Christopher Nolan wants to make a horror movie

In news that’s making our staff scream “yes!” and probably every other horror director scream “no!!”, Oscar-nominated director Christopher Nolan just said he wants to get into the ghost game. Yes!!!

During a recent conversation with London’s British Film Institute (via Variety), the director shared that “at some point, [he’d] love to make a horror film.” “Oppenheimer has elements of horror in it definitely, as I think is appropriate to the subject matter,” he explained. “I think horror films are very interesting because they depend on very cinematic devices, it really is about a visceral response to things.”

“It’s also one of the few genres where the studios make a lot of these films, and they are films that have a lot of bleakness, a lot of abstraction,” he added. “They have a lot of the qualities that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting in films, but that’s a genre where it’s allowable.”

Oppenheimer seamlessly blends in some of those classic tropes in the center of the film to denote the real-life life horror of what its protagonist has done and what that act is doing to his psyche. In a chilling scene that occurs just after the bomb is dropped (off camera) on Japan, Oppenheimer addresses a raucous crowd of physicists and their families as his guilt appends falling ash and melting bodies on top of the whole picture.

With such a good handle on the beats of a genre he’s never officially dabbled in, horror director Christopher Nolan is certainly an intimidating (and awesome) prospect. But aspiring spooky filmmakers don’t have to hang up their Halloween release dreams just yet. “I think a really good horror film requires a really exceptional idea. And those are few and far between,” the director continued. “So I haven’t found a story that lends itself to that.” Also, to really do his full thing, Nolan would have to find a way to create real-life zombies or poltergeists or whatever his particular idea focused on. So it might take a little while.