- Darren Lynn Bousman: [speaking of horror] Most of the power that it has relates to the time that it is made.
- John Carpenter: "Last House on the Left" was... it was like a strong cup of coffee in the morning, and opened you right up. Wow!
- George A. Romero: [talking about the 1960s and Night of the Living Dead] I thought it was about revolution. Um, you know we were '60s guys and, um, thinking in those terms sort of pissed off that the '60s revolution didn't work peace and love didn't solve anything in the end in fact shit was looking worse. And I said, what would be a really earth shattering thing that would revolutionary and that people would refuse to ignore. The dead stop staying dead! Oh! And there's one thing more, they like to eat living people!
- Larry Cohen: If a horror film is cutting off people's thumbs and gouging your eyes out, I guess that's a certain of horror. But it's not the kind of horror film that interests me.
- John Carpenter: [talking about They Live] I had this deal with Universal to make some movies where I would write the scripts and I'd have complete control and such, which was great. And I wanted to do something about Reaganism and... because it pissed me off so much. The crowd was kill a commie for Christ and uh... let's get those commies and kill all of them. Something I grew up laughing at that in "Dr. Strangelove". And now here it was again and with this massive enthusiasm behind it, and this unrestrained, um... free enterprise.
- Mick Garris: [talking about The Howling] Horror became spectacle again. Back in the '50s it was spectacle because it was space monsters and all those things. And in the '60s it drew down to the Norman Bates and "Rosemary's Baby" and into human drama. Now it was a new time because suddenly it wasn't just the filmmaker, but it is also the special effects guys, the Rick Bakers of the world, the Rob Bottins of the world. Spectacle returned in a big way.
- Mick Garris: If you meet all the people who make horror films, you discover they are very non-violent, they're politically active and knowledgeable and anti-war. They have opened themselves up to all of these possibilities, and it's the people who repress them who are the ones you have to look out for.
- Narrator: In "Targets", Boris Karloff realizes that traditional monsters can't compete with the horrors of real life in 1960s America.
- Joe Dante: The appeal of horror movies has always been about confronting death, and in their various ways, these movies, you know, help us cope with that, and that's one of the reasons that this has been such a long-lived genre, even from literary times on.
- John Carpenter: Fear is probably the most powerful emotion we all feel as humans. We're all afraid of death, and loss of a loved one, loss of identity. All the things that you see in the movie, we're all afraid of.
- Brian Yuzna: Going all the way back to the '20s, the horror movies of the silent era with Lon Chaney, there was a lot of, kind of, twisted people. The monster was just a mutilated person. When people came back from World War I, they came back without limbs, they- they came back in somewhat living pieces.
- Narrator: Many of Hollywood's earliest filmmakers were immigrants from Europe. They brought mythic monsters from the old world to new shores.