This and Kubrick's The Shining are probably the peak of American cinema's attempts at true horror.

All the other stuff, from Freddy to Michael to Jason, is lightweight fluff in comparison.

I highly doubt we'll ever get horror films of this calibre again. There's no way the Hollywood of today could handle the implications of a film like this...

I love this dialogue because it's a great example of letting the imagination of the viewer provide the horror ... like in Jaws, where much of the terror is provided by the fact that we don't see the shark until the very end, this little bit of dialogue lets us imagine in our heads an evil that can't be duplicated in actual dailogue or on-screen action.