Tobin Bell

"Wolf Creek, the Australian independent film that has such great locations and great music. A very simple premise, and it’s surprising. It starts out in this sort of idyllic setting and situation, and it just falls like dominoes into this horrific situation. Your hopes for the characters are dashed, one by one. I just love when I see a little independent film that’s got all the elements of good filmmaking done on a small budget with extremely powerful performances by the two lead characters in it."

"The William Friedkin film. I thought that was very smart. I thought the priests were as terrifying in that, and all the religious symbolism, and all of the dogma of the Catholic Church that was involved in that. It’s pretty rich stuff. The performances were very, very powerful in that film. Some of the special effects also that they did with the child in the bed were just so freaky."

"The Descent, which was the film about the women spelunkers who go down into a cave. What I liked about that was the fact that you spent the first half hour of the film developing the characters. You cared about the people. By the time they went into the cave, you were involved. I thought that was very smart, and I loved that a horror film didn’t go right to the scares but made you care about the characters and their relationships with one another. The Descent was very well made, I thought, on a relatively low budget."

"Psycho, the Alfred Hitchcock film, the film with Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. I thought that film was groundbreaking at its time, and I think everyone else did, too. The shower scene in Psycho, I likened it to people being afraid to go in the ocean because of Jaws. People were afraid after that film to take a shower. I remember distinctly so many people talking about that because of that shower scene with Janet Leigh."