"All of us have our individual curses, something that we are uncomfortable with and something that we have to deal with, like me making horror films, perhaps"
About this Quote
Craven smuggles an artist’s confession into a shrug. By calling horror filmmaking his "individual curse", he frames his career less as a genre choice than as a compulsion: the thing you don’t exactly want, but can’t stop circling. The word "curses" is doing double duty. It nods to the supernatural vocabulary his movies trade in, but it also makes the psychological point that everyone carries some private dread or shame that won’t stay buried. Horror, in this reading, isn’t escapism; it’s exposure therapy with better lighting.
The sly pivot is "perhaps". Craven undercuts his own myth. Audiences love tidy stories about directors who "love fear" or "chase darkness". He offers something messier: maybe the work isn’t a preference, maybe it’s a coping mechanism. That hesitation is also a form of charm, a way to admit vulnerability without begging for absolution. It’s self-aware, but not self-pitying.
Context matters: Craven emerged from an era when horror was treated as disreputable, morally suspicious, and commercially crude. By describing his craft as a burden he has to "deal with", he answers the unspoken accusation: Why do you make this stuff? Because the uncomfortable doesn’t vanish when you refuse to look at it. Craven’s subtext is that the monsters are real enough - and the job, oddly, is to give them a name, a mask, and a screen big enough for the rest of us to recognize our own.
The sly pivot is "perhaps". Craven undercuts his own myth. Audiences love tidy stories about directors who "love fear" or "chase darkness". He offers something messier: maybe the work isn’t a preference, maybe it’s a coping mechanism. That hesitation is also a form of charm, a way to admit vulnerability without begging for absolution. It’s self-aware, but not self-pitying.
Context matters: Craven emerged from an era when horror was treated as disreputable, morally suspicious, and commercially crude. By describing his craft as a burden he has to "deal with", he answers the unspoken accusation: Why do you make this stuff? Because the uncomfortable doesn’t vanish when you refuse to look at it. Craven’s subtext is that the monsters are real enough - and the job, oddly, is to give them a name, a mask, and a screen big enough for the rest of us to recognize our own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Tough Times |
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