"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."

"I’ve seen the Herzog one a good many times too, but the Murnau film… Murnau is neck to neck with Bergman as my favorite director. He’s responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from Nosferatu to Faust to Sunset. His work was so influential that filmmakers generations later can be referencing Murnau without knowing it. But Nosferatu is an interesting movie. It was produced by Albin Grau, an occultist who started an independent film studio to make occult-themed movies. Nosferatu was his first endeavor. And he hired the screenwriter, and he hired Murnau, and he was the production designer and did a lot of concept art. Very much part of the authorship of this film. And Max Schreck, as much as he is a folk vampire and a reinterpretation of Stoker’s literary gothic vampire, he’s also influenced by Albin Grau’s early 20th-century occultist views on vampirism. But in many ways — there’s horror movies before it, obviously — Nosferatu invents horror movies. The editing of the parallel story together in some ways invents cinema."