Eli Roth
The best movies now are called 'thrillers.' Because if you use the word 'horror,' people's associations are straight-to-video crap.Collection: Movies
For a long time, I had a crazy girl dating habit.Collection: Dating
'Beatrice Cenci' was an amazing film. If it were released today it'd win Best Picture. It's so well done, it's so contemporary, and the filmmaking is so smart.Collection: Amazing
Horror movies are the best date movies. There's no wondering, 'When do I put my arm around her?'Collection: Movies
Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.Collection: Society
Las Vegas is a 24-hour city. It never stops.
Horror is like comedy. Woody Allen's comedy is going to be very different from Ben Stiller's comedy which is going to be different from Adam Sandler's comedy which is going to be different from Judd Apatow's comedy. They're all comedy, but they're all very different types and you can enjoy all of them. Horror is the same way.
I think in life we get very caught up in the minutia and, unfortunately, it generally takes some sort of tragedy in your life to put things in perspective.
I think characters are most terrifying when they're relatable. It's best when your most horrible characters make sense, and are believable. That's when a movie is most terrifying.
I think that horror films have a very direct relationship to the time in which they're made. The films that really strike a film with the public are very often reflecting something that everyone, consciously or unconsciously feeling - atomic age, post 9-11, post Iraq war; it's hard to predict what people are going to be afraid of.
'Troll 2' is one of the rare sequels where you don't have to waste time watching the first one, since the films have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
People want to be disturbed when they go see a horror movie.
My phobias worsen as I get older. I'm scared of flying, driving. I'm terrified of sharks. I'm a germaphobe. But I try to face my fears; I do. Well, most of them.
Much of my youth was spent in the parking lot or inside a Dunkin' Donuts.
When I was 22, I had this horrible psoriasis outbreak. It was all over my legs, I couldn't walk because my legs were cracked and bleeding. Weird things like that can happen to your body.
Lucio Fulci is such a massively underrated director. Everyone knows him as the Godfather of Gore.
'Cabin Fever' was very much inspired by 'The Thing.' It's really a perfect guy's horror movie: There's no love story, it's just straight-up horror. And it's so well-done. It moves at a slow pace, but it's really terrific.
'Eraserhead' is a weird, horrible nightmare, and it doesn't narratively make sense. Stuff's happening, but you honestly feel like you're in a nightmare, and it has such disturbing imagery that it stays with you forever once you've seen it.
Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.
When you make a film for a million and a half dollars and it opens at 20 million, the next question out of everyone's mouth is, 'When's the next one, when's the next one, when's the next one?'
I would love to do a musical!
Look at comic books. It used to be something that only geeks were into. And now it's everywhere.
I love movies. I mean, I really, really love movies.
Horror audiences don't need to see some TV actor they're familiar with.
I get a little too obsessive with work.
I need to eliminate 'like' from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, 'That's seriously like... ' I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.
I have so many different projects, I hear voices in my head - the characters talking all at once - and I have to write to make them stop.
I've always dreamed of having a year-round haunted house.
There's a crazy, false notion that audiences are not patient or will not watch a story, that you have to put in a scare every ten minutes. But I always thought that was insane.
It's just assumed that a horror sequel is going to be bad. It's never going to be as good as the first one.
Once I got over the fear of writing female characters, it actually came quite easily and I was really happy with it. I just thought about girls I knew really, really well and I'd just have conversations with them and tried to relay how they talk about certain things.
I want people to see my name on a movie, pay money and know they're going to be entertained for 90 minutes.
I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.
Anytime you make a movie, the goal is a wide theatrical release, with the right distributor.
Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.
As a kid, my idols were Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and I get into crazy races with myself. Raimi was 21 when he made movies, and when I didn't get 'Cabin Fever' made that fast I thought I'd failed.
What is important to me is that people know I respect the business of making movies.
I generally follow my own compass and make films about what's scaring me.
You know, I'm from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand.
I feel like in the '90s, horror just lost its way and everything became so safe and watered-down.
When I go see an R-rated horror movie, I want lots of violence.
I'd love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they'd get so violent that people would get bored of it.
I think that many people are ashamed when they feel afraid. There's this thing in our society that you're not allowed to feel scared. You have to be a man and put on a brave face, but we all have fears.
There's fear in everything, but we can't just succumb to that. We have to suppress it, so we get used to suppressing fear to make it through the our day. Otherwise, we'd become paralyzed by them.
Well, anytime I make a movie, I like to load it up with more things than you could ever catch on the first viewing.
I never put out a vanilla edition of a DVD.
Anytime you're the first to speak out against something, there's going to be a backlash.
I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.
I love historical movies. I want to make a violent medieval epic.
If you are having fun on the set, you are not getting things done.