Oliver Stone apparently has a different definition of horror than anyone else you know.
The "JFK" director equated horror filmmakers to CIA torturers during a CinemaCon panel on Wednesday in Las Vegas, explaining that he could no longer watch or make any movies in the genre.
Stone's early directorial career began with horror films “Seizure” and “The Hand,” the latter of which Guillermo Del Toro fervently praised during the panel. But neither of them was financially successful.
“I realized at that point that I wasn’t a horror director,” Stone told a crowd of theater owners and film industry professionals. “You have to be like a CIA torturer — stick the needle right between the eyes and keep it there.”
For Stone, true horror is the “displacement of things that don’t make sense.”
One example? “Life of Pi.”
“The tiger out on the ocean is real displacement,” Stone said. “That was a horror film.”
Another? "G.I. Joe." Stone said CIA torturers should force subjects to watch it 300 times.
He was joking, we think.
But overall Stone didn't begrudge the horror genre, he was sitting between original "Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi and Del Toro, whose early films included horror flicks “Cronos” and “The Devil’s Backbone."
Stone explained his own career trajectory, and why he opted for tension over horror. He has stirred controversy with almost every one of his films since that early horror work, with conspiracy theories in "JFK" and violence in "Natural Born Killers."
Yet when it comes to modern horror, Stone said his son has made it quite clear that pops can’t handle movies like “Saw.”
