I think the monster and various fears associated with this, has been with us since Prehistoric times.

They were real monsters, so they were, mammoths, saber tooth tigers, that thing out of there was really dangerous.

And in the dark, you didn't want to go out in the dark, cause you couldn't see them to protect you.

For a matter of fact, the first narrative ever written in the English language, saxon, was Beowulf, which was about a monster.

So I think, that fear of the monster, that operates particularly at night and has powers that we don't have, has been with us since before civilization.

So I think, what we see today, with some sort of science fiction monsters, is simply the newest interpretation of monster myths.

I'm a part of a generation that has been completely known as "Monster kids".

We were kids who grew up in the 50's largely, and 60's when monsters' movies were on TV... ...And the 50's was a great time to be a kid because the whole culture was rather child oriented: it was baby boomers that were having kids, and TV was being introduced, and there was "Saturday Mad Days", where you could go for a quarter and see 2 features and 10 cartoons and a serial chapter.

I was a child of the double features and the whole idea of seeing only one movie was somehow strange to me.

And I was quite addicted to this.

I would go on Saturday, I would go on Sunday.

I spent most of my time at the movies.

And so, it became, I guess, an obsession.

I don't know that I have a favorite monster, but what inevitably comes to mind is that sort of naive, almost childish feel of those movies, with all those Hollywood productions from the 50's and 60's, especially the science-fiction productions of the day, with things like Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Meaning that rubbery, paper-mache look that's a little bit kitchy, but that you really feel so connected with.

It's the kind of thing you get into when you're crossing that edge between childhood and teendom.

I remember very vividly seeing Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman.

All the basic Universal horror films played on television for the first time.

We had only heard about these films, there were myths, mythology to us, that we didn't know.

And then, suddenly, they were available at 11:15 at night, and there they were.

The Universal Studios in the 30's... ...they were the first to make the monster the star of the show.

The actors playing those monsters would end up being huge stars: Bela Lugosi with Dracula, Boris Karloff with Frankenstein, Claude Rains with The Invisible Man... It's alive!

It's alive!

It's alive!

I loved Frankenstein because of the fact that monster was so fiercesome, yet at the same time, you felt sympathy for him.

Frankenstein is one of the most powerful modern myths.

But when you think about it, the full title of Mary Shelley's novel was Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

And that underscores the clear, direct link with the ancient myth of Prometheus.... ...But at the same time, it embodies all these fears related to the progress made by science, to the relationship between scientists and life, and what they discovered about life as a phenomenon.

It obviously already foreshadowed things like robots, artificial intelligence... A character like Frankenstein is amazing because it serves as a bridge between Antiquity and the future, basically.

Hammer Films is an interesting company, because they were an English studio that pretty much perpetuated the Universal Studios legacy in color, but adding in a lot more violence, a lot more blood, as well as a lot more dynamic scenes, giving viewers a much more visceral show.

It's funny because my favorite monsters were always the ones from the low budget B-movies like Hideous Sun Demon or Monsters of Piedras Blancas... ...It was always the cheap monsters that appealed to me.

I always loved movies like The Raven.

Into the ominous mystery of a master magician's evil castle.

With Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and the Black Cat, those are the films, they are not really monsters, but they're monsters inside of people.

It's not that it's better to then than it is now, it was just different.

Voice Over / Actor 1: From Joe Dante, director of Gremlins.

Voice Over / Actor 2: You see what he's putting back, his showmanship.

Actor 3: The bombs are falling!!!

Mant / Actor 4: You think this is some kind of picnic for me?!

Actor 5: I'm still concerned about that bomb thing."

I was the age of the kid in the movie when the missiles crisis happened and I didn't I live in Key West, in New Jersey.

I didn't have a heart of a filmmaker come to my neighborhood, unfortunately.

But everything else about that society, the drills, the air raids, the fear that when an airplane flew over, there were a bomb in it, is all real.

I hadn't really seen that on screen the way that I felt when I was a kid.

We were really paranoid.

And the whole society was rather paranoid in the 50's.

Exposed to radiations, simultaneously, the results would be terrible indeed.

For the result, would be: mant!

Nobody was making giant bug movies in 1962, and we took a little bit of a license there.

