“Everybody knows that you can't see Dracula's reflection in a mirror, but nobody has ever asked, 'Why?' That's a good question and I answer it. I also thought, 'You know, Dracula is like the father of all vampires and you can kill vampires with a stake in the heart. But Dracula has to be more complicated than that. No one knows how to kill Dracula'.”
“No one is going to think going into this movie that they are going to come out loving Frankenstein, and not in a cheap of cheesy way at all - he's really an angry, vicious guy - a beast. But when you think of the originals, they were scary melodramas. The characters were so deep. I always felt as badly for Frankenstein as I did for his victims because, like Lenny in Steinbeck's 'Mice and Men,' he's a man-child. I've always found that fascinating.”
“Frankenstein's monster is so iconographic, so my creature designers spent many, many months designing him. I said, 'OK, he has to have a flat head, blots on his neck and Doc Martens on his feet, but other that - we can play with him'.”
“I hope in my career I get to do every kind of movie. When I did Huck Finn, I got all those Disney kid scripts. When I did Jungle Book, then I got all the animal scripts. Now I do a couple Mummy movies and it's like, 'Oh, he does monsters.”
“There are four movies that got me into wanting to make movies: Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Jason and the Argonauts. Those are the movies that took me to different places when I was a kid. I fell in love with movies by watching those movies.”
“The key to humor in a horror film is that it has to be organic. It has to be organic to the situation.... if you know you're doing anything to get a laugh, or anything to scare people - that's great. But to try to get people to do both - to try to get people to scream in horror, and a moment later burst out laughing - I think that's a neater trick.”
