I try to see my films just once. It's like a dream you've been through when it's been intense, and you just have to go through it once more just to make sure you've had it.

Staring into the face of a corpse is sure to make one question where life is headed.

I think in horror the eyes are really important. How you draw them can totally change how scary a story is. I think the scariest part of the body is probably people’s eyes.

I'm frightened of my own movies.

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

You can talk film theory till you're blue in the face, but in the end, the thing that may haunt you most about a movie is a pair of eyes.

Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible than that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes. He could only see his own face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of seeing his own face. The creator of the mirror poisoned the human soul.

sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. François Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are

Sometimes I surprise myself with my own face.

To look straight into the eyes of my death/ My non-being/ To face myself as living and dying/ In the bare nakedness of my life and non-life.

I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features. "Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?" "A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destiny — and a call for help. And much more that we'll never understand."

It was really hard at first. I remember the first, the very first episode that we shot and I had to react to that Edwardian ghost, ghouly, kind of decrepit, scary figure that kept popping in and out everywhere. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. It's going to be hard using my scared face!’

"If you could just for a moment come out of yourself and see what I see...you wouldn't stop looking at yourself. But unfortunately you need a mirror to do it, my poor beauty.” (p148)

Well, I’m not very comfortable with looking at myself in the mirror before I do a scene, anyway. It really throws me.