Monthly Archives: June 2011

About the only law that I think relates to the genre 
is that you should not try to explain, to find neat 
explanations for what happens, and that the object of
the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud 
in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of 
the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully 
expressed in art than in life, which I found very
illuminating; it didn't help writing the screen-play, 
but I think it's an interesting insight into the genre. 

And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft 
where he said that you should never attempt to explain
what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people's
imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of
anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn't, within itself,
have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter
of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary 
ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling. 

Stanley Kubrick, "El Pais Artes" (1980)

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