But he's also, you know, Roger Corman, he's also David Friedman, the guy would take his phone around, with a guest lecturer.

It was a whole bunch of guys how were kind of doing that.

I tried to be as original as I can, but you can't be completely original all the time.

You have to be aware of what it's done before.

I think Picasso once said: "if an artist can take all that it's done before, and add one tiny bit to it then, it's a full career for an artist"... ... So I say, I take on what is gone before and added that small amount to it.

Roger Corman has a major significance within movie history, in that he was basically the B-movie pope.

But going beyond that, this is someone who ended up turning the monster movie, and fantasy movies as a whole, into a genuine mass-market, mass-appeal, mass-produced product.

This woman is not human.

It's clear to see that Roger Corman outright heralded the success that pop culture currently enjoys as part of entertainment media.

He shaped all the big directors that came up through the 80's and 90's like Joe Dante or James Cameron, people like Jonathan Demme, even Martin Scorsese, even though Scorsese is a bit apart from people like Dante or Cameron.

So this is someone who's very significant to American cinematic history, because without him, the last 30 years of Hollywood productions would look very different.

As a rule, monsters are actually deformed animals.

They can be regular, albeit giant animals, or they can be, like in the case of King Kong or Jurassic Park, examples of man trying to submit nature to his will, in which case he always hits a giant wall.

King Kong was the first example of that, and he made the figure of the romantic monster popular to this point.

When they created King Kong, Schoedsack and Cooper used to shoot documentaries in Sumatra and the like, so I believe it's a metaphor for the great adventure but also the great depression.

In relation to the harrowing economic crisis of the 20s, 30s, it's strongly symbolic: to take the most fantastic thing ever and bring it home, so that American people can forget about their troubles.

King Kong is a monster, the feral nature of the monster, but one that's confronted with the city, with modern civilization, and it's that feral side of our world clashing with the tremendous rise of progress that produces a drama worthy of a Greek tragedy.

Wild, weird, wonderful.

A start for what movies were made.

In Schoedsack and Cooper's King Kong, you feel empathy towards Kong: they have to kill it as it's gone wild, but their version is much darker than the Peter Jackson movie, where the ape becomes human once it comes to the US.

It becomes more human, and it goes into panic mode.

I feel Jackson did a great job conveying that feral nature of the beast being hunted down.

There's a very Spielberg-like quality to his final act, whereas Schoedsack and Cooper have a very nihilistic approach.

Their movie is a lot darker, and I like their approach better.

I feel there hasn't been another nihilistic King Kong like this one to this day.

The Kaiju king is Godzilla.

He's the most famous, the most emblematic, he was also the first.

Godzilla, king of the monsters.

It takes place during World War Two.

Honda's movie is very politicized in that regard.

In Japan, the way the monster is perceived is pretty different from the west.

Meaning the monster isn't necessarily something that's bad, like a killer creature intent on razing everything to the ground.

It's seen more like a force of nature, meaning it can also be a good thing.

Godzilla isn't perceived solely as a huge laser-spewing dinosaur that destroys everything in its path, it's there for a reason.

Godzilla, king of the monsters.

And cast it beyond comprehension... gripping beyond compare... astounding beyond belief... the mightiest monster of them all... See Godzilla!

The first Godzilla movie was a real horror movie full of terrifying scenes, in particular due to all those metaphors for the atomic apocalypse that Japan had just been through.

I mean, there are awful scenes showing survivors dying in hospitals, children, all that stuff.

A genuine horror movie, and yet the monster became incredibly popular.

It even managed something that was very rare back in those days: it crossed the cultural bounds of Japan.

Thus, the monster became softer and softer, and even turned into a defender of the planet as the sequels went on.

Well, these nuclear tests on the Pacific... Not tests.

They are trying to kill it.

I think the Kaiju aspect enables you to push the limits of credulity, specifically because it has that charm.

This "fake" look is somewhat appealing, you're forcing yourself to believe, and that means your imagination gets a lot more engaged than when things are too polished and well done.

When things are too perfect, you're ultimately a passive spectator to it all.

All modern weapons failed.

The whole latex suit thing is clearly visible, the actor stuck inside isn't the most convincing either.

But you can ultimately look at that as being part of the whole Kaiju diegesis.

