You had a screening of “Don’t Breathe” last night in front of an audience that was comprised mostly of hardcore horror and fantasy film fans. Is that an easier crowd to play for, in that they are more primed to respond to a genre film of this sort compared to an ordinary audience, or is it more of a challenge because they have seen so many movies of that type before and therefore may be harder to scare?

FA: Well, I have already seen this film with that type of audience already. When I know that I have tested it with that type of audience before, I know that audience is going to like it and enjoy it. If I could look at the audience and pause during the craziest moment, I will get one person cringing and terrified and another just choking on their popcorn because they are laughing their ass off. That is a very particular thing because I am not in control of the emotions, at least not as much as I want to be. I am not in control of the scenes and the moments that they create—I lay them out and I know that people take them in different ways. Most of the people in this audience will laugh because they are so excited. I think horror fans can look at these films as comedy—maybe not this one but “Evil Dead” is one where they are going to laugh at the over-the-topness of the entire thing. With yesterday’s screening, I felt great. I felt it was a good audience and I was confident to a certain level. You never quite know how it will go but I thought they would enjoy what the movie was going to bring to them.

After the success of “Evil Dead,” I presume that you were offered practically every horror remake and ultra-gory project out there. “Don’t Breathe,” on the other hand, has very little blood in it and, despite the marketing, is more of a thriller than a flat-out horror film. Was doing a film along those lines a conscious decision on your part in the wake of having done “Evil Dead”?

FA: This movie is a reaction to “Evil Dead” in a way. As much as I enjoyed making that film—and I am proud of it, to be my first film and coming from Uruguay, which doesn’t have a tradition of film, I was proud of the film that I was able to make—there were things that I didn’t want to repeat. I didn’t want more blood—I had enough blood for a lifetime on “Evil Dead.” With that, I was trying to push the blood and the gore as much as I could. But with this one, I wanted to see if I could be provocative and shocking without being gory. That was the question that I didn’t know until I made this film—could I find other ways to shock the audience and get their jaws to drop without shedding blood? I think on some level, we succeed with this film when we get deeper into the story. It was a reaction to that, a reaction to “Evil Dead” being all about shock and horror—I wanted to try to do something more suspenseful. It was my way to try to go back to what my original idea of what a horror movie was, when my father started showing Hitchcock movies to me. He would never talk about scares, he would talk about the suspense and that they were scary because they were suspenseful. That was a feeling I was trying to put into this story—to create a story in the service of suspense.

Can the two of you talk, from both screenwriting and performing perspectives, about developing the character of The Blind Man? One of the most interesting things about the film is that for a good chunk of the story, despite the things that he does, he is actually the most sympathetic of all the characters.

STEPHEN LANG: There is another word that I would use, maybe not to replace “sympathetic” but to add it to the mix, and that would be “pitiable.” I can be sympathetic towards you and then you can do something to me that would cause me to remove my sympathy. If you are pitiful, you are pitiful and it doesn’t matter how evil you are. He is pitiable in the same way that Job is pitiable. He has just had the woes of the world heaped upon him. I think that the character goes way beyond that as well but he earns the pity of the audience at a very early stage of the film. I think he earns sympathy as well and even a sort of grudging admiration because he displays strength in the face of certain adversity. He has overcome his own disability and made himself all that he can be. He has defined his environment in a way in which he can be effective and move with efficiency and economy so that he can exist. These are admirable things, it seems to me.