Texas Chainsaw Massacre – (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
"I'm not going to qualify it, the next three movies I just love. You could call them my guilty pleasures. Tobe Hooper created a movie with his collaborators that was just amazing. Brutal, effective... I can still remember the first time I saw it. It was at a second run theatre, maybe a year after it originally came out. There were 8 people in the theatre and the film was so stunning and weird that I ended up talking to and bonding with all these strangers about how insane it was."

That's something horror movies are good for, isn't it? Bringing people together in a strange place. Making them share the fear...

"That first movie that scares you – and for me it wasn't Chainsaw... it was one of the ones previous to that, Frankenstein or something like that – that first movie that scares you is like your first crush. It's something you never forget. And, you're right, it's also something that you want to to share. I remember one of the best experiences I had watching Phantasm was in a theatre the year that it came out. I was sitting behind this guy and his girlfriend. You know that scene in Phantasm where the kid discovers that flying bug creature crawling in his hair? This guy reached his hand around his girlfriend and he grabbed the back of her hair just as the bug appeared. She freaked! Hilarious to watch. To be the film maker and witness that is great."