Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.

Those films that really speak to the primal fear that we, as human beings, have about the unknown have always intrigued me. That's the really scary thing, not the slasher, macabre movies. It's the ones that deal with the inner fear: the unknown realms and the mysticisms that are scary.

I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.

Uncle Fester always intrigued me. I certainly always enjoyed his kind of humor. He's just full of mischief in a kind of macabre way. I don't see anything twisted about it. It's sort of ridiculous and wacky. It's sort of fun.

I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody along with Vincent Price who I celebrate and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre.

Working with Chaplin was very amusing and strange. His films are so funny but working with him I found him to be a very serious man. Whereas the films of Hitchcock are macabre he could be a very funny man to work with always telling jokes and holding court. Of course when I worked with Charlie he was getting older.