I say 'spectacle' rather than 'story' because in the end, it isn't the intricacies of narrative that draw us to horror films. When it's there, I'm grateful for the director's skill at telling an exquisitely nuanced tale filled with psychological insight, but it is the spectacles that I take home with me.

'Hellraiser' was what 'Hellraiser' was. It was a $900k movie, and there wasn't anything I would have done differently. But 'Nightbreed' was taken away from me. It was thought that its meaning wasn't... Its meaning didn't chime with the producers.

I'm feeling much better than I have been for many years. You know, I... there have been a couple of days when I thought maybe I wasn't going to make it to the evening. I don't feel that anymore.

Nobody cares for the product I, and a host of other horror directors, make.

I'm a gay man, living an out life for a long time, and it's tiring and anger-making to hear people continue to spit out the same old dreary cliches about the fact that gay men are doing something unnatural, and there'll be a price to pay when the Rapture happens.

I used to think that you'd open the door, and there was Narnia. Increasingly, I think it's all around us.

I wanted to fold into the 'Hellraiser' narrative something about the guy - the Frenchman Lemarchand - who made the mysterious box, which raises Pinhead. I figured, 'Well, what would have happened to him?' He might well have been taken to Devil's Island, and I thought that would be a pretty cool place to start the movie.

I was always aware of the ticking clock of time, always. I was very aware that I had a lot to do, and I wanted to do those things in the best possible way that I could and probably the biggest way I possibly could.

It is the creature that stands at the center of horror movies, not those who have made it their business to bring the beast down. We're all the same.

The thought of making a movie in which the monsters were the good guys was just financial suicide.