Writing Horror for Film & TV (On Demand)

Mariama Diallo is a Brooklyn-based writer-director. Her debut feature, Master, from Amazon Studios, was released in March 2022 after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. Previous work includes the short films Hair Wolf (Sundance 2018) and White Devil (TIFF 2021), as well as HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness. She has been featured in Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch and Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Avra Fox-Lerner is a writer/director living in Brooklyn NY. The daughter of a screenwriter, Avra became a cinefile at an early age but decided not to pursue film studies in her higher education. Instead she learned filmmaking from the ground up as a lighting technician in Local 52 IATSE. Cutting her teeth on set by learning the ins and outs of technical work while always creating her own work, Avra learned to problem solve on her feet, how to communicate with crew both above and below the line and honed her craft as a genre creator with a female focus. She is an alum of the New York Stage and Film Screenwriting Lab with her original settler horror GOOD LAND and the IRIS Writers Lab with her original female gunslinger script LADY KATE. She co-wrote the serial killer thriller BLOODLINE with Henry Jacobson for Blumhouse Pictures in 2018 which was bought for distribution by eOne Entertainment and released in 2019. She has written and directed four short films - The Lovers (Official selection of Final Girls Berlin; Brooklyn Film Festival; Chattanooga Film Festival; Fantasia Fest), Such A Shitty Time (official selection Walla Walla Movie Crush; Brooklyn Women’s Film Festival; Winner Best Narrative Short NY Pause Film Festival), Research (completed February 2022; winner of Best Female Director NY Pause Film Fest) and most recently Eat Your Heart Out, a silent 16mm horror tone poem (made in partnership with Mono No Aware), which Avra wrote, directed, produced, shot and is edited herself. Avra’s heart lies in horror but she has her eyes on expanding all genres to contain more female created stories.

Award winning filmmaker and novelist Owen Egerton is the screenwriter and writer/director of several films including Blood Fest (Rooster Teeth, Warner Media) and Mercy Black (Blumhouse, Universal). Working in horror, comedy, and occasionally animation, Egerton has written for Fox, Disney, Warner Brothers, HBO and more. He’s written several novels including The Book of Harold the Illegitimate Son of God and Hollow which landed on NPR's Best Books of 2017. Egerton is also one of the comics behind the Alamo Drafthouse’s Master Pancake Theater and host of the Fantastic Debates at the Fantastic Fest.

DuBois Ashong is a graduate of AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE CONSERVATORY (MFA in the study of Directing) whose first feature GEECHEE, starred Andrea Riseborough for AGC Studios and was produced by Jamie Foxx. DuBois recently stepped into the world of television, directing episode 9 of the CW’s horror television show TWO SENTENCE HORROR stories.

DuBois’ short, WHERE THE WATER RUNS was screened at CAA MOEBIUS 2018, and has the distinction of winning awards at the Blackstar Film Festival 2018, Tide Film Festival 2019, PAFF 2018, and the historic first ever Smithsonian African American Center for History and Culture Film Festival. DuBois blends his gritty style with a larger worldview to create stories that speak to the plight of the under-appreciated and unrepresented, with a keen eye for breathing humanity into each frame.

Hailing from a family of horror filmmakers, Jake Yuzna is writer, director, and curator focusing on genre filmmaking. Their films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, London Film Festival, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the British Film Institute, as well as been acquired by Netflix, PBS, and Arté Television. Yuzna’s debut was the first American feature to win the Teddy Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. In addition, they have received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, Frameline Foundation, IFP, as well as a Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award from the American Film Institute and a special jury award in Artistic Risktaking from IFP. Yuzna founded the cinema program at the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC where they curated the first American retrospectives on Italian Zombie Films, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dario Argento, Sion Sono, and the medium of VHS. In addition, Yuzna has curated retrospectives on Andrei Tarkovsky, Crispin Glover, H.R. Giger, and Science Fiction cinema of the 1990s. Their curatorial work on horror and genre filmmaking has been collected by the libraries at Yale University and NYU.

Chloe is a writer/director based in Los Angeles. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Slavic Languages and Literature and completed her masters degree at the American Film Institute Conservatory, where she also received the Franklin J. Shaffner Fellow Award. At AFI, she directed the award-winning horror short film SLUT. In recent years, she’s written a remake of the 1977 thriller “Audrey Rose” for Orion Pictures and wrote and directed a segment of the anthology series V/H/S/94. Chloe’s co-wrote and directed the psychological thriller Watcher starring Maika Monroe and Burn Gorman as her feature debut. Watcher premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in the US Dramatic Competition category.