People don't call them horror movies, but Hitchcock, for me, is my favorite storyteller. He was really exploring dark themes, and I don't know what category you put his movies in. Thriller? Horror? Some of them go in either one.

My favorite thing about horror is that it attracts this great group of nuts, of which I include myself in. I was always kind of an oddball. I collected my fingernails, for instance.

The way we structure our backend, we key the payments to the box office - so that cuts the negotiating way down, and it's very transparent. One of the things I'm most proud of is that we're really transparent with our process.

I wouldn't be creatively satisfied if all we did were sequels, but in the same breath, I'll say that I wouldn't be creatively satisfied if everything was an original. It's good to use the different parts of my brain. Very different rules apply.

Blumhouse Books is not an outlet for us to mine intellectual property for movies and TV.

I liked stuff like 'Halloween,' but I wasn't a horror fanatic until I was in my 30s and then made 'Paranormal Activity.' Now, having a company, I can't imagine doing anything else. But it took me a while to find my love for it.

You shoot yourself in the foot when you think, 'We have to get a good scary movie director to do a script by another scary movie writer.'

What I love about low-budget movies is my interests and the director's interests and the actors' interests are aligned. No one makes money unless the movie works, and that informs every creative decision.

I'm attracted to things that make a point or have a certain point of view, but it's not a conscious thing that I decide to do every morning. Unconsciously, what I like has a social commentary in it, or it's about race, or it's risky to do. That's what I like doing.

It's easy to get a theatrical release that shows in one theater for a week. But there's no advertising, and no one sees the movie. It's hard to get a real theatrical release. The distribution of independent films is, to me, extraordinarily frustrating.

There are a lot of parallels between doing a sequel and doing low budget movies, which is they give creative parameters. As a creative person myself, I work better with parameters as opposed to anything goes.

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

I never wanted to get paid by the hour. If I was going to do more work than another guy, I wanted to get paid more.

YouTube is found footage. It's here to stay, and people will always come up with new concepts that will make sense for found footage.

My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'

Ethan Hawke is not a horror movie fan, but he's a really good friend of mine, and I finally cajoled him into doing 'Sinister.' Later, he said one of the reasons he was really resistant to doing a horror movie is he thought it'd be really scary on set.

I love Hitchcock movies. I took a Hitchcock class in college, so I saw all his movies. I wrote papers on his movies.

I think the location is almost as important as casting the leads of the movie. The location on 'The Purge' was crucial to that movie working.

I read an interview where someone said, 'It's a shame that anyone can make a movie now,' and I feel the exact opposite.

I'm proud of 'Sinister' because Scott and Cargill did a great job on the movie, and I set up a framework for them to make what they wanted to make. They gave me the idea, and I figured out how to get it out into the world.

When there's a great horror movie, people are like, 'Horror's back!' And when there's a series of not so good ones, 'Horror's dead.' I think it's all about the quality. When there are one or two good horror movies in a row, people come out interested again.

Occasionally I'll be a producer for hire on a larger budget movie, but with Blumhouse Pictures, we mainly focus on micro-budget, under-$5-million-dollar movies. That's what we're in business to do, and that's what we're in business to make.

It's really hard to make an original movie of any kind that succeeds in the theatrical market place, in the wide release market place.

I'm a big believer in creating parameters for creativity. I think parameters make people more creative. So that starts with my budgets. I only do low budget movies, and I think that makes the movies better.

What I loved about 'War Dogs' was the fact that the tone - turning that story into a spectacular two hour ride is just such a complicated thing to do.

Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.

As an entrepreneur, one of my biggest struggles is that you have to focus, but you also have to expand.

I didn't grow up loving horror.

I've grown to love it, but I'm not like a lot of other people who were always crazy horror fans like Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino.

People look down on it, but I love the community of horror. Writers and directors are a tight group of people, and we help and support each other.

You know how on movie sets there are specific chairs for each person? I hate that. We don't have names on our chairs. We have five chairs. Anyone can sit on them. I think the idea of names on chairs on a set is terrible. It's so dumb. So we got rid of that.

Most people who've had a big hit movie like 'Paranormal Activity,' the next thing they say is, 'I want to make a $100 million movie.' I have no interest in making more expensive movies.

We make movies for the cineplex. They're designed for wide release. They're designed to be seen by a lot of people and eventually make money.

When I was a kid, I really loved game shows. For whatever reason, I was fascinated with them and watched them a ton.

I do want to grow our company, so the way I've been doing that is moving 'scary' to different things.

I love going to see musicals. That was one of the major reasons why losing the chance to produce 'La La Land' was so painful.

Ryan Murphy and I share our love of horror and musicals. I think those things somehow go together.

When you work in low budgets, you can do weird stuff.

I think if you went to a studio and pitched the first 'Insidious,' it never would have gotten made because it was so offbeat.

I really love 'Poltergeist.' I think that's a great, terrific movie. I did really love the first 'Friday the 13th.' I thought that was such a crazy movie.

I think it's frightening for all of us to contemplate that there's more to the universe than just us, in whatever form it takes, that there are higher forces at work, and to me, that's always a scary notion.

I started out producing theatre in New York.

I think there's room for people to love 'Transformers' and love 'Insidious.' They coexist in a happy way; in other words, my movies wouldn't exist if 'Transformers' didn't exist, because they're an alternative to that. They're not better or worse, they're just different.

I love to go see big movies, I just don't make them. It's just a different business.

The business of horror movies goes up and down, and people are always like, 'It's working,' 'It's not working,' but generally, I think if you make a good movie that's scary, people will come.

It's harder and harder to scare people, and filmmakers are aware of that, and they're making the movies better, and I think they feel more original, which I always like.

I think when people are scared, they like to see movies where the scares are not real.

It is hard to make a movie funny and scary at the same time.

I have a real kind of fundamental philosophical belief that movies are better if everyone gets paid when they work, and if they don't work, the people who worked on them make a little bit of money, and the people who finance them, they lose, but they don't lose too much. I believe that that creates better work.

I wasn't a fanboy of horror. I didn't grow up on horror movies. I grew up loving all movies. I still love all movies, but I particularly love scary movies - as much for the culture around them as the movies themselves.