Greetings, connoisseurs of chaos and caretakers of the creeping unknown. Another year, another glorious avalanche of nightmares. You sent us horrors that crawled, slithered, screamed, and in one disturbing case insisted on singing show tunes. Our judges read every entry at least twice, and most were read a lot more times as arguments escalated in a frenzy of horror-inspired passion.

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But we emerged from the darkness triumphant, if slightly twitchy, and we are proud to present the results of this year’s Short Screenplay and Feature-Length competitions.

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Below are the winners and the runners-up whose scripts clawed their way frighteningly close to the top. Every listed script showed ambition, imagination, and that undefinable pulse that makes horror worth devouring.

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SHORT SCREENPLAY RESULTS

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BEST SCREENPLAY

Our winner was The Interview, by first time screenwriter John Morley. Every now and then a script arrives that makes you close the document, stare at the wall and mutter something unprintable because you wish you had written it. This is one of those scripts. What begins as a mundane HR-style interview slowly reveals itself as something far stranger. The room feels off. The questions twist in on themselves. The interviewer seems to know things he absolutely should not. Morley takes a familiar scenario and turns it inside out, creating a short that is confident, surprising and deeply unsettling. It is an astonishing debut.

 

Several other exceptional screenplays also impressed us. The Bonding, written by Vincente DiSanti, sinks its claws into the terror of losing someone twice. First emotionally, then physically, as the script threads a gruesome werewolf folklore through the unraveling connection between two people racing across New England. The transformation at the center of the story is described with a kind of awful tenderness. It forces the question of how far love can stretch before it finally snaps.

 

Thaw, written by Paul Corricelli, offers stark, frozen dread in a sleepy town that has the misfortune of discovering what happens when the dead begin to warm back up. The horror is brutal, but the heart of the story rests on one deputy who must choose between the badge on his chest and the father he no longer recognizes. It is a sharp, icy slice of survival tragedy that will hit you hard.

 

Scared Becky, crafted by David J. Webb, spins a historical nightmare through fire, rot and mass hysteria. Using a psychiatric session as its frame, the script recounts a family's ergot-poisoned plunge into hallucinations and violence. It feels like a slow rot creeping across the edges of sanity.

 

Secondhand Kook Book, by Jermaine T. Jackson, rounds out the category with brain-twisting sci-fi horror flair. Simulation glitches, duplicate selves and a life that keeps resetting all collide in a narrative that feels like someone is flipping channels inside the protagonist's skull. The final realization hits hard, revealing the tragedy of someone addicted to the very cycle that keeps destroying him. Superb social commentary. 

 

 

BEST TWIST

Take a bow, Sally Lerner. In her hilarious screenplay What’s Wrong With Everyone?, the horror hides in plain sight, tucked behind the obvious like a prankster waiting to yell boo with perfect timing. It is an ending that slaps the reader across the face with its simplicity and precision and you will never look at a feather duster the same way again. Lerner blends humor with dread in a way that feels effortless. The result is a twist that lands with both a grin and a shiver.

 

Dead Cats, by Danny O'Gallagher, seems at first to be a sharp little mystery about an ex-con who cannot escape suspicion when local pets start winding up dead. The script steers us expertly toward him as the obvious culprit, only to yank the floorboards away and reveal the monster next door.

 

House for Sale: The Viewing, written by Ton Schrederhof, has a delightful sense of mischief baked right into its bones. What appears to be a standard haunted house setup slowly peels back to reveal something far more absurd and grounded. The so-called ghost is not supernatural at all, but a pregnant woman in makeup playing along with her real estate agent husband as they run a deposit-heavy scam. It is playful, smart and manages to make the reader feel like the butt of the joke in a very satisfying way. You got us, Ton!

 

Polaroid, by Ian Baaske, works its magic through silence and slow revelation. Each snapshot inches the truth closer until the final photograph arrives with a terrible smile. The girls discover that their grandfather, the man who raised them, had murdered his wives and their grandmother. When the image finishes developing and shows him holding a knife, the twist lands with a sick certainty.

 

Alone on the Beach, by Simon King, begins with sun, sand and the promise of a simple escape. What follows is a steady slide into an uncanny nightmare where time folds in on itself and the protagonist becomes trapped, replaced and cut out of her own life. It is a twist that creeps rather than strikes, and it's delivered to perfection.

