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
With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.
When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.
Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They're no longer the scary creature in the dark.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
We tell ourselves zombie stories to remind us we shouldn't live beyond the natural boundaries of life - or seek a third stage of life in this world.
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.
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
My uncle Randall always had a book in his hand. He read in the car, he read at restaurants, he read when you were talking to him. He read lots of different things, but mostly it was Louis L'Amour's westerns and contemporary thrillers.
There's no purer feeling in the world than being scared.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.
The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.
People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.