Meaning, even in a recent movie like Anno's, you can still feel that kind of latex legacy, and it's part of its charm: they weren't even really trying to give it a fully 3D feel like the Americans would.

They wanted to keep that "guy in a suit" feel to things.

Kids relate to monsters, because kids feel like monsters themselves.

They feel like they are not understood, they feel like they're taken for granted, ill-treated.

I mean, in a sense, when you're a kid, you're a pragmatic: you see a giant lizard destroy a city, that's a kid smashing up his room, and in that sense Godzilla the monster is basically the kid who's gotten in a snit and started breaking everything.

Godzilla brought the whole idea of the monster as a metaphor due its current height.

When you're 7 and you watch Godzilla, you don't get the whole nuclear aspect.

Well, Godzilla is a metaphor for the H-bomb and you know, a lot of monsters are metaphors for various sorts of things.

And I think Godzilla has taught us a lot over the years.

He's become from a bad guy to a good guy, as they always said atomic power was very good for us, but those of us who grew up in the 50's knew better.

And a lot of the things we were taught to be afraid in the 50's like authority and science, proved out to be pretty accurate.

I think monster movies and all speculative fiction reflect the time of the time when they were made... For instance, when I was first started making films like that in the 1950s, I did a picture called the Day the World Ended and it was based upon the atomic bomb.

So the atomic bomb was new at that time and people were very concerned.

Today you have new concerns, you don't refer to the atomic bomb anymore, it's still just as deadly, but other things have come up: radiation from atomic bombs, bioengineering, climate change and so forth, so those who influenced monster movies made today.

There is a creature, alive today.

My first time seeing a cinematic monster was when I watched Jaws, which was broadcast during the viewer advisory days, and it was a huge shock to me, because it stirred up these primal fears that induce a sort of trauma in you.

Even now, when I go swimming, I still get these visions of a monster I can't see.

It's as if...God created the devil.

And gave him... jaws.

Through this movie, Spielberg perpetuated and amplified what Roger Corman had heralded.

He took a B movie, and he tried to make it into a film that would reach blockbuster audiences.

We were accurately embarrassed about being a Jaws' rip off and it had been like several years from Jaws.

And there was another Jaws movie about to come out, Jaws 2, which is an expansive movie.

And so we decided immediately to let the audience know that yes we know it's a rip off, you know it's a rip off, and let's just both admit it's a rip off.

We had a character playing a Jaws video games under the credits and it was like "OK now, we can just enjoy the movie".

With razor teeth that can strip a man to the bone in a frozen instant of terror...

Piranha!"

How should I put this, I really wanted to see this movie, as a viewer first of all, to watch a horror comedy with a dash of American criticism.

I wanted to watch a very gory Gremlins or Mars Attacks, and I said to myself: "I'm almost 30 years old.

If I don't do it now, I'm never gonna do it."

The piranhas gain in appeal through the fact that the American youths taking part in Spring Break are so appalling that it makes you want to side with the piranhas and eat them all.

Sam?

Something bit me.

Sam, what are you seeing down there?

Oh my God.

Sam ?

I've always felt this dual fascination-revulsion for the US.

Meaning that I love America, I love the American culture, but at the same time I find it repelling, that contradiction there fascinates me.

I find Spring Break to be the most staggering embodiment of American vacuousness, of the culture that places image over substance.

Actor / Party guy: Take it off!

These thousands of young people who pretend to have fun but truly don't, who pretend to have sex but don't, who only end up accumulating frustrations and discomfort.

There's this critical gaze at the carelessness of Spring Break America, which culminates in this piranhas revenge where you almost, for the first time, feel yourself siding with the piranhas.

Voice Over / Actor 1: ...A creature you saw.

Voice Over / Actor 2: It was a shark...a big one, with tentacles, many... I tried to come up with new and original monsters and I tried to take different interpretations.

For instance I made a picture called Sharktopus for the SYFY channel, which was half shark, half octopus.

And the theme was, because I'm very concerned about global warming, was that this creature was a prehistoric creature, frozen in the Arctic ice pack and with the global warming, the ice melted, the creature came back to life and terrorized people.

So I got a little thought of global warming and what's going on into a monster movie.

