Scream Writing

One topic that doesn’t come up often in discussions on writing horror is the importance of the victims themselves. There is plenty of writing on characters, but most of the victims in horror aren’t...

If after the first kill in Jaws, the mayor agreed that there was clearly a shark problem and acted fast to get rid of it, then would there still be a movie? Maybe a...

If you take any Writing 101 course then you will be familiar with the importance of character arcs to fiction. Prose fiction has always been regarded as having quite a bit of leeway when...

Welcome back, Scream Scholars. As a part of our continuing education in horror, it only makes sense to reach out to academics who have spent far more time than us considering the genre. It...

Do you remember how you discovered your favorite TV show? I do. https://youtu.be/w7mefwmxkwQ Friday nights growing up were special. I would go with Dad into town to get groceries, which in and of itself was not...

Sometimes we can discover fantastic resources for writing while just kicking back and relaxing. That's what happened to me when I can up with the idea for this article. I've been going through some...

This Scream Writing Questions post should have been up two years ago but somehow it managed to slip through the cracks of email, a damned shame considering that David J. Stieve wrote one of...

One of the best features of Scriptophobic is how it has allowed me to talk to such wonderfully intelligent creative minds, such as Graham Skipper or the Video Palace duders. However, I have not...

When we begin writing a story, we’re in love with an idea. The idea may be bold, maybe it’s weird, could be it’s a love letter to our favorite thing. Whatever it is, the...

This week I got a chance to sit down with my good friend Spencer MacKay and speak with him about his newest short film, Subject #44 (2019). Subject #44 was made as an entry...

Most writing advice would suggest you follow a certain formula, as if the best stories are something you create in the lab. And look, there’s plenty of good movies that follow familiar formulas. Most...

Fanfiction gets a bad wrap. And I get it. It’s full of weird sex, poor spelling, and a fervent love for a fictional universe that most of us probably only have a passing interest...

A bullet might be the fastest way to develop character (or end it). Similarly, dropping a bomb on a city is the most surefire way to change the landscape of a fictional world. But...

In his book On Writing, Stephen King discusses his method for discovering the story as he writes it and why he is not a fan of outlining his books. King suggests that he can...

You can learn a lot writing a book. Learn something about yourself, your understanding of genre, and maybe hopefully how to be a better writer on the next book. I like to think I...

I’m almost done writing Scream Writing: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing the Horror Screenplay and that means I’m beginning to gear up research on my second book, Mindfulness at the Movies: A Cinephile’s Guide...

I grew up on the tale end of the arcade boom, only encountering them in my travels a few times as a youth (aboard a cruise ship or in an out of the way...

I spoke before about how writing fiction can be a lonely task – how sometimes it is necessarily lonely in order to protect the idea you are shaping into a story. But that’s not...

Writing is a private ordeal. We sit at the computer and will a world into existence with words. It’s a Herculean task. The loneliness which comes with writing isn’t often fun. But some of...

Pat Higgins reached out to me on Twitter while we were looking for new people to talk to. Can't say how glad I am that he did, this week's Scream Writing Questions is a great...

Gathering around the campfire and telling ghost stories is such a powerful image of how we share our mythologies that John Carpenter used it to open The Fog (1980). Often we forget that there...

“We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the internet!” – The Social Network (2010)   Something I like thinking about is how many classic film plots might’ve...

This week’s Scream Writing is going to be a little bit different. If you follow me on Twitter, then you know that I’m a big fan not just of horror movies and screenwriting but...

When it comes to horror, it's surprising just how well it meshes with comedy. Perhaps no one knows that better than Chance Shirley, writer/director on For a Few Zombies More (2015) and Hide and Creep (2004). What...

This week Scriptophobic is joined by Andrew Bellware to answer some Scream Writing Questions, explore the art of screenwriting, and dig into the love of sci-fi and genre. What first got you interested in screenwriting? I first...