Sarmad Khan

Screenwriter/Director and horror film connoisseur who swears by the holy trinity of terror— The Exorcist, The Shining, and Alien.

Born in Dubai to working class parents, Sarmad’s introduction to cinema began at the age 6, with a bootleg copy of E.T. the Extra-terrestrial. E.T., along with other ‘80s gems, including Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, laid the foundation for Sarmad's passion for cinema, and more importantly, for storytelling.

Fast forward to 2007. Sarmad gave up a decade-long career as a web designer to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a filmmaker and moved to Los Angeles to attend film school. Barely out of his freshman year, Sarmad scored his first paid writing assignment when an independent producer chanced upon Sarmad’s short script, Blood Dawn—a grindhouse, vampire story pitched as No Country for Old Men meets John Carpenter’s Vampires.

Impressed with Sarmad’s writing style—more action, less dialog, combined with ‘70s style pacing—the producer hired Sarmad to write his first feature-length screenplay—"a neo-noir gangster flick” titled A Hard Man, with actor Jason Statham attached to play the lead. A Hard Man followed an aging gangster, who, surviving an attempt on his life, returns from the brink of death to settle the score. Inspired by morally ambiguous crime capers from the ‘70s like Point Blank, Get Carter, Charley Varrick, and the Parker series books by Richard Stark, A Hard Man was pitched as Layer Cake meets Payback.

Soon after Sarmad began working on film and television sets as a production assistant, starting with low-budget productions, and quickly moving onto bigger films, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, Henry’s Crime, and My Name is Khan. During this period, Sarmad also co-wrote, produced, and served as assistant director on a short film titled Paper and Colored Pencils, which was screened at various film festivals across the US.

2010 saw Sarmad re-teaming with Paper and Colored Pencils writer/director, Karin Binanto, to script the Sundance Screenwriters Lab quarterfinalist, Dragonfly—a quirky drama about an emotionally disturbed artist and the apathetic party clown she hires to videotape her suicide.

Later in 2010, Sarmad relocated to his maternal hometown in Karnataka, a move which led to the inspiration behind Mission Hospital—a horror/mystery in the vein of The Others, The Devil’s Backbone, and The Woman in Black; a throwback to ‘70s horror classics. Mission Hospital proved to be Sarmad’s ticket to Mumbai when, in 2011, the screenplay was featured on ScriptShadow, the screenwriting blog run by Hollywood’s most notorious screenplay analyst, Carson Reeves, and subsequently caught a Hindi film producer’s attention.

In 2013, Sarmad wrote Ghost Story—a slow-burn horror-thriller about a middle-class couple being tormented by a malevolent spirit soon after moving into a seemingly ordinary, suburban Mumbai apartment. Ghost Story made the quarterfinals in Screencraft's 2015 Horror Screenplay Contest, ranked by Indiewire as “Hollywood's #1 Horror Screenplay Contest.”

A 2014 writing assignment produced Ittefaq—a taut, suspenseful, Hitchcockian thriller about the sole survivor of a multiple murder who must prove his innocence by recounting the previous night's bizarre, and at times unbelievable, series of events.

From 2015 to 2018, Sarmad worked as a screenwriter cum development consultant for Dār Motion Pictures, the producers of The Lunchbox, Ugly, D-Day, and Bucket List, writing screenplays and developing concepts, including an Untitled Action/Thriller for Nawazuddin Siddiqi, a female superhero adventure titled Super, and a biopic based on Arunima Sinha.

In 2017, Sarmad adapted Abigail Haas’ YA novel, Dangerous Girls, into a teen drama/murder mystery mini-series about a teenager’s dream vacation with her friends turning into her worst nightmare when she’s accused of her best friend’s murder.

In 2018, under assignment for Starman Films (Paris), Sarmad wrote Under the Ice—a survival thriller about a marine biologist and her estranged ex-husband trapped under the Arctic ice, their oxygen supply running out, and being forced to work together to survive.

That same year Sarmad developed Love Sutra—a drama/comedy web-series about a couple of Bengaluru-based millennials setting-up an online sex toys store. It’s a story of grit, hustle, and what it takes to make your mark in India's startup capital. Oh, and, of course, it's about sex!

In 2019, Sarmad worked on a Netflix original series, working titled Bollywood Agent, for Still & Still Media Collective and Dharmatic. Bollywood Agent followed the lives of talent agents and their movie star clients, and was co-developed by Jyoti Kapoor (Badhai Ho, Good Newwz).

Sarmad spent 2020 directing his first feature film based on his Screencraft quarterfinalist screenplay, Ghost Story, for Zee Studios. The film, retitled The Wife, is in post-production.

Sarmad is currently developing Rakshas: Bride in Blood—a horror/romance web-series chronicling a young woman’s transformation from mild-mannered ingénue to blood-sucking rakshas following a surreal sexual encounter days before her wedding.