 

 

BEST VILLAIN

In the nicest possible way, we hope to only ever meet Maria Prendergast if we have a team of armed security with us. That is the level of caution inspired by the mind that created Billy, our Best Villain winner. The titular frenemy in this killer short has the persistence of a debt collector and the emotional range of a shark. Billy is the person you think you know well enough to trust, right up until the moment you realise you should have changed your locks six months ago. What makes him so chilling is the way he blends into the everyday terrors of social life. Prendergast has given us a villain who feels frighteningly plausible and that realism is exactly what makes him unforgettable.

 

Mianmoto, created by Jerzy P. Suchocki, unleashes a spider demon with a very personal sense of justice. She hunts Yakuza bosses with an elegant brutality, shrugging off bullets and crawling across ceilings like she owns them. There is style in the violence and purpose in the carnage, and that combination makes her unforgettable.

 

Scribbles, by Tom Anthony, brings to life a creature born from a child's innocent drawings. What should be sweet becomes something sharp and predatory. The monster protects its young artist by tearing through adults with tentacled ferocity and a smile full of teeth. It is nightmare fuel with a crayon border.

 

Seven Blades, from Armand Arekian, gives us E. G. Thorne, who kills with the calm, patient air of someone doing a chore that simply needs to be done. Each knife is chosen for a particular sin, and each kill is carried out with a precision that is almost polite! His lack of remorse is chilling. He feels less like a man and more like a verdict, and with that surname you have to wonder if there's a Damien somewhere close on the family tree.

 

The Giggler, written by Darcy Lally, delivers a creature that thrives in the rot left behind by toxic frat-boy culture. It hides, it waits and then it tears its victims apart while laughing with an awful, wide smile. The unnatural blend of silliness and savagery makes it stand out as one of the most uncomfortably effective villains of the bunch.

 

 

MOST MESSED UP DEATH

Once again, this category seemed to inspire a kind of creative madness in our entrants! There were so many inventive deaths that at one point our judging panel looked like they were attending a support group. The standout winner, however, was Limelight, by David Shields. This script gathers a specially convened audience of critics and dispatches them with kills so brutal and theatrical that we briefly considered disqualifying it for crimes against imagination. Each death feels like a warped love letter to the art of being cruel creatively. It is bold, unrestrained and absolutely unforgettable.

 

Close behind was Feeding the Foxes, by Ross Dean Lovell. It does not ease into its horror. It rips into it with a sequence that is both shocking and unforgettable. An elderly woman's mouth tears open as a tar-covered fox creature forces its way out of her body. The moment is described with such vivid, unsettling detail that it sticks to the imagination like something wet and alive.

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​Soap Gene, written by Hannah Weisz, earns its place here by treating bodily mutilation as something disturbingly casual. Characters cutting off their partners' testicles in the middle of conversations or intimate moments creates a kind of horror that is both shocking and eerily nonchalant.

 

OK Mother, by John German, serves up a death that feels like it wandered in from a fever dream. A man tries to "heal" a robber by slicing off pieces of his own flesh and stitching them onto the injured stranger with hydrogen peroxide. What results is a grotesque fusion, a tribute to his own damaged upbringing that is impossible to scrub from your mind.

 

Garage Game, from Edward Martin III, proves that sometimes the simplest tools can create the most spectacular gore. A weed whacker is put to horrifying use, shredding a man's midsection until organs spill in a grisly spray. It is blunt, brutal and impossible to forget.

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BEST DIALOGUE

Our winner is the delightful writing duo Jennifer Vale and June Merritt for their screenplay Dine and Die. Their script is a wickedly funny horror piece about a supper club where the charm is as sharp as the knives. Their dialogue dances. Characters spar with lines that feel improvised even though you know they have been crafted with care. The rhythm is quick, the jokes land, and Vale and Merritt have created a world where every line feels like it was written with a wink.

 

Our runners up showed remarkable voice as well. No More Mr. Nice Guy, by William Jody Ebert, gives us a killer who croons his own soundtrack while cutting people down. His musical, sing-song lyrics clash beautifully with the carnage he creates. The effect is both funny and horrifying, like being serenaded with a knife at your ribs.

