"I saw this movie for the first time at the Elgin Theater on Eighth Avenue as part of a double feature with The Tenant a long time ago, when I was young and scared. I didn’t like it. But I was young and scared. Eighth Avenue used to be scary. I honestly don’t remember why I didn’t like it, but just a few years later I would be mocking my younger, uninformed self. I absolutely love everything about this movie, from its cheesiness (camera as murder weapon) to its sheer profundity (camera as murder weapon). Anna Massey should be a household name."

"Okay, so number two, can I choose another Stanley Kubrick? Number two is A Clockwork Orange. I just think it’s just visually an absolute masterpiece. Again, the central performance is incredible. I just love these performances that you get with these lead actors that are so on the brink of madness. They’re violent, they’re unpredictable and scary, and I just love that sequence where it’s operatic in A Clockwork Orange, when they’re beating each other up, and it’s the classical music. I love that. The Singin’ in the Rain, singing that song is deeply disturbing. I think he’s just a complete master."

"For some reason. I think the combination of the gruff, tyrannical old man pursuing the unruly, rebellious son really appeals to me. The scenario is, in some odd way, almost as scary as Freddy Krueger, you know! The evil father is an idea that’s really fascinating to me. Hawks is great, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Big Sleep… He could do the Salt-of-the-Earth very well. He was a very smooth director; a very good film architect in terms of his storytelling. That’s how he constructed this film, and got so deep into the characters."

"Do I get pretentious? Because this is foreign. {laughs] I love that German film from a few years ago that won the Oscar, The Lives of Others. Such a great movie. I’ve seen it a bunch, and I own it. I love, love, love that movie, and I found that it was just intensely riveting and scary and beautiful and so well crafted, so well plotted as a movie. And such a sad comment on a time in a certain country, but also a really beautiful comment on people being altered and finding their humanity again. I thought that movie was really special."

"The Twilight Zone. I had never watched it before, and it is so scary and so fantastic. My first advice would be to just go watch it (without) researching it, because the thrill of it is not knowing anything about the show, and then just watching it. It’s basically an anthology series where there’s a bunch of these weird stories, (in which) the world is just a little bit off. And it’s all these different, weird, crazy 30 minute episodes giving you portraits of the world in this science fiction scenario. At the same time, there’s always some crazy, fun twist."

"An old French film with Simone Signoret, and I think Paul Meurisse is in it. It’s the film that terrified me as child, with this very simple scene where she pulls a curtain back in an upstairs window, and he’s watching from the yard. That was actually probably the first horror film I ever saw. It was a very scary. I was a small child. I just remember the simplicity of that moment when she pulled that curtain back. So there’s that, and they did the remake with Sharon Stone that was not very successful and wasn’t very well made."