Meet the Stephen King-endorsed maestro who's ready to shake up horror movies
Hours before hopping a red-eye from Los Angeles to London to promote the biggest film of his career, one of horror's fastest-rising filmmakers is too busy waxing ecstatic over his love of scary movies to worry about making it to the airport on time.
Why horror? Let "The Boogeyman" director Rob Savage count the ways. "There are taboo things that we all think and feel that we don't want to talk about, that in a horror movie you can dramatize without looking straight in the eyes," he says, sipping an old-fashioned at the aptly named Blue Room, one of his favorite Burbank bars.
In conversation, he ticks off his favorite auteurs — De Palma, Argento, Bava, Hitchcock — with encyclopedic knowledge, recounting how his cinematic obsessions led him to experiment with tricks and techniques, and resulted in at least one black eye. (It came from a falling camera, while re-creating the stair shot from "Psycho.") But Savage's love affair with the genre is an emotional one too.
"The best horror movies make me feel really seen," he smiles. In his youth, he aspired to be the next or . Now
