Wes Craven

“'Nightmare on Elm Street' wasn't that big. Over a long period of time it did very well, but this was different. 'Scream' didn't have a strong first weekend, and it went down the second, but then it kept going up.”

“How can you have 'Scream' without Ghostface? It's like 'Friday the 13th' without Jason.”

“I like to think I'm making films in the film business where movies are making enough numbers for the studios to let me keep working, but you also want those films to have content that makes you proud you made the film. That's not easy, but it's a fun puzzle to figure out.”

“I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people.”

“A big part of directing is being strong in certain circumstances and taking the gamble and hope you don't get fired.”

“You just find the best actors that you can. There's an inherent drama within the framework of scares and killings and all that. In 'Scream,' there is very real drama that would be in almost any drama.”

“My whole background was in voracious book-reading.”

“When you have a name that means scares, you have to live with that.”

“I'm the kind of director, at any given moment, an idea occurs to me, I'll just do it.”

“I was paralyzed from the chest down when I was 19, so I kind of put my head together about dying, and I think I've come to terms with it.”

“It's great to be thought of as the master of anything. Even idiocy. Master of idiocy, Wes Craven. But if it's master of horror or fear or whatever, that's great.”

“The 'Scream' series is unique in that it's an ongoing murder mystery, even though it's a different killer, so if you know who that killer is, then half of the fun of the movie is gone.”

“Within the structure of 'Scream 4,' there is the film within a film, but that's been part of the 'Scream' franchise since 'Scream 2,' when you had the 'Stab' franchise.”

“I think being Jewish has been covered really well but almost nothing about being fundamentalist Protestant. For years, I've had a movie in my mind called 'Total Immersion' that looks to my life as a kid where you're immersed in this different worldview from almost everybody around you.”

“Some people ask why people would go into a dark room to be scared. I say they are already scared, and they need to have that fear manipulated and massaged. I think of horror movies as the disturbed dreams of a society.”

“My mother never saw any of my films until she was in her late 80s, and that was 'Music of the Heart' with Meryl Streep.”

“It's not an easy place to be - to write a horror film. You go down the stairs to the dark to find these characters. It's not a place anyone can go, and sometimes it's not a place that you want to go.”

“I couldn't find an actor to play Freddy Krueger with the sense of ferocity I was seeking. Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned.”

“That's what's great about the horror genre is that you're getting a load of people together in the cinema at the same place and the same time, having them all experience extreme fear and come out alive at the end. It's an uplifting experience, and there's a sense of elation.”

“I've experienced a great deal of, you know, ostracism from the making of films.”