"After getting my brain stretched by Kubrick, the next “favorite director” I started to discover as a preteen and teen was Nicolas Roeg. Like 2001 before it, The Man Who Fell to Earth was sci-fi that reached out and grabbed my mind, spun it around, and made me want to see it over and over again. Roeg’s use of music and surreal imagery made the film both a visceral and an intellectual experience simultaneously—a heartbreaking puzzle—still my favorite kind of film experience. Don’t Look Now is probably my favorite scary movie of all time, and a model for the now overused and underachieved expression “a smart genre film.” Now, that might mean a movie that’s marginally less dopey than most mainstream films that deal with the occult, but in the days of this and Rosemary’s Baby, etc., the emphasis was much more on smart than on genre. And Walkabout is an amazing piece of nearly wordless visual storytelling that left me desperately in love with Jenny Agutter for years afterward."

"After getting my brain stretched by Kubrick, the next “favorite director” I started to discover as a preteen and teen was Nicolas Roeg. Like 2001 before it, The Man Who Fell to Earth was sci-fi that reached out and grabbed my mind, spun it around, and made me want to see it over and over again. Roeg’s use of music and surreal imagery made the film both a visceral and an intellectual experience simultaneously—a heartbreaking puzzle—still my favorite kind of film experience. Don’t Look Now is probably my favorite scary movie of all time, and a model for the now overused and underachieved expression “a smart genre film.” Now, that might mean a movie that’s marginally less dopey than most mainstream films that deal with the occult, but in the days of this and Rosemary’s Baby, etc., the emphasis was much more on smart than on genre. And Walkabout is an amazing piece of nearly wordless visual storytelling that left me desperately in love with Jenny Agutter for years afterward."

"After getting my brain stretched by Kubrick, the next “favorite director” I started to discover as a preteen and teen was Nicolas Roeg. Like 2001 before it, The Man Who Fell to Earth was sci-fi that reached out and grabbed my mind, spun it around, and made me want to see it over and over again. Roeg’s use of music and surreal imagery made the film both a visceral and an intellectual experience simultaneously—a heartbreaking puzzle—still my favorite kind of film experience. Don’t Look Now is probably my favorite scary movie of all time, and a model for the now overused and underachieved expression “a smart genre film.” Now, that might mean a movie that’s marginally less dopey than most mainstream films that deal with the occult, but in the days of this and Rosemary’s Baby, etc., the emphasis was much more on smart than on genre. And Walkabout is an amazing piece of nearly wordless visual storytelling that left me desperately in love with Jenny Agutter for years afterward."

"Another imperfect perfect film that came slithering into my late-adolescent consciousness at just the right time. I was a disciple by the end of the opening titles (alone worth the price of admission). This thing is a bath of Cronenberg’s cold, polite, Torontonian style, and thus makes the story’s insanity that much more insane—the form of the movie pressure-cooking the content. And what better way to dramatically illustrate this repression explosion than a scene wherein Dr. Icy Veins himself, Jeremy Irons, pounces across an operating table in a spasm of drug withdrawal, belly flopping onto his unconscious patient to rip off her mask and suck anesthetic gas. This is a film featuring twin prescription-drug-addicted gynecologists dressed like Star Wars Imperial Guards who use H. R. Giger–esque, Josef Mengele–level–scary surgical instruments to operate on the “abnormal genitalia” of women they mistake for mutants. Now, if that’s not one for the whole family, well, I don’t know what is! (See Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts for obvious inspiration.)"

"Here, Vincent Price is reciting all the witches' spells from a place I can't quite remember in England. It was meant to be around a Halloween vibe, which in the Catskills is everything. That's our Christmas, that's our New Year, May Day, Wicker Man… that's our pagan holiday supreme. Holiday ornaments are already out right now - you can go into any store and buy Halloween stuff. Growing up here, it wasn't a stretch that these kinds of records would be played by my mother or at elementary school almost ad nauseam. I became so inoculated to spooky, scary stories that they just became like urban legends. Another case of a children's story narration that was entrancing. These weren't just songs, these were whole inner emotional moments for young kids like me. When you're six and hearing about witches, ghosts and goblins, it's permeating your whole being and likely to shape the rest of your life, certainly in terms of the possibility of a supernatural world. Or probable, in my case."