Screenwriting : Search for New Blood contest closed - who submitted? by Pat Alexander

Hey all. I submitted a horror script I was really proud of called Statuemaker. I’ve worked on it for a few years now and I think it’s good. Then again, don’t we all think our scripts are good? I truly believe these contests have the capacity to make our scripts objectively better.

Hi everybody!

I submitted a script called "The Campground." It is an homage to slasher films of the 80s that also deals with themes and emotions more prevalent in modern horror. I've already submitted previous drafts to competitions and gotten some great results.

I'm trying to get as much feedback on it as i can to make it as strong as possible and, hopefully, this next batch of contests will help me see what I've gotten right and what I can improve.

Fun fact, it started as a tabletop game that I created for my wife's birthday during COVID and I thought: "this will make a great script."

Good luck to everyone who submitted

Good luck everyone! I do not envy the judges who have to read the scripts, the nightmares!

Hey all! I submitted A Summoning, a script that had started as a possible self-shot indie and grew into something that I wanted to put out a bit more broadly. An earlier draft of it had a few good placements on contests last year, so this comes with a bit more polish. At its heart is a queer coming of age story of grief and finding purpose... that also happens to feature a demonic coven looking to bridge Hell and Earth. Good luck to everyone who entered!

Hey hey! I submitted “Cling,” my horror feature about attachment theory and sea monsters. The festival response has been really positive so far, and I’m excited to see how far this script can go.

By way of an artist’s statement, I’ll say that it’s an attempt to problematize the indie-style male coming-of-age subgenre, while flipping some classic Lovecraftian motifs on their head. Imagine driving into a Zach Braff project but finding yourself firmly in Cronenberg country. It’s earnest, funny, empathetically sad, and relentlessly intent on crawling under your skin.

Thanks so much to Stage32 and all the fellow contestants! The inspiration and motivation you all give me have been priceless on my competition journey.

Hey everyone! I submitted two features. STONEBLEEDER is a story about the horror of heartbreak and homophobia experienced by two coal miners, with a man made out of smoke haunting the protagonist. It was inspired by being on both sides of a breakup, as well as growing up gay in a very socially conservative town.

VELVET FANGS is a horror-tinged psychological thriller that explores the potential perils of the Hollywood Dream. It stars a desperate actress struggling to maintain her sanity as she tries to break into the industry while serving as her Hollywood idol’s assistant (who is working on a vampire film). I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been told they’re “crazy” for pursuing a film career, and wanted to explore that in a script.

Hey everybody! I submitted "Sinistaar!" -- Desperate for one last chance at the fame and notoriety they never achieved, a down-and-out rock band tries to reinvent itself through appropriating Satanic imagery, and accidentally summons an ambitious lesser demon hell-bent on taking over the band...and the world.

It's a raucous and ridiculous love letter to heavy metal during the “Satanic Panic” of the 80's, inspired by the melodramatic, over-the-top music of Ozzy Osborne, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Ronnie James Dio. Drawing from my own experience playing in hard-working rock bands and as a hair metal super fan, Sinistaar! satirizes a very distinct period in rock history, but also serves as a cautionary tale on selling out for success and fame at any cost – it's not only the deals we make with the devil, but also the misery that comes when our self-worth is solely defined by adoration and validation from others.

Hello all! I submitted a found footage horror feature titled Depth Unknown. It's about a pair of adventurous YouTubers out on a boat in the Bermuda Trangle trying to survive a vicious sea monster. It only has two characters(plus the sea monster) and is only one location!

Hello everyone! I submitted my pilot NATURAL BORN SINNER about a vampire slayer turned vampire against her will over 2,000 years ago teams up with LAPD's best detective and most vengeful vampire slayer. They must set aside their differences to solve cases before the body count rises.

Can't wait to hear from our judges on this contest!

Hi, all! I submitted two scripts this year since I've been on a horror writing spree the last year. My script INDIGENT is a medical horror/body horror story that I've been working on for the last couple of years, and I'm super excited to submit it to a horror competition for the first time. My second script, THE GOOD NEIGHBORS, is a limited location "ghost" story that combines Irish and Native American folk lore. It's my newest script, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it does. Good luck everyone! :D

Hello to all the Horror Writers! I submitted my paranormal slasher ROCK-A-BILLY.

Hi fellow Stage32ers, I'm happy to report that my writing partner, Sarah Selnes, and I submitted, both a feature horror called "Thy Hallow Tide" (the first of a trilogy), as well as a pilot for a dark crime serial called "Deadly Canvas."

Thy Hallow Tide follows a young girl named Nora Delmenzo through her youth as she grapples with a family of religious serial killers bound to a strict order of zealot "saints" who gruesomely cleanse their community each year on Halloween at their famous haunted house.

