Once you accept the fact that there's nothing to fear, you drill into the primal oil well. I believe when we do things without fear, we can do anything. As long as you don't worry about the consequences.
— Anthony Hopkins
Courageous Primal Fear quotations
There's something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.
I think that's still the most primal fear of all humans: to be eaten.
Possession and exorcism is something that’s in every religion and every culture. It’s a real primal fear: Is the body a vessel for our spirits? What happens if something else takes over it? Where does the spirit go?
Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.
Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal.
Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
I guarantee if you walk into 100 spider webs, you will have changed your fundamental human behavior. And you can apply this to anything, And figure out a way to reprogram yourself, to change your primal fear.
Animals do have emotion. But fear tends to be one of the most primal emotions.
Since fear is such a primal reaction, making the choice to move forward despite fear is an evolved decision that transcends our animal nature.
When you connect to a primal idea - life, death, hunger, hope, fear - any of those primal ideas are going to translate, and I think that's the thing that I've always been attracted to in my work.
I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.
There's something very terrifying about that and very primal about it.
It's my belief that what horror does for people is that it provides that primal fear that, when we were wild hunter-gatherers, we had as part of our natural lives because maybe something was trying to hunt and gather you as well. We don't have that anymore in life and that's one of the things that horror films and action films provide for us.
For me, it's a multitude of things. In the modern world, there's a real genuine fear of loss of individuality and I think the undead speak to that. I also think the idea of the dead coming back to life, and this unstoppable foe that just keeps coming and coming, but rather slowly just chases you, is a real primal fear. It's like a fear of claustrophobia, heights or water.
What I like about the Carpenter take on The Thing is the fact that it just has so much suspense. It seemed like a different story, with the horror elements. Those films that really speak to the primal fear that we, as human beings, have about the unknown have always intrigued me. That's the really scary thing, not the slasher, macabre movies.
One of my inspirations, Harry Houdini, remains an icon of the art because he defied our primal fears. His demonstrations in the early 20th century, especially his escape from the Chinese water torture cell, represented triumph over suffocation, drowning, disorientation and helplessness.
The idea that boxing lends itself to cinema so well is because it's usually a morality play - good against evil, insecurity and triumph, fear strikes out, so the audience can really get drawn into the drama of it. Also, it was sensual and very primal. I think subliminaly we do two things - life is a fight, life is a struggle and we understand that from our early, early, early ancestors, and life is a race.