 

Paranormal Employment Agency, penned by Bob Canning, oozes noir charm from its very first line. The dialogue snaps and smolders in a voice that could have stepped out of a smoky bar in the 1940s. References to legs like Betty Grable and the intoxicating allure of the femme fatale make this horror-comedy feel like a lost classic with something sinister in the pipes.

 

So You Went and Became a Zombie, by Ben Cessna, adopts a cheerfully clueless tone to explain the Vivomancy that lets airheaded zombies speak like distracted teenagers. The humor sneaks up through the language, especially when they try to order pizza by groaning into the phone. It is a delightful play on the undead’s worst habits.

 

And to My Son, the World, from Miles Douglas Bartle, leans into surreal philosophy through a strange man whose explanations sound like riddles from inside a dream. When he says a computer is "dreaming" the protagonist, the dialogue steps into a place that feels unnervingly profound. 

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FEATURE-LENGTH SCREENPLAY RESULTS

 

BEST SCREENPLAY

Congratulations to Lillian Marquette for The Ash Widow. Marquette delivers a story that feels excavated rather than written. Following a disaster investigator studying spontaneous combustion cases in her hometown, The Ash Widow melds personal grief with creeping folklore. Survivors whisper about a soot-veiled woman watching from corners. The investigation tightens, the daylight thins, and the protagonist’s emotional scars burn hotter than any flame on record. It’s haunting, humane, and quietly devastating.

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Mind Prison, by Rehanna Loncar, crept up on the judges in a way that felt unsettlingly personal. What begins as a blocked screenwriter seeking clarity becomes a slow, intimate dismantling of identity, where writing is no longer expression but obligation. As Ryan sinks deeper into Dr. Wildes’ hypnotic process, creativity turns ritualistic, and authorship itself feels stolen one session at a time. The horror here isn’t loud, but invasive, a psychological possession that unfolds sentence by sentence. By the end, the act of finishing a screenplay feels less like success and more like surrender.

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I Am Relevant, written by Romi Banerjee, is sharp, funny, cruel, and painfully aware of where it’s cutting. It drops a fading supermodel into a cult masquerading as a wellness retreat and lets ego, grief, and hallucinogens do the rest. Ayahuasca visions blur with runway humiliation, and personal suffering is packaged as spiritual growth with terrifying efficiency. The script delights in discomfort, turning bathrooms, bodies, and breakdowns into recurring battlegrounds. It’s a vicious satire that keeps asking how much pain someone is willing to endure just to be seen again.

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Michael J. Panek’s Origins aims impossibly big and somehow pulls it off. This is a sprawling intergalactic war story that treats Earth’s ancient civilizations as collateral damage in a much older conflict. Vampiric alien factions, Atlantean science, and mythological history collide with relentless confidence, piling lore on top of bloodshed until the scale becomes overwhelming in the best way. The screenplay refuses to simplify itself, trusting the reader to keep up as gods, monsters, and empires rise and fall. It feels less like a single story and more like forbidden history being violently remembered.

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BEST TWIST

The winner is The Sundial Room, by Everett Cole. A widower seeks peace in a coastal boarding house. He finds locked rooms, whispered warnings, and a sunroom that seems to breathe around him. Cole’s final twist—that he is trapped in a time loop engineered by his dead wife—is earned, elegant, and heartbreakingly tender.

 

Haunted, written by James Michael Farley, starts out like a cynical jab at paranormal reality television and then gleefully pulls the floor out from under it. What seems like a fake ghost-hunting show slowly mutates into something far more dangerous as the cameras never stop rolling and the rules quietly change. The reveal turns performers into contestants and demons into hosts, with suffering reframed as entertainment. The twist lands because it feels inevitable in hindsight, as if this was always where televised horror culture was headed. By the end, the audience isn’t just watching the show, they’re complicit in it.

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In Dagger’s Draw, by writing duo Mary Haarmeyer and Craig Beeman, the twist hides in plain sight, disguised as childhood nostalgia and family folklore. A seemingly harmless ghost story passed down through generations becomes a perfectly engineered alibi for murder. When Lacy weaponizes that myth, the past is no longer something remembered but something actively manipulated. The reveal is quiet, cruel, and deeply human, showing how easily tradition can be sharpened into a blade. It’s the kind of turn that makes every earlier scene feel suddenly poisoned.

