Quotes About Psychological Horror

“From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.”

— Peter Straub

“Let's say it once and for all: Poe and Lovecraft - not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Franz Kafka - were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of 'outsider artists.' That's where the future development of horror fiction lies - in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction.”

— Thomas Ligotti

“Great artistic works are often based on solving several psychological problems simultaneously. In literature this is often accomplished by splitting apart the conflict and assigning each aspect to a different character. Marjie Rynearson, for instance, wrote an award-winning play, Jenny, about the meeting and reconciliation of two women: the mother of a murder victim and the mother of the murderer. Within the dialogue between the two characters she sought to resolve two sets of problems: the rage and grief of the victim's mother, and the horror, guilt, and grief of the murderer's mother. She worked on the play for several years, and only when it was finished did she realize that through it she was struggling to resolve her feelings about the suicide of her best friend. Rynearson had simultaneously been, in effect, both the friend of the victim and the friend of the perpetrator of the killing. The power of the work lay in its simultaneous resolution of conflicting problems.”

— Linda Austin

“It cannot be denied that in cases of child rape the question of consent cannot arise at all, simply because a child or worst still an infant lacks mental power or knowledge to provide "consent" or even lacks physical ability to restrain. Moreover such an act subjects the child/infant to physical trauma, leading to even physical , mental and psychological ailment. To eliminate the horror from the face of the earth, I firmly believe we need to accept capital punishment as an apt punishment for subjecting a child to such a ordeal”

— Henrietta Newton Martin B.Com LLB Goldmedalist LLM Goldmedalist MMS Etc - Legal Consultant

“There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

“Psychological horror I've always appreciated, like 'Rosemary's Baby.' The slasher movies and the grotesque movies are the ones that I've really been off for a while.”

— John Carroll Lynch

“She understood now why her friend Elizabeth, with her near-genius, analytical mind gave wide berth to murder mysteries, psychological thrillers, and horror stories, and read only romance novels. Because, by God, when a woman picked up one of those steamy books, she had a firm guarantee that there would be a Happily-Ever-After. That though the world outside those covers could bring such sorrow and disappointment and loneliness, between those covers, the world was a splendid place to be.”

— Karen Marie Moning

“Horror movies have never been my thing. I love psychological thrillers like 'The Exorcist', 'The Shining', even though they scare the living daylights out of me.”

— Emmanuelle Vaugier

“Psychological horror is more interesting to me than the explicitly physical.”

— Andrew Pyper

“My story reflexes come less from fantasy or horror than from the darker sort of psychological thriller - not as plot-driven as most, rather more mood-driven. My interest in the supernatural is a complication - though I am less interested in ghosts than in people who see ghosts.”

— Graham Joyce

“I would love to do something in the thriller category. Not so much horror, but I would love to do a full-on psychological thriller. That would be really interesting. A period piece would also be fantastic.”

— Brooke Nevin

“Most horror films fail to scare me. I think 'The Ring' plays more as a psychological thriller. It's smarter, there's more character development and some of the themes explored go a little deeper.”

— Martin Henderson

“Any horror element is as much psychological as special effects.”

— Christopher Eccleston

“I do like sci-fi, and I do like horror - those are my favorite genres. Good horror, though, not like slasher horror ... psychological horror like 'The Shining' - really good stuff!”

— Mark Pellegrino

“I know that Wes Craven feels watching horror films does have a psychological effect, in a good way. It is very cathartic. He might be right about that.”

— Marley Shelton

“'Ravenswood' is horror. It's not slasher, but it's psychological and spiritual horror.”

— Tyler Blackburn

“What you don't see is scarier than what you do. Categorization is always kind of arbitrary, but people have called 'Preservation' a 'psychological thriller.' To me, psychological thriller basically means 'a horror movie without the blood.'”

— Christopher Denham

“I don't like the slasher stuff, myself, but I do like the psychological horror of Roman Polanski and that world. But, it's curious to me why people do like to be afraid.”

— Dylan McDermott

“At Universal Studios, Marston had a hand in films like Show Boat, in 1929. He also helped get films past the censors, including All Quiet on the Western Front, in 1930. When Carl Laemmle's son, Junior Laemmle, took over Universal, he turned it into a specialty shop for horror films: Marston's theory of emotions lies behind the particular brand of psychological terror in Laemmle's Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and The Invisible Man (1933). Before Marston left Hollywood, he also worked for Paramount. For Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), he tested audience reaction by strapping viewers to blood pressure cuffs while they watched the rushes.30”

— Jill Lepore

“I like all of the mental, psychological thriller movies too. I enjoy horror movies across the board.”

— Sophia Bush

“To me Polanski is one of the greats in terms of psychological horror. It's just hard to top him because he's so damn good at it.”

— Dylan McDermott

“Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the "luxuriousness" of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer's task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

“When you're playing the devil, you're playing the ultimate evil. There are no boundaries. In doing a film in the horror genre or a psychological thriller, you're really pushed as an actress, you're pushed way outside of your comfort zone. Emotionally, mentally, and physically. That's when things really get fun.”

— Ashley Bell

“In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.”

— Bryan Fuller

“There are two types of people: you have people that like psychological horror and you have those that like everything in their face.”

— Tom Six