Television and Cinema Verities #42

"I put a lot of effort into making Cujo scary.  That started when I was preparing Alligator.  I had Jaws in mind when I was doing that.  Before I started that I film, I wanted to have a few scenes that would make people jump, so I thought about the films I'd seen in my lifetime that scared me.  And I focused on a few that had particularly frightening scenes that made me jump.  The scene in Jaws I selected is where Richard Dreyfuss is swimming underwater at night, discovers a hole in the bottom of a boat, and a head falls into view.  Another scene I focused on was in Wait Until Dark...I studied those scenes to find out what they had in common, to extract a set of principles I could utilize to make a scary scene, and I applied them..."

- Director Lewis Teague talks horror movie craft, in my book, Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), page 310.