We actually say in 'Nightbreed,' 'God is an astronaut, Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters go.' There's a lovely sense in which there's a simple thesis being played out here. These are things you understand as a child out on the play yard.
Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.
Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work.
All I've ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night.
Neil Gaiman is a star. He constructs stories like some demented cook might make a wedding cake, building layer upon layer, including all kinds of sweet and sour in the mix.
I don't like PG-13 horror movies. I think they're a contradiction in terms.
Nobody cares for the product I, and a host of other horror directors, make.
I love the idea of stories being about great beginnings and terrible endings.
As for theatre, there's ups and downs to everything. Theatre is ephemeral. But that is part of its charm because you can always say the production was better than it was.
I certainly knew from an early age... how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people's heads.
I was always aware of the ticking clock of time, always. I was very aware that I had a lot to do, and I wanted to do those things in the best possible way that I could and probably the biggest way I possibly could.
Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.
What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once.
I say 'spectacle' rather than 'story' because in the end, it isn't the intricacies of narrative that draw us to horror films. When it's there, I'm grateful for the director's skill at telling an exquisitely nuanced tale filled with psychological insight, but it is the spectacles that I take home with me.
For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.
I don't feel there's any reason to apologise for having a wicked imagination. I think it's important as a maker of fantasy and of horror.
When I was looking for financing while making 'Hellraiser,' I wish there was a studio like Project Greenlight Digital Studios behind me.
The 'Hellraiser' situation was pretty darn wonderful and very unusual. Nor did I understand how radically unusual the thesis of 'Nightbreed' was.
Interestingly, although the 'Books of Blood' were greeted with cries of righteous horror - and smirks - I didn't think of them as being particularly excessive. God knows what I did think was excessive at the time, but I didn't think they were.