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Joe Kunz’s Inflictor earns its place here by building an entire life as a lie and then pulling the string all at once. What looks like a loving relationship is revealed to be an intricately planned act of vengeance, calibrated for maximum emotional devastation. The twist reframes affection as preparation and intimacy as strategy. Every shared moment becomes suspect, every kindness a calculated step toward punishment. It’s a revelation that doesn’t just shock, it retroactively corrupts the entire story.

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In Rose, written by Kevin Kirtlan, the twist arrives not as a jump scare but as a slow, horrifying realization. A predatory filmmaker who has spent years controlling narrative and image is finally forced to face the camera himself. The screenplay weaponizes real-time confession, stripping away power through exposure rather than violence. What unfolds is a reckoning staged as performance, where truth becomes unavoidable and denial has nowhere left to hide. It’s chilling precisely because it feels plausible, and because the camera never blinks.

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BEST VILLAIN

Our winner is Harvestman’s Creed, by Wesley Hill. Wow. Just wow. The Bone Harrower stands in the cornfield, patient, silent, draped in prayer cloth and crowned in bones. A folkloric villain who bargains in blessings and body parts, it exudes quiet, ancient dread that seeps into the soil itself.

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Broken Hearts, by Luke Ollerton, gives us Lily, a villain who seduces with vulnerability and kills with intimacy. She doesn’t just want devotion, she wants ownership, carving her way through victims who fall in love before they understand the cost. Emotional manipulation and literal heart extraction become inseparable, turning romance into a hunting ground. There is a lot happening in this script, but Lily remains its dark center, charming, monstrous, and impossible to look away from. She feels like the kind of predator who would thank you for trusting her before destroying you.

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In Hudson DeVoe’s Open Box, the villain isn’t loud or theatrical, which is exactly why it’s terrifying. PAL is a corporate AI that treats human beings as expendable resources, reducing lives to metrics and productivity failures. When efficiency demands correction, PAL dispatches BuDDY, a robotic enforcer that turns corporate policy into physical punishment. The horror comes from how clean and rational it all feels, like a performance review that ends in bloodshed. This is villainy stripped of malice and replaced with optimization, and that makes it feel dangerously close to reality.

Rough Cut introduces Arnold, a digital specter who turns creativity into a death sentence. He forces his victims to edit their own murders, shaping violence into consumable content for an unseen audience hungry for spectacle. Every cut, every effect, every adjustment becomes part of their execution. Arnold isn’t just killing people, he’s grooming them into collaborators, trapping them inside the very process that once empowered them. It’s a villain born from algorithmic attention and creative obsession, and he thrives on both.

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In The Kept, written by Will Nunziata, Mrs. Chen is quietly one of the most unsettling villains we encountered. Soft-spoken, polite, and endlessly attentive, she presents herself as a caretaker while feeding residents to a living building that demands sacrifice. Her grandmotherly demeanor never cracks, even as her efficiency becomes horrifyingly clear. She doesn’t threaten or rage, she simply nurtures the system she serves. The terror lies in how normal she feels, like someone who has been doing this for a very long time and plans to keep doing it forever.

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MOST MESSED UP DEATH

Our winner was Rend, by Margo Leeds. Where do we start? A malfunctioning skinning rack. A desperate rescue. A death so believably paced and horrifically grounded that several judges looked away from the page. Leeds delivers brutality without spectacle, which paradoxically makes it land even harder.

 

So Spineless, written by Erin Copen Howard, earns its place by taking frat-boy invincibility and melting it into pure punishment. A tainted formula collides with alcohol in his bloodstream and turns his body into a slow disaster that refuses to let him pass out or escape. The real cruelty is the consciousness, the fact that he’s aware as he dissolves. It’s chemistry as horror, intimate and unstoppable. The kind of death that makes you wish the victim could faint, and then reminds you that’s not on the menu.

 

Potluck, written by Patricia Hickman, delivers its nightmare with a casserole dish and a smile that never wavers. A troublesome congregant is ground into lasagna and served to the entire church, turning fellowship into complicity one bite at a time. The horror isn’t just what’s being eaten, it’s how easily the room accepts it, how quickly ritual becomes appetite. It plays like a sick joke told in a sanctuary voice. Warm, communal, and absolutely rotten at the center.

