"The step-by-step horrific setup of the film is just great filmmaking. The movie starts, and you’re on a movie set, and this actress is bringing her daughter along with her to Boston, because she has broken up with her husband. So while she’s busy working, [actress] Linda Blair is at home, doing whatever, except the home is haunted, and eventually the evil spirit, a demon takes over her, and her mom doesn’t believe in it. Sure, you get the punch in the gut and the kick in the nuts when her head spins around and she spits out pea soup and everybody just flips out, but leading up to that is a very well-written script. It’s easy to do the action sequences. You sit down, and say, ‘OK, we’re gonna have a head pop off here, and then I’m gonna have a ghost dive off somebody’s ass, and use them like a hand puppet.’ OK, I get it. Those are all gonna be good hand-puppet scary moves, but what’s the script? You have to care about the characters, and stuff. That’s what we mean by elevated.”

"I became obsessed with horror at a very early age. Knowing this, my dad would often recall the greatest horror film he ever saw. It was black and white, it was French, and it was, in his words, “really, really gory.” He would tell me it was about a mad surgeon who tries to restore the face of his daughter, disfigured in a car accident, by mutilating young women and stealing their fair skin. And he would go on and on about how great it was, how scary it was, and how I would simply have to see it. But . . . He could not recall the name of the film. I tried to cross-reference with horror guidebooks in the library, but without the invention of the Internet and plot keywords, I was left stumped for a long time. Years later, I saw Eyes Without a Face and called my dad immediately. I told him the crucial fact he’d been missing, the actual name of the greatest horror film he had ever seen. I then agreed with him that, yes, it was a quite extraordinary film."