African Queen' is pretty darn great.

I like finding things that are on the fringes and sort of half-forgotten, and to remind us of those things.

I had these fashion history books that I really enjoyed looking at. I liked costumes and used to wear them to school until I got beat up for it.

When 'The Lighthouse,' bizarrely, became the film that people wanted to greenlight, it was really clear that those were the only two people to play the roles. And I knew that they would want to do it.

Digging into the creation of the Puritan mind-set involved really trying to wrap my head around extreme Calvinism and what that's all about. I now understand predestination, and I had to read the Geneva Bible cover-to-cover and read the gospels quite a bit to get into that world.

If you're a part of this urban intelligentsia, you're not around animals all the time the way people were in the past. So animals become a part of the folklore.

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.

What I love about research is when I'm having a bad day and I can't write, I'll just research some more, I'll learn some more and I'll have better command of the world of the film.

Murnau is neck to neck with Bergman as my favorite director. He's responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from 'Nosferatu' to 'Faust' to 'Sunset.'

I saw a picture of Max Schreck as Count Orlok in a book in my elementary school and I lost my mind.

Certainly in Catholic countries, the peasantry have always found ways to integrate pagan things in a way that makes it a little bit easier just to be a human being.

Three years into getting 'The Witch' financed, I was hanging out with my brother and he was like, 'I'm working on this script. It's a ghost story in a lighthouse.' I thought, 'Damn, that's a really good idea, I wish I'd had it.'

Tons of folktales have to do with hares and witches. Basically, witches all over Europe turn into hares and are able to do malevolent things in the form of a hare. It goes back to the great god Pan. Pan is, if we're going to do archetypal projections, related to the Christian Satan, but as a child, Pan was wrapped in a hare's hide.

When we learned about Salem at school, the whole thing was confusing. Because the idea of the witch hunt is used as a symbol to describe people searching for something that's basically untrue, it cemented in my mind as a kid that witches weren't real.

I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.

Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult - these are the things I'm most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I'm very passionate about cinema.

I think the thing that is most influential about 'Haxan' is the casting of the witches as just old women and the strength of that.

Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.

Ben Wheatley continues to be one of the most original voices in contemporary film.

I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.

The Lighthouse' couldn't have been made without this kind of freedom that is allowed to some filmmakers to be able to play around with genre. Jennifer Kent's 'Nightingale' is more horrific than any horror movie - but also, I don't think you could make that movie without this kind of freedom.

What's important to me about horror stories is to look at what's actually horrifying about humanity, instead of shining a flashlight on it and running away giggling.

When I was younger, I used to think it was kind of cool to abuse actors mentally, but I really disagree with that now.

Without sounding like a New Age crystal worshipper, you can feel something there, in these old dilapidated colonial farms and hidden graveyards in the middle of a pine forest. I certainly did as a kid.