Deadly Canvas is the story of a tortured artist and anti-hero, Eliza Hellina, in the midst of incredible grief and personal trauma who directs her artistic talents to human skin, creating beautiful tattooed artworks made from the skins of criminals, stretched over frames and sold on the black market. Playing off of comps like True Detective and Dexter. Our voracious female lead eventually enters a game of cat and mouse once special detective, Vieta Quadira, is brought to town to bring to justice, "The Deadly Canvas Killer," but there's more to this story than meets the eye.

Wishing you all a ton of benefit from your submissions.

Happy writing!

Hello everybody! My writing partner and I submitted our script Santa Claws that sees a mall Santa turn into a werewolf on Christmas Eve. That old story

Hey everyone! My writing partner, Greta Guthrie, and I submitted our feature BABY TEETH!

Forced to return to her hometown to recover from an injury, a loner must make amends with her estranged childhood best friend to unlock the truth about a derelict house from their past -- and the baby tooth she lost inside of it.

I actually grew up down the street from a scary old house that was falling apart. By the time I wanted to have my "kids sneak into the creepy house" movie moment, they'd already bulldozed the house! So here I am, 20 years later, still thinking about the secrets inside.

Shore Scripts Best Genre Winner, Filmmatic Horror Finalist, BlueCat Semi-Finalist, and we have a proof of concept short film on the festival circuit also doing well!

Best of luck to everyone who submitted!

THE AMENDS is THE SHINING meets FUNNY GAMES, with two sisters and grifter in a 3-person, cabin-in-the-woods horror that ends in a psychedelic, near-spiritual mind f'...

THEMES: Underneath it all, it's really about siblings grappling with the beast of regret over unresolved issues after a parent dies, and the f'ed up ways one uses to escape that raging unresolvable grief.

LOGLINE:

Rebecca, 6-mos sober, needs to make amends to her younger sister for creating havoc at their dying father's bedside, but when her sister shows up to their woodsy vacation with a sociopathic grifter, a battle of the wills over how and when the amends will take place commences... meanwhile, their problems are only just beginning as the trio ignite long dormant spirits in the woods demanding atonement of their own.

Some 2023 Accolades for THE AMENDS:

-Top 1% searchable genre screenplays on Coverfly

-On the Red List

-Launchpad Mentorship Selection

-Big Break Quarterfinalist

-2nd Rounder at AFF

I submitted THE EYE OF OWUO. It's won before in a Stage 32 contest. Like to see where my new version places.

Logline: A desperate mother uses ancient African magic to resurrect her daughter, and then realizes that the price for keeping her daughter alive entails taking the lives of others.

Let me just you all have some great scripts. Good luck to you all. The competition is really great.

Hi everyone! I submitted my feature THE FOREST OF YEARNING, a horror where the big bad isn't the horrible wooden monster hunting down this group of friends on their camping trip, but instead the main character, who's unstoppable yearn for love and attention made him bring his friends to such a place, knowing the thing lurking within will help him take control of any situation.

I appreciate you taking the time to read!

Hey guys, I submitted my feature script "THE LEGEND OF YAKATUTCH", a creature-feature I've been developing for several years, set in the Canadian Yukon. The logline: When his girlfriend is abducted by a legendary creature in the Yukon wilderness, an aimless young snowboarder must embrace his First Nations heritage in order to save her, before it finds his mountain town.

I've spent the last few years gathering feedback from the professionals on Stage 32, while pitching and entering contests. The screenplay has placed as a Finalist or Semi-Finalist in several competitions, including the ISA Emerging Screenwriters Suspense Screenplay Competition (2023 & 2021), the ISA Horror & Thriller + Genre Busting Screenplay Competition 2021, Best Scene Screenplay Reading - Toronto Festival for Horror (2017), the Horror Film & Screenplay Festival in Toronto 2016, and others. I'm eager to see how the newest draft fares in the Search for New Blood Competition. Good luck to everyone who entered!

www.seanfrancisellis.com/news/2023/11/3/pitch-deck-for-the-legend-of-yak...

Hey, my friends! I submitted a terrifying title, "PLEASE READ MY SCREENPLAY". ;). I'm kidding; it's called "HEAD CASE". Logline: A therapist decides the only way to eliminate her patients' problems... is to eliminate the people causing them. Everyone has really creative ideas here- well-done and good luck, folks!

As the father of three boys, I’m hyper-aware of the influences in their lives. Some good. Some not so good. All of them informing who they are and who they will become.

For my story, THE DARK STARES BACK, I wanted to up the ante by making the protagonist a single mother, Amanda, raising a fragile son, Zach, and by introducing a monstrous presence that threatens to destroy their small family altogether.

Already wracked with guilt and self-doubt, Amanda must find a way to protect Zach from those who seek to harm him, navigate those who seek to help him, and rescue him from a malevolence that seeks to corrupt him before the child she knows and loves is gone forever.