Also, I always try to put a little bit of humor in a monster movie.

It's not a genre you wanna take too seriously.

Actor: Against cruelty to animals.

Monsters have always been captivating.

Monsters of all shapes, no matter if you put antennas on them, suction cups... All throughout movie history, there have always been monsters, they're part and parcel of the fears and fantasies that tie into being human.

Movie makers have grasped that perfectly.

Here, we love finding all kinds of monsters.

Even this is a kind of monster.

We can say that fortunately, a meteorite saved us from these monsters, or else mankind might not be here today.

This was a predator of man.

With Spielberg, you can either have monsters that are very human-like, such as E.T.

which is a type of monster in a sense, a "good" one.

Or else monsters that are complete forces of nature.

Voice Over/ Actor: Grandpa had been right all the time.

I have to say that my favorite monster moments is probably the raptor's scene in the kitchen of Jurassic Park.

It's one of the best and the most rewarding I worked on, that involve artificial creatures, monsters in a storytelling way.

Find for woods.

My friend Mike Finnell who was working at a werewolf picture called The Howling, which divested itself of its director and they asked me if I wanted to come over and do that.

And I thought "it's probably the only chance I'll ever get to do a werewolf movie" and I really like werewolf movies and making it into more of a satire of self-help groups and what was going on in the 80s.

And it was a very successful picture for a very cheap movie.

And it put me quote on the map to the point that I actually was sent a script for Gremlins by Steven Spielberg who I didn't know, knew who I was or that I even existed.

Heigh ho, heigh ho... He wanted to make a low budget horror film because that's what I've been making and he wanted to make it a non-union in organ like the pictures I've been doing.

But it became apparent while we worked on it that it was going to be a little more elaborate than that, if we gonna have all of these creatures, going to run around, we would gonna have to spend some money.

I loved the work of Joe Dante, who started here and I saw Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and I thought - and other films he's done - and I thought he's brought a whole new and complex layer to the monster film and they're just sort of bigger, better, more complex usings of technologies of today which was not available when I was making films.

Oh crap... Guillermo del Toro's movies have at the heart, and this is something that represents what monsters can be in our days, a sort of infinite love and passion for the monster figure.

The potential issue that you can get with this kind of approach is that the movie itself is going to be a lot less scary if you try to make the viewer sympathize completely with the monster.

But this is another aspect where you can see the panache of an author and director like Guillermo del Toro, because he manages to do both.

Actress: Turn around!

He's able to maintain the terror potential of the figures he's showcasing, all while making us champion them.

What I find fascinating is this genuine love he has for all things monstrous.

This idea that beauty, whether it's moral or aesthetic, can be contained within monstrousness.

That's what defines del Toro: he sings the praises of monstrousness.

The Thing by Carpenter is a monster movie, but the monster in question has more than just one shape!

The Thing is without a doubt one of the greatest horror movies of all times, despite the fact that it was hated, absolutely loathed back when it came out.

It was a complete flop that changed the course of its director's career, and it's a movie that features an amazing monster because this is a monster no-one can describe.

I talked to Rob Bottin who approached the designs and built them and he and I decided that we wanted to see the creature but still keep it "not too graphic", "not too brightly lit".

There were like one sort of texture here, a little bit over here, keep this area dark so that the shape, so that the thing were controlled.

It was an upsetting movie to a lot of people, for a lot of reasons.

The fact that the creature was so explicitly shown, would violated the Hollywood rule that never show the monster, you keep him in shadows.

That's a whole cliche!

But that's what they wanted me to do.

Then I decided more is more, here: take a look at this!

See what we're talking about here is an organism that it imitates other life forms.

When its thing attacke our dogs, it tried to digest them, absorb them.

That was the goal sought by Rob Bottin, the special effects genius who came up with it.

The idea was to manage to make up a monster that you could at best describe by saying, "It's made up of stuff that come out of things, there's like flowers, it has privates hanging out, but there's animal heads too, then fur, tentacles..." It's a surrealist mess, unique and indescribable.

Something never before seen on screen!

It depends on the story: the monster should fit the story.

In The Thing, the monster was ferocious.

So that's a different way of treating him.

And Big Trouble in Little China, he's funny, like monsters are funny: the eyeball that comes down the hallway, the guy that blows up big, Thunder.

