He and J.J. Abrams first met screening their early shorts at an 8mm film fest in Los Angeles.
It's the idea that anticipation is as scary as anything in a movie could be. People's imagination is the most effective tool in creating terror or dread.
Really interesting genre films, especially monster movies, evoke the fears of the times intentionally. Our starting point was Godzilla - the original movie was released less than 10 years after Hiroshima, and it's a classic in Japan. It came out at the same time as Seven Samurai and is held in equal regard. Yet it was definitely a metaphor for the anxiety of those times, about the fears after Hiroshima and the knowledge that we now had the ability to destroy the world. To give that the form of a giant monster - that was an effective way of exploring that fear.
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