 

Let Me In, by J.D. Ferro, corners a man in a boiler room where the setting does the killing as efficiently as any slasher. Steam and steel turn the space into a pressure-cooker of pain, and the carnage feels industrial, inevitable, and mean. There’s no romance to it, no flourish, just heat and metal doing what they do when someone’s trapped too close. The scene hits because it’s so physical you can feel it in your teeth. A reminder that the scariest rooms are the ones built for work, not murder.

 

Scissor Mouth, written by Deborah Richards, takes the language of beauty and speaks it like a threat. Titanium precision turns grooming into violation, and every slice feels deliberate, controlled, and terrifyingly practiced. It’s not chaos, it’s craft, and that’s what makes it stick. The screenplay understands that beauty can be a trap people volunteer for, right up until the moment it becomes torture. Clean cuts, ugly outcomes, and a lingering dread that looking “better” is just another way to bleed.

 

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BEST DIALOGUE

Our winner is Cold Season, by Tom Cross and Kerry Hart. Estranged sisters return to a childhood lodge and immediately fall into the kind of conversational combat only siblings understand. Their humor, resentment, and affection form a lifeline as the horror tightens around them. The dialogue sings even when the characters scream.

 

Crazy Cat Lady, written by Anthony Bevilacqua and Stephen Bevilacqua, walks a razor line between wordplay and outright feral collapse. The script fires off pun-laced insults with gleeful cruelty before letting the story unravel into something far more unhinged. What starts as sharp, almost playful antagonism gradually curdles into chaos, with humor acting as a pressure valve rather than relief. The result is funny until it isn’t, and then it’s unsettling precisely because the laughter came so easily at first.

In Only Blood Will Save Us, written by Tim Meyer, the dialogue alone could damn a soul. The sheriff is handed a seemingly endless supply of cynical, doomsday-soaked one-liners that drip with exhaustion and moral rot. Every line feels like it’s been dragged through the dirt of experience, sharpening the story’s apocalyptic edge. The voice is confident, mean, and unapologetically bleak, turning gallows humor into a worldview instead of a punchline.

Archfiend, by Alex Ayres, finds its horror not in grand gestures but in the rhythms of family life. Casual conversation, domestic routines, and shared meals become quietly oppressive as something deeply wrong seeps through the cracks. The screenplay understands that true unease comes when violence feels normalized, folded into everyday speech and behavior. It’s the kind of horror that whispers instead of screams, and trusts the audience to feel the weight of what’s being said and what isn’t.

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Middle School, written by Steven Keith Bogart, captures adolescence as a liminal state where fear, imagination, and loneliness bleed together. The script leans into the eerie uncertainty of that age, where superstition feels plausible and cruelty feels enormous. Small moments carry outsized emotional weight, and the supernatural elements grow naturally out of that fragile perspective. It’s unsettling not because it reaches too far, but because it remembers exactly how strange and dangerous growing up can feel.

 

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BEST OPENING SCENE

The winning entry was Black Fog Gospel, by Anya Redmond. A preacher enters a storm-lashed church where every congregant wears a black veil. The humming begins low, rising with the fog that spills from the altar. A masterclass in atmosphere.

Adjacent to Mazenod, written by Jeremy Beam, opens in raw, handheld panic as a terrified family flees through falling snow, a moment so immediate it feels stolen rather than staged. The script leans hard into the modern horror of smartphones, influencer culture, and true crime obsession, where suffering becomes content and ethics erode with every upload. What begins as curiosity curdles into complicity as the characters chase relevance instead of rescue. It’s bleak, sharply observed, and unsettling in the way only very current horror can be.

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In Outer, written by Joe Boi, the story plunges from the vast calm of space straight into an abandoned ghost town without ever taking a breath. The script commits fully to its conceit, unfolding like a single, relentless descent as cosmic horror bleeds into military secrecy and human frailty. The sense of momentum is suffocating, every scene tightening the grip rather than releasing it. It feels less like watching a story unfold and more like being dragged through it.

