I love splashing the blood around.

At the end of the day, you're trying to make a certain film within a certain budget. Those rules never change.

I think as long as the standard of quality, the story-telling, film-making, acting etc. etc. remains consistent, then you've got a good change of making a decent anthology.

I alwyas want to try and create new looks and new things, but equally scary, hopefully. But a new kind of style.

It's the one thing, a compromise I guess. On network it's the one thing you can't smoke on network. That's one of his character traits. We're working around that. We're trying to get aspects of it in there as much as possible. We'll see.

Whatever the regulations are, you can be as dark and disturbing as you want and we're going to go in that direction. The intention is to be as dark and scary as possible with the show. And that was our whole kind of plan going in, to make it scary. So we're going to explore all kinds of things.

But the smoking is very frustrating. Who knows where it will go; where the story will go; where the character will go? There's still lots of options.

There's a real kind of snobbery in the U.K. about horror films.

Roman history was kind of unavoidable where I was growing up. It was everywhere - all the place names and ruins and forts. My dad's a history buff, and I spent a lot of time on Hadrian's Wall. I became fascinated by the idea of what was so terrifying up there that the Romans built a 60-mile long, 30ft high stone wall to keep it out?

With the exception of 'Descent,' that was a very conscious thing to make an action or horror movie that was an all-female cast because I hadn't seen anything like that before.