Horror quotes
427 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside horror — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis."
"My job scoring a horror movie is like being the barker at a carnival. A good barker can get anyone to walk into the roped-off tent. Especially with the main title, my job is to convince the audience to take the leap into the film even though their better sense is telling them, "I should put my popcorn down and get the hell outta here"!"
"I'm a fan of 20th century orchestral music, the experimental avant-garde composers of the '50s, '60s, and '70s. In horror movies you can write music that if it was performed on the concert stage would have the audience running out of the room with their fingers in their ears. But in a movie all of a sudden it becomes incredibly accessible and appreciated."
"Horror allows you to do things as a composer than you're able to do in no other style of movie. The music has to be aggressive. You can't tiptoe around. It has to be incredibly focused dramatically - no time for second thoughts. It needs to generate a kneejerk reaction."
"I feel a horror for exaggerated love or friendship. It's just too well demonstrated to me that when the moment comes that one asks something, or has need of something, the responce is not worth a biscuit."
"Pain was a fascinating horror"
"Awake, awake, English nobility! Let not sloth dim your horrors new-begot."
"New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis."
"Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres."
"With a horror movie, you want to know where the engine of the fear is coming from. Like in comedy, you want to know what the engine that's going to make the comedy - where that's coming from."
"The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror."
"Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death."
"People want to be disturbed when they go see a horror movie."
"When I go see an R-rated horror movie, I want lots of violence."
"I feel like in the '90s, horror just lost its way and everything became so safe and watered-down."
"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."
"I think in the late '80s and early '90s horror was dead."
"I want to have an ending where people say: "That's the most shocking ending I've ever seen in a mainstream horror film.""
"Horror movies are the best date movies. There's no wondering , 'When do I put my arm around her?'"
"In most horror films, you don't really get to understand why this character is the way he is."
