John Carpenter Quotations

Horror stories have always worked on film. It's where they work. That's where vampires and ghosts and UFOs are real. They're not particularly real in life, but they're real on the screen. It's the communal aspect of movie-watching.

Fears are all psychological. Being afraid of death, loss of a loved one and disfigurement are all powered by your mind, and that's very powerful stuff.

To make movies you just have to want it enough. You have to have the passion for telling stories. You have to get by the love-of-movies aspect. You can't just be a movie fan.

What a director does... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools.

Anybody can make a movie, if you have the will. The digital revolution has made it very inexpensive to make a film. Anybody who wants to can do it.

A lot of it [success] is luck. That's a huge part of it that no one wants to talk about. You just got to be in the right place at the right time.

Horror is a reaction; it's not a genre. Somebody's life would have to be in danger for it [story] to be a horror story.

Horror found me. I got into the movie business to make westerns.

I stopped directing in 2001 for four or five years, until I did the TV series 'Masters Of Horror.' I had been working steadily as a director since 1970. That's a long time. I was burned out.

I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies. They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn't work out.