They're more humorous, so you treat them differently.

James Hong / David Lo Pan: Ch'ing-ti will be happy and my curse will be lifted.

Kurt Russell / Jack Burton: And go off and rule the universe from beyond the grave.. The monster is just the other, the creature in us, the beast.

With The Thing, Carpenter did a remake of a science-fiction classic from the 50's, which is The Thing from Another World, by Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks.

The Thing from Another World, is a movie that was a complete product of its time, the 1950's, in the paranoid science-fiction genre, with "the red scare," the soviet threat and all that... Where you had this idea that soviet spies could be lurking among us, that the devil, the red devil, could be among us.

Carpenter stepped away from this to get into something that was ultimately a lot more worrying, because instead of pertaining to the geopolitical context of the times, it related to the ontological nature of human beings, pretty much.

A lot of people wondered about why The Thing wasn't a bigger success.

When it came out, people had a choice: they could go see the bad alien and The Thing or they could go see the good alien and E.T.

And I think a lot of people said "Oh, let's go see the good alien".

It's a very dark movie, very pessimistic on humankind and very paranoid.

It wasn't bankable.

It's about the end of the world, it's not a happy movie.

It's bleak... there's no hope for these people...so.

This is a monster that fully embodies the doubts and the duality that make up the modern human being.

Because ultimately, the person you look at in the mirror in the morning may not be you a couple hours later.

That person may look like you to others, but it's no longer you inside.

I was raised, so to say, by the Alien world.

I was lucky enough to be able to spend time with Giger, to talk to him and see all his prep work, all his sketches.

And I have to admit that I'm passionate about Alien.

That's why, at the museum, when we went to the ADI studios in Los Angeles and we saw that the alien queen was gone from the studio showroom, only to be stored in the basement... Why the basement?

Because it was too old, because it was getting damaged, because the latex was breaking down, and because they were slowly salvaging the metal to make other animatronics, and that made us very sad.

So what we asked was, "Wouldn't it make sense to save this alien queen?"

Personally, this is my idol, Alien.

She's every bit as famous all over the planet as Marilyn Monroe or as The Beatles, and maybe even more so.

Because in every country in the world, from India to China, everyone knows the terrible alien queen.

The movie boasts a very elaborate production design, from the cinematography to everything pertaining to artistic design.

It's a movie that's incredibly rich visually, and that aspect makes it a landmark in movie history.

The alien actually represents industrial profits.

They get sent to this planet thinking they're embarking on a philanthropic walkabout.

And that's far from the case.

They're going out there in support of some mercantile, industrial interests, and the alien represents nothing more than the industry devouring its workers, if you will, eating them up from inside.

The Nostromo is nothing but a plant that sacrifices its workers to industrial profits.

So yeah, the monster created by Giger, that phallic head, those multiple organs that come out everywhere... At the start, you don't really know what the alien looks like, since it's often in the shadows.

And as it's uncovered more and more, and you see what an original and remarkable creature it is for its time.

The most frightening monsters are often inspired by insects.

An alien by its reproductive means, for one, it's something that serves to unconsciously remind us that we have life swarming inside us.

But that is not something we like to picture.

It's pretty funny, because we humans will never be able to create a monster and make it different from what we already have in our subconscious.

If you're told to "Create a monster," you'll find yourself only adding things you know.

You'll think about an insect and add antennae, or a squid, and add tentacles... You can't change that.

That survival instinct, that idea of the "perfect living organism" that stops at nothing to reproduce and perpetuate its existence... It's an organic, visceral disgust.

It's not just symbolic.

It's so incredibly cringy it just makes anyone shudder in horror.

Granted, I'm not talking about the whole nightmarish birth reproduction aspect, but yeah, I definitely think there's a bit of all of that in Alien.

There's a very degenerate sexual side and something lethal about them in every way: even the people who get them to bleed end up... Their blood is acid.

That's really, really nasty.

Aliens is Cameron's script for Rambo 2.

Let's rock!

It follows the same structure.

Watch Cosmatos's Rambo 2, and you'll get the same structure you see when you watch Aliens: war trauma, the guy going back off to the battlefield, and there's a chick.

