Really it comes from being a weirdo and being like maybe a bit in tune with emotional reactions to things. There’s something that’s scary about being broke in college and having nowhere else to turn and that leads you to make terrible decisions that lead to bad things happening, and that’s kind of where The House of the Devil came from. And so those weird feelings that I was dealing with—living that and feeling like I was trapped and had nowhere to go—I was like, “Well, the story of me doing that is uninteresting, but using that and turning it into this satanic thing and having this kind of ’80s pastiche to it will, I think, make people see that movie.” So I can kind of deal with all these emotions in the package of something that more people are interested in. I’m generally making movies for my own personal reasons; all my movies are generally about something personal to me, and then I find some kind of high-concept thing to wrap them up in.
