In 1984, when ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ came out, not only was I twelve and couldn’t get into an R movie, but I lived twenty miles from a theater. So my first experience of it was on VHS. Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
Where ‘Paranormal Activity’ really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy – how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real. Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface’s mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early ’90s. Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
In the 40 years since ‘The Amityville Horror’, dramatizations of those supposedly-real events have gotten loose enough – special-effects laden enough, star-power re-packaged enough – that the audience no longer trusts the dramatization’s loyalty to the core story. Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They’re no longer the scary creature in the dark. Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don’t you? That’s supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it? Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas. Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
You can’t negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse – that’s to eat us or our brains. Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more. Stephen Graham Jones Read Quote
