[T]he horror genre is very kind if you are wild and want to be outrageous. It forgives a lot of faults and it encourages madness of a certain kind. I’m not too worried about staying within it because it encourages exactly those things that I value most about art. Picasso’s Guernica is a horror work of art. If he’d only done those things, and been classified as a horror artist, would that mean that Guernica was any less a masterpiece and a political statement? That’s the double-edged sword. The very things that nurture you in the horror genre are also the things that can suppress an understanding of what you’re trying to do.
– David Cronenberg in Cronenberg on Cronenberg, Chris Rodley, ed.
“It encourages madness of a certain kind”: David Cronenberg on the horror genre