Potent quotables
The act of going to a horror movie, to be part of a communal experience that terrifies, is really about the moments after the scares. There’s often a laugh, a shared feeling of catharsis, where we can wordlessly acknowledge that we survived intact, whether the characters on screen did or didn’t. We did. Wes thought the audience comes back to the genre over and over because they get to survive. They get the cathartic release of facing absolute terror and coming out the other side unscathed.
Fiction is the only place you can take this darkness and live in it because you can close the book, and you can turn the TV off, and you can leave the theater. You can play in that darkness and then you step out of it and come back to the real world and you’re in the light.
What makes Scream so relatable is that the killer, though initially masked and anonymous, is not some monster. It is someone you know who is deeply betraying you in a very traumatic and violent way.
Wes used to always talk about horror movies being a way to cathartically survive the challenges of your life. The people who dismiss them, I don’t think they understand the primal need we have to be scared in the dark and then wake up. That’s why art exists. It’s a way to make sense of insanity. Because, if not, we’d all be just fuckin’ mad.
Because you’re not afraid of being alone, right? You’re afraid you’re not alone. If you’re alone, nothing can happen to you. If there is another person who wishes you harm…that’s truly scary, especially when it’s someone you know and trust.
I can remember just running, running, running, and being chased down this corridor. It felt almost like therapy or something because you never get chased in life, hopefully, other than when you’re a child,” Mortimer remembers. “It was such a hugely weird and wonderful experience. I just remember laughing and laughing and screaming and screaming and being totally out of breath and feeling like a child again. My God, that felt so good. I can remember saying you should be able to do this for therapy. You should be chased around the house and then got. It gets things out, somehow.
How much do you really know your own friends? It destabilizes your relationships with all people because if one person in your life can fool you that way, who can you really trust? Can you trust anyone? That’s what happened to Sidney, that’s what happens to Sam. They have trust issues—and with good reason—because they have been through this kind of trauma. I think that’s really relatable, maybe not in a murder way, but that sense of betrayal and people having hidden colors.
It’s stunning, at first, the way people talk about Wes Craven. No one expects an icon to be a regular guy—especially in Hollywood—and a deeply thoughtful, kind one at that.
He definitely had demons. There was a darkness to him, which he thought was inherent in the human condition, that he worked to understand. But he also made a conscious choice to at least start out happy, to start each day positively.
If you know what you want without ambivalence it will explode in front of you. It will be like fireworks. He wouldn’t settle, and he was a gentleman and a gentle man.
At the end of the day, it all comes back to fear and how Craven turned the terrors in his real life into stories that helped people deal with the horrors of their own.
It was not a choice. He was completely driven to put out into the world the things that he was trying to work out in order to help other people work them out. It is a cathartic experience. It is a way of working out our fears. We have an existential need for that, and he felt he provided it.
I don’t know if I can do this, but if anyone’s gonna fuck it up, let it be someone who loves it as much as we do
True to his character, Dewey dies trying to protect the people he loves.
They start with what they call their “vomit draft,” a version of the script that just gets everything down on paper so they can start picking it apart and fine-tuning the story.
Often actors are expected to know as much about politics as politicians. And, in today’s day and age when everything is online, everyone thinks they’re an expert in everything, which isn’t the case. I also think there is a clear difference between talking politics and standing up for people who don’t have a voice. It’s not politics, it’s human life.
Fuck it, there is no reason not to do it. Just stop thinking. Don’t overthink this. Just say yes and do it and have the time of your life. What if I don’t do a good job? It doesn’t matter. Just do it. Just say yes.