Rachel Baran

30 Chilling Quotes That Perfectly Explain The Things Horror Fans Know (That Everyone Else Doesn’t)

Horror fans know something everyone else won't admit: our fears define us: it drives us, it informs all our decisions. Horror films are analogies for our very real lives. We are both the monster and the girl running up the stairs. We are watching the part
Chrissy Stockton
September 26, 2016
“It's built in. That's all. The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated. I can't explain it. My wife and kids drink coffee. But I don't. I like tea. My wife and kids won't touch a pizza with anchovies on it. But I like anchovies. The stuff I was drawn to was built in as part of my equipment.”
— Stephen King, Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview
Tagged: Horror, Why we believe what we believe
“Hemingway sucks, basically. If people like that, terrific. But if I set out to write that way, what would've come out would've been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me.”
— Stephen King, Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview
Tagged: Horror, How to be a writer, Why we believe what we believe
“Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. 'A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible', the audience thinks, 'but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall'.”
— Stephen King, Dance Macabre
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
— Stephen King, The Shining
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people. That is a remarkable thing, if you scream and everyone else in the audience screams, you realize that your fears are not just within yourself, they're in other people as well, and that's strangely releasing. But on the TV, you can still watch it with friends. We watch films on so many different mediums now, that I think they'll complement each other for a long time.”
— Wes Craven, Exclusive Interview: Wes Craven talks Yeah TV, Nightmare on Elm Street and his future
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.”
— Wes Craven, IMDB
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.”
— Wes Craven, Nothing to Fear
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“You see, it’s not just that people want to be scared; people are scared.”
— Wes Craven, Nothing to Fear
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
— Stephen King, Stephen King from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of His Life and Work
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.”
— Stephen King, Dance Macabre
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”
— Stephen King, Night Shift
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“The image of those two oddball little girls from The Shining (1980) in their matching powder-blue dresses standing in a bleak, floral-wallpapered hallway has been burnt into my retina ever since the first moment I laid eyes on them. "Come play with us Danny... Forever and ever and ever..." I can still hear the chorused voices of those little Grady twins almost as well as I can recall some of my favorite songs. 'The Shining' was the first film to actually make me uncomfortable with the idea of ever watching it again. To this day I have never met a single person who when those twins are brought up doesn't shudder and share a personal terror story of their own. That is some achievement. Way to go Kubrick, you ruined us all.”
— Ti West, IMDB
Tagged: Horror, Movies, Why things scare us
“I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid to take it whole and work from there… I delight in what I fear.”
— Shirley Jackson, Ladies Laughing: Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers: 3 (Studies in Humor & Gender Vol 3)
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.”
— Clive Barker, Scared Stiff
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.”
— Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger, Volume II: Down To Earth
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Horror is the removal of masks.”
— Robert Bloch, Radiant Vermin
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.”
— Stephen King, Cell
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.”
— David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It (John Dies at the End)
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us, Why we believe what we believe
“Nothing made me happen. I happened.”
— Hannibal Lector, Thomas Harris, The Silence Of The Lambs
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us, Why we believe what we believe, Why people are such dicks
“Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.”
— Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter)
Tagged: Horror, Smart People, Why things scare us
“I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.”
— Hannibal Lector, Thomas Harris, The Silence Of The Lambs
Tagged: The problem of evil, God, Religion, Horror, Why things scare us
“In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior...”
— Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter)
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
— H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
— Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War
Tagged: Horror, Writing, Why things scare us
“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls. In that, it is no different, or less controversial, than humor, and no less intimate than sex.”
— Guillermo Del Toro, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories (Penguin Classics)
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.”
— Guillermo Del Toro, The Monsters of Hellboy 2
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.”
— John Carpenter, Unmasking the Villain: Michael Myers
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.”
— John Carpenter, Horror Master John Carpenter’s Greatest Quotes on Fear
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They’re us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero’s movies are us. They’re hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that’s vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.”
— John Carpenter, Horror Master John Carpenter’s Greatest Quotes on Fear
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us
“The strongest human emotion is fear. It’s the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman.”
— John Carpenter, Horror Master John Carpenter’s Greatest Quotes on Fear
Tagged: Horror, Why things scare us