Alfonso Cuarón Wants To Make a Horror Movie

Academy Award-winning director Alfonso Cuarón has stated he really wants to make a horror movie, but has found writing one difficult.

The Mexican filmmaker was speaking at the Locarno Film Festival’s masterclass series and answered all manner of questions about his career to date, but when it came to his future projects, he was also quite willing to discuss that.

“My aspiration is to one day do a horror film,” said Cuarón at Locarno’s outdoor Spazio Cinema.

“I love Rosemary’s Baby, and the other Polanski films, and films like The Babadook. They’re so grounded in reality and in character, so I love those,” he continued. “As a spectator, I have a wider taste, but anything I feel I could do would need to be more grounded.”

Cuarón hasn’t just been dreaming of making a horror movie, however. He’s just found it difficult to get one off the ground, saying, ”I’ve been trying to write something like that, but somehow, it doesn’t fully work.”

Alfonso Cuarón’s history gives hope for a horror movie

But Cuarón has overcome the odds before. During the talk, he discussed the toil that led to his 2013 comeback hit Gravity. He recalled being told his vision for the film was impossible with the technology at the time, and the likes of David Fincher and James Cameron tried to dissuade him from attempting it back then.

But Cuarón found ways to create a spectacular space-bound disaster movie using visual trickery, animation work, and more.

“Fincher told us to forget about it, there’s no tech, wait 6 years. And he wasn’t wrong,” Cuarón said. “James Cameron told us how we could do it but that was a 400 million dollar film. We told him only you can do that. And he said yeah you’re right. So we developed our own way.”

While Cuarón hasn’t made a horror movie yet, there have been darker elements to his work that suggest he’d be adept in the genre. The dystopian Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban provide promising glimpses.

Cuarón has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won Best Director for the 2018 drama Roma. His current project is the Apple TV+ series Disclaimer starring Cate Blanchett.

Neil Bolt

Neil became a horror fan from just a nightmare-inducing glimpse of the Ghoulies VHS cover and a book on how to draw ghosts. It escalated from there and now that's almost all he writes and talks about.