"The process is very gradual, you see. At first there's the tainted stage; they know what will eventually happen to them if they go on but they say, 'Oh God, don't do it to me do it again, please, please.'"
About this Quote
Gradual corruption is a scarier monster than any bat-winged count, and Terence Fisher knows it. His line is basically a director’s mission statement: horror isn’t the sudden bite, it’s the slow bargaining that happens before the bite even lands. The “tainted stage” is a neat, clinical phrase for something deeply intimate: the moment a person recognizes the danger and still reaches for it. Fisher’s genius is in that contradictory prayer - “don’t do it to me... do it again” - which captures addiction, erotic compulsion, and moral collapse in one breath. It’s funny in its naked desperation, but the laugh is trapped in your throat.
Coming from a director synonymous with mid-century British gothic (Hammer’s lurid moral theater), the quote reads like an x-ray of his era’s anxieties. These films were made under a culture of repression and censorship; they had to smuggle sex, appetite, and transgression inside capes and fangs. So Fisher frames damnation as incremental, almost polite. People “know what will eventually happen” - the punishment is not a surprise - yet desire rewrites the script in real time. The victim becomes an accomplice.
The intent isn’t to moralize so much as to weaponize ambivalence. He’s explaining how you keep an audience leaning forward: by making the character’s downfall feel like a choice they’re making, then failing to make, then making again. The horror is that the monster doesn’t only attack; it invites, and the invitation sounds like your own voice.
Coming from a director synonymous with mid-century British gothic (Hammer’s lurid moral theater), the quote reads like an x-ray of his era’s anxieties. These films were made under a culture of repression and censorship; they had to smuggle sex, appetite, and transgression inside capes and fangs. So Fisher frames damnation as incremental, almost polite. People “know what will eventually happen” - the punishment is not a surprise - yet desire rewrites the script in real time. The victim becomes an accomplice.
The intent isn’t to moralize so much as to weaponize ambivalence. He’s explaining how you keep an audience leaning forward: by making the character’s downfall feel like a choice they’re making, then failing to make, then making again. The horror is that the monster doesn’t only attack; it invites, and the invitation sounds like your own voice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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