You don't enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.
Interpretation
This quote highlights that theater serves as a medium to confront and explore our inherent fears through storytelling.
Wes Craven emphasizes that the purpose of entering a theater is not about being frightened in an arbitrary way, but rather to engage with the fears that we already possess. Theater offers a narrative framework that allows us to process and understand our anxieties, transforming them into accessible stories that resonate on a personal level.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of horror films on audiences.
That's what's great about the horror genre is that you're getting a load of people together in the cinema at the same place and the same time, having them all experience extreme fear and come out alive at the end. It's an uplifting experience, and there's a sense of elation.
If something comes along that is totally outside of horror, fine, but I find there's an immense amount of freedom within the genre.
You have to be aware of what the audience's expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren't looking.
I couldn't find an actor to play Freddy Krueger with the sense of ferocity I was seeking. Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned.
I was paralyzed from the chest down when I was 19, so I kind of put my head together about dying, and I think I've come to terms with it.
Looking back now, if I went to film school, it probably would have helped knowing what the best of the best of foreign films were, but that wasn't the case. In some ways, I think that led to my originality, because I hadn't seen anybody else.
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.
Opera singing is in every way of inestimable value; a real heritage for all mankind that has been reached over centuries of studies, attempts, flights of the spirit.
Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.
You can take things that Jimi Hendrix took, from Curtis Mayfield or from Buddy Guy for example, because we are all children of everything, even Picasso. But if you want to stand out, you have to learn to crystallize your existence and create your own fingerprints.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.