Ultimately, this is a study in the existential dread of every parent. As guides, guardians, providers, supports, and comforts to the innocent lives that we love more than our own, failing in any of those roles is a nightmare unto itself.

In addition to THE DARK STARES BACK, I have written several other feature-length screenplays and one short, most of them horror.

I have always loved horror. Beyond the ability to push the boundaries of creativity, I find that there’s a purity and honesty in well-crafted horror that isn’t always present in other genres. Whether it’s a terrifying image or a tragic idea, horror crawls into your subconscious and emerges whether you want it to or not - when you’re alone on a train, when you’re in the basement doing laundry, when the forest suddenly becomes silent - and sends a shiver down your spine.

I hope my script does that for you.

Happy reading,

Paul

Hey guys. I submitted a female driven feature script "SCISSOR MOUTH".

The log line is: Scarred from the twisted abuse by her beauty obsessed mother, a teenage girl in rural Texas must escape her basement prison to show the world how cruel vanity can be.

I wrote it over five days while isolated in the desert with no phone, internet, tv or car.

I also shot a deleted a 'deleted scene' from the script to help visualize the vibe. You can watch it at www.scissormouth.com - Let me know what you guys think :)

GLTA!

Wow! Creepy deleted scene, @Deborah Richards! Great job!

Wow, that scene is great, totally freaking me out!! And good production quality.

Thanks guys! I wrote, directed, DP'd, edited, VFX'd, colored, production designed, and camera op'd it in my apartment living room lol

You're welcome, @Deborah Richards. You did all of that in your apartment living room? That's impressive! Looking forward to seeing SCISSOR MOUTH and all the projects in the comments!

Pretty girl.

Maurice Vaughan :)

I like the set-up, @Deborah Richards! Are the boards used for green screen?

Maurice Vaughan they are there to give me a bunch of dimensional tracking points for the CGI modeling, and have the added benefit of bouncing some fill light in.

Oh ok, @Deborah Richards. Does that include the mannequins?

Maurice Vaughan Yes, i made the mannequins in blender then painted them in substance painter :)

Maurice Vaughan the plants were real though, although I did use digitals plants as a gobo for the light.

Hi. I am Miguel del Campo. I submitted a feature screenplay titled "La Parca". This is a drama/horror/thriller/romance feature screenplay that draws inspiration from films of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema as well as from Robert Eggers' films (The Witch, The Lighthouse).

The tone is Cronos (Dir. Guillermo del Toro) meets The Lighthouse and I like to think that this is a love letter to my culture as well as a twist on the monster horror subgenre. Not only this, it also touches themes such as depression, death, love, loneliness and transcendence. Themes that I believe everyone can relate to, but from my point of view as a Mexican filmmaker.

Logline:

When a struggling documentarian fails to finish his film about the process of death in Mexican culture, he returns to Los Angeles to gain more funding only to discover he’s been cursed to become the new Grim Reaper.

Synopsis:

Michael is a struggling American documentarian making a film about the death process in Mexico. Once he is back in LA, and after witnessing how a hooded figure takes a man to a remote lake in the middle of the woods, mysterious things happen around him that make him question about his own mortality while he tries to save his dying project and attend the wedding between his brother and the love of his life.

I've been selected in a few festivals and competitions including:

Awards and Nominations

Best Screenplay - Thriller Feature Film at HorrOrigins Film Fest 2023

Nominated - Best Script Feature at Love and Hope International Film Festival 2023

Honorable Mention

Feature Screenplay Competition at Big Apple Film Festival 2023

The Finish Line Script Competition 2023

Selections

Feature Script at Scriptmatix Genre Screenplay Contest 2023

Finalist

Feature Screenplay at Page Turner Awards 2023

Scriptmatix Fellowship 2023

Semi-Finalist

Unproduced Feature Film Screenplay at Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival 2023

Feature Screenplay at FilmQuest 2023

Outstanding Screenplays Feature Competition 2023

Portland Screenplay Awards 2023

Miami Screenplay Awards 2023

Quarterfinalist

Creative Screenwriting Feature Competition 2023

ScreenCraft Drama Competition 2023

Inroads Fellowship Season 6

ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship 2023

ScreenCraft Feature Competition 2023

Vail Film Festival Screenplay Competition 2023

Hi, everyone! A little late here, but wanted to share. I submitted my feature POPPET, a contemporary horror written for any theatre kid who never got a callback.

When reluctant stage manager Sarah makes a prop poppet for her high school’s production of “The Crucible,” she accidentally unleashes a centuries-old horror upon the cast, prompting a modern-day witch hunt. Think THE CRAFT meets the Gen Z humor of BODIES BODIES BODIES.

Good luck!