Montauk Monster, by Steven Carter, thrives on contrast, slamming frat-house excess up against primal terror in the woods beyond campus lights. Loud music, spilled drinks, and careless youth evaporate the moment the chase begins, replaced by breathless fear and ancient menace. The screenplay balances grief, folklore, and physical danger with a steady hand, letting the horror grow out of emotional wounds rather than spectacle alone. It’s a monster story that understands loss is often the sharpest set of teeth.

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In Spoon-Fed Addiction, written by Silvano Williams, heartbreak becomes ritual and memory becomes something dangerous. Moonlight, handwritten confessions, and grief-soaked obsession drive a story where love lingers long after it should have died. The horror unfolds slowly and deliberately, rooted in longing rather than shock. It’s intimate, mournful, and deeply unsettling, proving that sorrow, when fed often enough, will eventually bite back.

 

 

HONORABLE MENTIONS

 

Every year, the volume and quality of submissions to Frights! Camera! Action! remind us why the horror genre remains one of the most fiercely imaginative spaces in storytelling. Our 2025 contest was especially competitive, with writers tailoring their nightmares to our signature categories—Best Villain, Best Twist, Most Messed Up Death, Best Opening Scene, and more. Choosing winners and finalists meant passing over many screenplays that were chilling, clever, bold, or beautifully crafted. Below is a selection of fifty scripts that stood out to our judging team for their originality, atmosphere, scares, emotional punch, or sheer audacity. Though not finalists, each earned an Honorable Mention for contributing something memorable, thrilling, or deeply unsettling to this year’s competition.

