GDT: Yeah. He’s like King Kong in many ways.

JL: Whereas the Alien is a predator.

GDT: Yeah, but what I love about the Alien is what I love about insects: Remote perfection.

JL: How do you feel about vampires?

GDT: My favorite vampire movie is Nosferatu.

JL: The Murnau, [1922], or the Herzog [1979]?

GDT: Both. And I also loved Willem Dafoe in Shadow of the Vampire[E. Elias Merhige, 2000] and Barlow (the vampire in Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot,who was made up to resemble Nosferatu, 1979). That physicality is what I like the most.

JL: Vampires live forever, as Béla Lugosi [in Dracula, Tod Browning, 1931] says, “To die, to really die, that would be glorious.” And then there’s the sexual side of vampires; there’s also this weird AIDS and blood transfusion thing. What did you think of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark[1987]?

GDT: I loved it. For me, the vampire myth in the Carpathian Mountains with the castle and the cape was always very remote. It’s much more interesting set in an urban or suburban environment, like Salem’s Lotor I Am Legend[Francis Lawrence, 2007].

JL: What about Christopher Lee’s Dracula?

GDT: I love him! He is a righteous, arrogant figure; a guy that believes he deserves everything by lineage.

JL: Exactly. John Carpenter said that Dracula is all about the European aristocracy literally feeding off everybody.

GDT: Christopher Lee’s Dracula exudes entitlement. Everybody talks about how sexual his Dracula was, but I think it was just very forthright. He went for it straight.

JL: One of the reasons people talk about it being sexual is that it’s only relatively recently that vampires bite great chunks out of their victims. When Lugosi’s and Lee’s Dracula made those polite little punctures, their victims swooned. They became orgasmic!

GDT: Yeah. The whole sexual subtext of the vampire, I’m not denying. Also there was a lot less wardrobe for the ladies in the Hammer films; they were a lot more scantily clad!

JL: OK, so what about mad scientists, mad doctors, like Dr. Moreau? Island of Lost Souls[Erle C. Kenton, 1932]? Have you ever seen it?

GDT: I love it! I have a homage in Blade II[2002]: The “House of Pain!”

JL: Island of Lost Soulsis one of my favorite horror movies. What do you think of witches and warlocks—movies like The Devil Rides Out[Terence Fisher, 1968]?

GDT: I don’t think those are monster movies; those are supernatural movies.

JL: Do you think ghosts are scary?

GDT: Well, I have two simple rules that define horror for me: The things that create fear are either things that shouldn’t be, but are, or things that should be, but are not. I’ll give you an example (of the first rule): Your father died a week ago, you walk into your house and he’s sitting at the dining table, completely still. That generates fear. An example of the second rule is: The scene in Poltergeist[Tobe Hooper, 1982], where the woman turns around, then turns back, and all the chairs are piled up in the kitchen: that shouldn’t be, but is.

JL: But you don’t consider anything supernatural to be monstrous?

GDT: Like I said, I’m willing to make an exception with vampires and werewolves because they have a physical manifestation. But in traditional tales of vampires—in many, many countries—the vampire is a spirit; it doesn’t have a physical body. A monster has to have physicality.

JL: But what about a demon that grabs you and causes you bodily harm? I can picture a scene where people are in a room: there are terrible sounds, the walls are bending inwards, it’s getting increasingly terrifying, and they’re having this same argument! (Laughs.)

GDT: Yes! I think that there are many ways a ghost can physically manifest itself, but it doesn’t have a body. We’re going to go by my rules! I’ll tell you: Most of the time a monster has a natural or physical body that has something to do with science, or biology, gone awry.

JL: What about the character of Regan in The Exorcist[William Friedkin, 1973], when she’s possessed by Satan?

GDT: She’s not a monster!

JL: Isn’t Satan a monster?

GDT: No, he’s a spirit! He’s a spiritual entity.

JL: What about gnomes, or fairies, or elves, or leprechauns?

GDT: They’re not monsters. Not for me.

JL: But they have physical bodies!

GDT: They are not monsters; they come from a completely different lore.

JL: OK, well, now that you’ve destroyed half of my guide, I’m going to go ahead and call them monsters anyway! Let’s talk about Psycho[Alfred Hitchcock, 1960] and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre[Tobe Hooper, 1974], Peeping Tom[Michael Powell, 1960], movies like that.

GDT: Yeah, those are about psychopaths. Are they in your guide?

JL: Psychopaths are humanmonsters! They’re the only monsters that scare me. I’m not really scared by any monster in a movie, any monster as you define them, or any monster as I’m broadly defining them: Werewolves, vampires, they don’t scare me; they do not exist. But people are crazy, they do terrible things, and they scare the shit out of me!

GDT: Has there ever been a monster movie that scared you?

JL: While actually watching the movie— absolutely! I’m a great audience, a real sucker for the sudden “BOO!” I’ve always maintained that The Exorcistis the greatest horror film because, although I don’t believe in Jesus or Satan, during the course of the film I was scared.

GDT: Alienmust have scared you.

JL: Actually, when I saw it the first time, I kept thinking: “This is a remake of It! The Terror From Beyond Space[Edward L. Cahn 1958]” and Planet of the Vampires[Mario Bava, 1965]! It was like a haunted house movie in space. But it’s beautifully made. I love the scene with John Hurt… you know, the chest-burster?

GDT: Yeah.

JL: What made that scene work, isn’t the chest-burster itself—that’s kind of a dumb-looking puppet—but the moment when it actually bursts out of him—the horror on the actors’ faces, their reactions, are so real. But I think Aliens[James Cameron, 1986] is a better movie than Alien. It was brilliant of James Cameron to make Aliensan action movie. Forgive me. I know that’s sacrilegious.

GDT: No, no, it isn’t! I’m just trying to define what a monster movie is. Hitchcock never did a horror film except for The Birds[1963]. That truly had a supernatural agent at work; it may not be ghosts, but it was supernatural. And to my mind, Spielberg did two great horror films: one was Duel[1971], because he elevated that truck to the state of a mechanical monster; and the other one was Jaws[1975], because he gave that shark intelligence and motivation… That is a monster movie that has haunted me for my entire life. I used to love the sea before I saw Jaws—I still love it, I still scuba dive, I snorkel, but I’m always nervous!

JL: Okay, the last question—and this is the one that everyone has given me radically different answers to. It’s the one I expected the same answer to, but they’ve all been very different: Why do you think people like going to see scary movies?

GDT: I think it is part of our nature as myth-making mammals to tell stories of the dark and what lives in it. The earliest storytellers, seated around the campfire, were trying to make sense of the world. They needed to create angels and demons, and beauty and monsters. Fear can be a very powerful, spiritual experience, and we look for it. People say going to a horror movie is like a rollercoaster ride and I partially agree. But the rollercoaster analogy is limited. On a ride, you’re only scared of being physically damaged. Horror films are a rollercoaster of the soul.

JL “Horror films are a rollercoaster of the soul.” That’s wonderful!