Time & Perspective Quote by Margot Kidder

Kidder’s delight in cinematic gross-out isn’t just a backstage anecdote; it’s a little manifesto about how performers survive the artificiality of the job. Ooze in basements and pigs’ heads through windows are the kind of B-movie flourishes that, in the wrong hands, read as cheap. Kidder flips them into a shared joke, a reminder that movie “horror” is often an elaborate craft project held together by timing, crew choreography, and whatever unholy substance is standing in for slime that day.

The phrase “inordinate amount of time” is doing quiet work. She’s not merely admitting she laughed; she’s confessing to the social impropriety of it, as if the set’s emotional script (tension, fear, dread) was undercut by the obvious absurdity of the props. That’s the subtext: film asks adults to pretend with absolute conviction, and the more grotesque the pretend, the more it exposes the seams. Laughter becomes a pressure valve, but also a bonding ritual - a way to align the cast and crew around the truth that everyone can see.

“How could you not laugh?” doubles as invitation and gentle rebuke. If you’re taking it too seriously, you’re missing the point of the spectacle. Coming from Kidder, an actor associated with a generation of genre-crossing, effects-driven filmmaking, the line also nods to a cultural moment when practical effects were tactile, ridiculous, and communal - and the joy of making the illusion could be as memorable as the illusion itself.