Stephen Graham
Stephen Graham
Stephen Grahamis an English film and television actor who is best known for his roles as Tommy in the film Snatch, Andrew "Combo" Gascoigne in This Is Englandas well as its television sequels, This Is England '86, This Is England '88and This Is England '90, Danny Ferguson in Occupation, Billy Bremner in The Damned United, notorious bank robber Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies, Scrum in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and a crooked police detective in the acclaimed...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth3 August 1973
Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
In the 40 years since 'The Amityville Horror', dramatizations of those supposedly-real events have gotten loose enough - special-effects laden enough, star-power re-packaged enough - that the audience no longer trusts the dramatization's loyalty to the core story.
I feel very at home in L.A., I think, because it's dry, and there's sun, like the West Texas I grew up in.
You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.
The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.
There are always certain things that you tap into, your own personal experiences, and I try to base my characters on someone I know or someone I've seen.
We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They're no longer the scary creature in the dark.
You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don't you? That's supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it?
When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways.
With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.
You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake.
Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real.