It's a guy in this case, and a love story with the girl, and what happens?

He goes off in search of his teammates, he runs off at the end.

And it's the Vietcong shooting at him instead of Bishop.

And the two movies are very Reaganian, very tied into their day.

They hinge on the industrialist sending troops out in search of profit, so they head back out to LV-426 to see if the colony is functional.

And whoever says colony inevitably says war.

That's what happened in Vietnam.

Aliens is a post-Vietnam movie.

The Chestburster tearing out of John Hurt's body in Alien, that's what it's about.

Monstrousness lurks inside all of us, but in this case "inside" in the anatomic sense of the word: inside ourselves, right in our viscera, and it can burst out at any moment and turn you into a monster... Now granted, that can be an alien for a start, an unknown alien race.

Or a genetic modification.

At this point, the horror movie started probing the theme of the tormented flesh, of the horror bursting out from our most hidden depths.

That's something that also tied into medical advances, and I believe it also tied in to the development of diseases such as cancer or AIDS.

Human beings are connected to a whole network of medical knowledge.

The more hypochondriac they become, the more afraid they are of holding their own doom inside themselves.

I saw it when I was pretty young, but I only watched it up until the scene where he arm-wrestles the guy and tears his arm off and there's this white liquid running out.

The jewel of this subgenre of horror movie that is the body horror movie of the 80's, and this is something that David Cronenberg was extremely keen on, is his movie, The Fly, which examines all these themes that tie into the fact that, by attempting to engineer their own perfection, human beings end up self-destructing.

It's a very Promethean theme, one that's rendered very graphic, very visceral, by the fact that the movie tackles the monster it depicts head-on.

It still makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Oh no, what's happening to me?

Am I dying?

The whole treatment of the flesh, of the almost clinical and scientific progress of the guy keeping his own log.

He makes his own museum of himself with all his body parts that fall off.

Starting with the 70's, horror movies and fantastic movies started to get progressively more radical and more and more violent.

The first most significant film of that era was The Texas Chain saw Massacre.

The Texas Chain saw Massacre is a movie that ultimately shows us that we've discovered the world now.

We know everything about the entire world.

We can go anywhere in space, we can explore the depths of the ocean, all that stuff... And ultimately we find out there's an unknown territory right at the very heart of our civilization, in the remotest Texan countryside as it happens in The Texas Chain saw Massacre, but that the monsters are here.

The monsters are here, burrowed inside our very civilization.

That's a theme that would become central to modern horror films and Leatherface would become a major figure in the movie monster bestiary.

Above all else, Leatherface is mentally deficient.

At times, he's frightened by his own victims.

It's a situation that becomes more and more disturbing, because this is something that's so frightening to us, and at the same time it's almost something that never should have existed given a normal relationship.

It's a movie that influenced its generation and made horror movies take a more and more extreme turn.

Voice Over / Actor: Texas Chain saw Massacre.

Wes Craven, who was very impressed by High Tension, asked us the following question.

He said to us: "Do you know The Hills Have Eyes?"

Obviously, The Hills Have Eyes was something we were incredibly familiar with.

Even though Wes Craven's seminal work, from our point of view, was The Last House on the Left, which had been a huge wellspring of inspiration for High Tension.

You think about it, you watch the movies, you rack your brains, and you realize that our Deliverance, our Straw Dogs, is The Hills Have Eyes.

Actress: What the hell was that?

Voice Over / Actor: The Hills have eyes.

The political aspect was there from the very first days when we started hammering out the brainstorming on what the story might be.

Former miners who refused to leave their village and ended up enduring all those nuclear tests, all 400 and some nuclear tests that they had to withstand, and that led to them developing terrible mutations.

Now that of course led us to that aspect of the American family finding itself confronted by what they've created.

And the political dimension ballooned further and further with the Big Brain scene, with the national anthem, with the American flag ultimately being used to deliver that killing blow.

There are so many references, this testing town where everything is taking place... There are so, so many deconstructions of the politics of the American society.

To me, the mutants in the hills are only interesting insofar as they're victims.

Halloween night... A small American town.

Through Halloween, John Carpenter truly made the psychological horror movie come into its own.

He was someone different from most of the directors that I had worked with.

He was interested in using the camera to tell the story.

