RIP to Dan O'Bannon. Loved Return of the Living Dead, Dead & Buried, Alien, Dark Star and the Resurrected. Also as a fellow fan of H.P. Lovecraft you will be missed as you've put out some great Lovecraftian movies.
Still one of my favorite quotes from him on Dead & Buried special dvd:
"You see here's the thing, fear, fear is a sensitizing emotion, if you think about it, it's obvious that the function of an animal, organism, a human being is in danger it's survival value is in becoming really aware of where any threat might be coming from. Fear sensitizes you, your perceptions, your thoughts, you entire awareness and so if you frighten an audience they become momentarily more sensitive to everything in the film and the story, and that's one of the things that make Lovecraft's stories have such impact. Lovecraft simply isn't a catalogue of slimy frog monsters, and he's very good at creating an atmosphere of building fear, and by the time Lovecraft gets you good & scared that's when he starts to spring some of his cosmic ideas about the nature of the universe, the place of man in the universe, is there a god, is there not, the scale of the universe; and I guess his core idea is that out there somewhere things are different than they are over here. If you hit someone with this on the first page it won't mean much, but once you get the person frightened they become sensitized to anything and specifically they become sensitized to the story they're reading, the book they're seeing.
Atmosphere is extremely important to horror movies- the old house, the dark woods. I mean a horror movie which does not have a good atmosphere which the mood & setting are bland is almost ineffective, it's well known that atmosphere is important but nobody really knows why, the atmosphere is not there to support the fear, the fear is there because the writer really wants to write about is the atmosphere and he wants the reader or the filmmaker or audience to be sensitive to these old houses and old woods that he loves so much. If you're not afraid, it's just a travelogue; if you're afraid it becomes a magic wood, a magic house. This is something that I figured out about 15 years ago when I was contemplating a patch of woods and wondering why I enjoy the old woods in a horror story so much, that's when it struck me, when you are afraid you are sensitized, I loved the old woods but unless you've got me frightened they're just a bunch of trees."
-Dan O'Bannon (Dead & Buried featurette on creating fear)
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