In earlier cultures with pagan belief systems, light and dark were celebrated equally, people were around death a lot. In contemporary Western culture, we don't have that, and horror is a place you can be immersed in it.
Look, some days, you have to film a sequence in which the rain is pounding down on someone and you're just turning the camera on what's happening. And other days, you occasionally have to spray Robert Pattinson in the face with a firehose.
For some reason, no one wanted to give me money to make a movie written in early modern English that involved a lot of puritans praying - even if it did involve a witch.
I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.
I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.
Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.
The Diary of Samuel Sewall,' 'The Diary of John Winthrop,' these are easy for anyone to get their hands on. This was really common stuff and there's tons of cases of demon possession.
After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.
Honestly, I'm a snobby person.
Witches were really scary to me as a kid.