I feel like in the '90s, horror just lost its way and everything became so safe and watered-down.

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.

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 get a little too obsessive with work.

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.

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.

The one negative to horror is that it's always law of diminishing returns. When you go in the funhouse, the ride is never scary the second time. You will never have that pure experience as when you first watch it.

What's important for me is staying healthy.

When people direct insults at me, I can take it.

'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.

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.

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.

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've always been fascinated by the idea that there's no such thing as evil; it's all in your point of view. To one group a suicide bomber is the antichrist and to one he's a hero.

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.

I love movies that are just straight-up exploitation, but the ones that endure and the ones that last are the ones where the filmmakers put in that extra level of thought; after 25 years you put them on in front of an audience, and they'll respond to it and enjoy it.

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.

Some disaster movies look like you're watching someone else play video games. They're fun but it's not real.

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.

I love historical movies. I want to make a violent medieval epic.

'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.

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.

I cannot even begin to express how happy my baby's birth has made me.

You have to show up when your show fails - or it succeeds. When you are enjoying the glory of success, you have to show up and still work hard because it may not last. You have to do your job with the same sincerity when you started and till you can actually do it with passion.