With this one, we're no longer straying in the remote countryside as we were in The Texas Chain saw Massacre.

We're in the suburbs, in cushy little residential neighborhoods in the US, and horror looms here as well.

Halloween was very sort of new for the time.

Nobody had made horror films like that.

This was a new take, just like Psycho was really sort of a new take on suspense.

It's a masterpiece.

He crystallized that angst of the American cookie-cutter suburbia, where the fact that nothing happens is the actual problem.

Michael Myers is a real monster.

He's not some kind of serial killer.

He's the bogeyman.

He keeps going forward, he's unstoppable.

We don't get a Z-movie explanation like we do with Jason, all like, "Well, see, he's actually dead, he's half-zombie and that's why you can't kill him."

No, with this, he's basically the embodiment of death marching your way and he's just never gonna stop.

It's a manifestation of puritanical America, the bogeymen of the 1980's horror movie canon, because he's out there killing kids who are getting into pot or into drugs... If you watch closely, he doesn't even look mean.

He's just this robot ambling through his scenes, and that's why it works.

He's dehumanized.

Carpenter is really the man who laid the foundations, the conventions of this "bogeyman" movie genre, that was going to have some phenomenal success throughout the 80's and spawn characters like Freddie Krueger, or Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th franchise, and all these other killers that keep making relentless comebacks.

All the others that it sparked off, those "mask-and-knife" killers, not one of them can match him.

The monster is only that awful and terrifying if we can see part of ourselves in it.

Meaning that for me, Freddie Krueger is only interesting because what qualifies him as a monster is the fact that he represents human nature veering into its most sordid extremes.

Our goal was to make a movie that would keep viewers on the edge of their seats from beginning to end, keep you in a total state of tension at all times, a movie that would just exhaust you.

There hadn't been a movie like that in a really long time, because the whole shtick of the 90's was this faint thread of irony that was woven into all horror movies, where the fear would always get defused by a good joke or by some pop culture reference, anything to show that things really weren't as terrifying as all that.

What I find interesting about High Tension, and what makes the movie twist interesting, is the fact that the girl's name is a cliche.

And so what that does is that tricks the viewer into a situation where all the warmth and all the empathy you had for the Cecile de France's character vanishes, while at the same time getting you to realize that she committed all those atrocities out of love.

And I do actually feel like that twist is what turned the movie into something almost romantic, which, again, it wasn't with the twist as it was originally designed.

But you stop them, don't you?

I can't stop 'em.

But you do, don't you?

My take of a monster is that, in order to make it interesting, you have to understand emotionally where the monster's coming from.

In the end of Maniac Cop 2, it was about the monster avenging the people who had attacked him in prison to seek retribution against the bureaucrats who had caused them to be thrown into prison.

And without that sense of empathy, you don't really have an interesting monster.

That's got to be there.

Same thing with Joe Spinell.

Joe Spinell, you saw as a tragic abused child who's grown up.

We made identification possible when we made Maniac and we decided to shoot in viewpoint mode, to really get stuck inside this guy's head.

Where the experiment gets challenging is when you want to make a movie where people won't be able to stop themselves having some compassion and feeling a little sorry for poor Elijah Wood's character, despite the fact that the guy is going around scalping chicks and brutally murdering them one after the next.

Yet despite all that, you feel sorry for him.

There's this very human side to him, that's what I find interesting with monsters.

Freaks, fell victim to censorship everywhere when it got released.

Matter of fact, in England, they waited something like 10 or 20 years before broadcasting it, because the English stricter where censorship is concerned.

All because they thought that viewers would be traumatized visually from seeing a movie with such unusual heroes.

The whole theme of the movie is to show you that, yeah, these guys frighten you because one of them looks all messed up, this other one is a dwarf, that other guy has his arms and legs missing, but at the end of the day, they're not the worst of the bunch.

And the thing is, this movie that got censored everywhere is seen as an absolute classic today.

It sort of embodies all the various fears and threats that ever grip society.

There's a movie called Raw, which examines a monster figure: the cannibal.

You don't need to have big social shifts to talk about monstrousness.

It's just as valid to have a conversation about a teenager who's becoming a woman, who's discovering herself in the process, and how she's experiencing those internal and external changes.

Here, you don't necessarily find the cliches of the "final girl" trope, or the monstruous cannibal living in a den and clothing himself in human skin.

This is something a lot more subtle.

We're talking about a monster, but at the end of the day, at that age, when you're growing up, when you're figuring out who you are, when you don't really know what to do with your body, don't we all feel a little monstrous then?

The movie opened up that conversation in a pretty audacious way.

You do have this character that represents the social monster, that commits such unforgivable atrocities that they exclude themselves from the human community.

Michael Rooker / Henry: It's always the same...And it's always different... Ain't that right?

Tracy Arnold / Becky: It was good talking to you, Henry.

John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was a groundbreaker of the genre.

It takes you through the most mundane and anecdotal facets of the daily life of a butcher, of someone who commits horrendous, unforgivable acts.

But the film still shows you the social relationships someone like that might have, with the woman he loves for instance, with his friends, all that.

And the movie is incredibly shocking, but not because it's bombarding you with unbearably graphical violence so much as because it makes us spend an hour and a half with this character and taking us as up close and personal as it can.

Then in Silence of the Lambs or Seven, with the characters of Hannibal Lecter or John Doe... ... Those serial killers are portrayed as criminal geniuses, masterminds whose level of intelligence blows that of mere mortals out of the water.

Movie like Seven and especially Zodiac take a unique look at how a serial killer, this monster that lurks in the city, taking part in its routine, is just like me and you and can blend into our daily lives without being spotted.

The most significant part is that you don't catch the guy at the end.

That's the terror brought on by Zodiac.

This is a very serious, a very grim movie, because it ends with the idea that it doesn't matter if you know who he is: even dead, you can't catch him.

Actor 1: God!

Milo Ventimiglia / Josh: Keep pushing me, you're gonna see what happens.

Actor 1: Help me!

Help me!

No!

No!

The first thing I had the cast do for The Divide was to show them Pasolini's Salo.

I told them, "You're going to be locked up in that bunker, and I want the movie to take the same tack as Pasolini's Salo, meaning that we're going to gradually delve into human horror and peel back just how far human monstrousness can push us."

In terms of the physical shift, since these were human beings, we got more into the notion of ideological monsters like nazis, like fascists.

The point was to examine how a human being can physically turn into a monster.

Ostensibly, this was due to radiation, and the way it's decaying them from within.

So we put them on a special diet, and they transformed as the shooting went on.

But the idea behind it was really to show how man turns into the monster he is inside, and how we could make that obvious, how we could showcase the way those bodies mutated.

And the meaner and more aggressive they become, the more they lose their minds, the more their bodies break down, the more they lose weight and hair, the more repulsive they become.

Because I think, at the end of the day, we often think of ourselves as the monsters.

We could be prosecuted, we could be diluted, we could be frenzied, out of control and therefore trapped in our bodies to kill.

What would that be like?

I feel like people need to accept their own monster within, in order to avoid becoming someone else's monster.

We're all someone else's monster.

The best thing about monsters is that, by their very nature, by their behavior, simply by who they are, they're perfect for giving us an idea of what we as human beings really are.

Every single time, you get this small level of humanity within the monster, and that's what makes that monster terrifying.

A monster that's lacking in humanity, the monster that just goes around being a monster, never really scares you.

The scariest and most radical monsters are always the ones that are the most human.

Fear of monsters can also make you feel like you exist, it can make you grow up into adulthood, and that's why I'd wrap up with Pixar's Monsters, Inc.,..

...which is the perfect monster movie for me, because it talks about monsters as childish figures, and it shows you exactly how to confront that demon.

Meaning, you're a child, and the more you grow up, the more you understand what the point of the monster is, and that it doesn't necessarily only exist to scare you, but in a sense to make you grow up.

Once you're an adult, what are you confronted with?

What kinds of monsters are you facing?

Well, that's when you tend to get more industrial monsters like the Alien movies, or environmental monsters like King Kong or Godzilla.

There always gonna be monsters as long as there's guys with liquid latex and people like to wear masks.

I think for the foreseeable future anyway, let's say for the next thousand years, people will still be afraid of monsters.

I'd love everybody to wake up and value life, as it's precious.

But people live their lives and bless them.

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