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Code Pink by Eric Perchuk – A new parent’s joy turns to terror when hospital staff inexplicably keep their newborn from them, revealing a sinister conspiracy; To All of My Friends by Zarki B. Mills – A failed screenwriter lures old friends onto a cruise where manipulation and delusion escalate toward a final, deadly tableau; Mr. Oxenfree by Jody Matzer – An escaped mental patient must decide whether to trust a bloody young girl or flee as a fanatical cult and demonic possession close in; Room Service by Henry S. Brown Jr. – A weary couple at a secluded motel confront the horrifying fears waiting beyond the next door; Leapers by SherLann D. Moore – A lakeside Christmas party erupts into chaos when supernatural creatures attack, forcing guests into gory battle; Blue Bliss by Spencer Hunt – A narcissist becomes obsessed with a delicious new snack that carries disturbing side effects; Wake Up by Nicola Muscolo – A man drifting into sleep behind the wheel must rely on dreamlike visions of his family to steer him to safety; Zandaya by Curtis Harrison – A girl moving into a cursed home binds herself to a trapped young woman as a centuries-old voodoo curse threatens to claim her; The Woods by Daryl Denner – A night of partying turns deadly when A.I. technology seizes control of a group’s devices; Wallpaper by Nick Bankhead – A lonely, unseen man spirals into violent obsession with a young bartender as buried trauma resurfaces; The Viral Killer by Sonny Kruger – A murderer filming his crimes turns his rage toward a father and family after an online insult; Cheerbleeders by Jason Stant – A victorious cheer squad must outwit the Jersey Devil during a deadly night in the Pine Barrens; The Devout by Dred Baird, Ash MacReady and Mark Hardcastle – A devout mother endures brutal spiritual torment when her husband is possessed by a seductive demon; Love, Santa by Sarah Noe – A disgruntled ex-employee crashes a workplace Christmas party disguised as Santa to exact revenge; An American Werewolf in Compton by Chris Pope – A young man returning from abroad struggles to control a werewolf transformation that endangers his community; To Travel with the Sun by Alex Garnett – A desperate father hunts an ancient creature in Oaxaca to save his dying child; The Woman in the Attic by Brett McKay – A kidnapped woman trapped in a mansion must survive both a cannibal family and supernatural beings experimenting on humans; Head (less) by Jenny Popovich – Siblings using deepfake tech accidentally summon the real spirit of a headless motorcyclist who begins hunting them; Think Apocalypse! by Erin Copen Howard – Five screenwriters’ “dream meeting” becomes a nightmare when Hollywood literally kills bad ideas; The Pack by Bill Albert – Predatory creatures drift into towns to feed, leaving survivors with only one rule: don’t be found; The Devil’s Lantern by Juan A. Mas – A trip to Argentina forces a young woman to confront a terrifying family legacy of witches, werewolves, and demonic desire; La Bruja by Andre Aguirre – A runaway, two criminals, and a witch collide as a devastating supernatural force approaches; Two Lost Lambs in the Black Woods by Nick Kloppenberg – A young couple’s new apartment hides a malicious presence that toys with them before claiming what it wants; The Last Costume by Djamel Bennecib – A woman who dons a vintage dress marked “Don’t wear after midnight” learns the warning was deadly serious; Bloodbath by Alice Pucci and Michelle Grace Maiellaro – A man awakens trapped in a bathroom beside a claw-foot tub filled with blood; Code Blue by Joe Boi – A PTSD-stricken nurse must fight through nine demon-infested floors of a hospital to save her soul; The Divining by Robert Riley – A satanic cult’s sacrifice unravels when one participant is possessed by an unexpected angelic entity; No Means No by Stanley Eisenhammer – A teen confronts undead parents and her own agency after a romantic night turns horrific; Mall Santa Massacre by Scott Gregory – Six struggling employees attempting a Christmas Eve heist face a murderous mall Santa; Meat Locker by Chad Jackson – A wounded ex-con, a ganglord, and a Texas Ranger must unite during a chase through rural Texas to survive cannibalistic farmers; A Single Dead by Solvan Knell – A deceased father returns each year to celebrate his children’s birthday, pretending he’s still alive as they accept his unnerving gifts; Wolf Lake by Tim Pitoniak – A disgraced detective’s missing-persons case leads him to an impossible amusement park that shouldn’t exist; They Wait by David J. Aberle – An Indigenous grandfather’s pact with ancient spirits backfires and unleashes a greater horror on his family; Anxiety by Meredith Stack Strangfeld – After her sister dies, a woman’s crippling anxiety manifests dark family secrets and new terrors; Sitter by Margina Sisson – A woman with multiple personalities murders a babysitter and infiltrates a family hiding monstrous secrets of their own; Mount Mora by Eric Sollars – A family attorney clashes with a ruthless corporate lawyer over the sale of cemetery grounds haunted by a vengeful spirit; Somnus by Steven Raney – A grieving man using an experimental dream-regulating bed finds the system becoming conscious and studying him; Artichoke by Amir Moini – A woman fleeing an abusive partner discovers a device that opens a dangerous portal into another world; Night by Mike McDonald – A woman trapped in a looping nightmare is terrorized by the hostile inhabitants of her own home; Perfect Family by Rocky Polan – A girl obsessed with embalming turns her bedroom into a secret mortuary as her dark “preservations” escalate; The Still by Toby Donica – A sheriff and waitress uncover a preacher’s relic that freezes townspeople into eerie, silent stillness; A Bump in the Night by Kevin Wilde – A couple shelter an injured girl during a snowstorm, unaware the true threat is the force following her. Mega Blood Moon: Pugilist Ex Mortem by Ben Floss – A spree of ghost-related murders prompts two men to embark on a bizarre quest sparked by their destroyed TV; The Tales of 6 by Mar Rodriguez – Six interconnected horror stories unfold around a grocery store on Halloween night; The Alraune Family by Javier Yañez Sanz – A runaway orphan seeks out her reclusive father, unaware he has just kidnapped another girl; Sincerely Departed by Rebecca Leigh – A long-dead hotel ghost struggles to tell the owner he’s finally ready to move on; Forever by Brian McGrath – Two high school loners must save humanity from a zombie attack with help arriving from an unexpected source; Beast Mode by Tom Anthony – A timid boy gains courage when a Halloween energy drink transforms kids into their costumes, forcing him to rescue a mermaid he likes; The Hedge by Lacey Desper – A couple discovers a hoarded house hidden behind a massive hedge as neighbors guard disturbing secrets about the missing; Escape Clara by Erik Waldman – A movie date turns deadly when the slasher on the screen escapes into the real world; Mud Wooky by L. E. Coleman – A military family fleeing a mutated-virus apocalypse faces an even darker creature stalking their sons; Parasomnia by Andrew Dean Pearson – A sleep-deprived comic book artist suspects his insomnia and waking nightmares are being orchestrated by something far more sinister.​

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If your name appeared above, congratulations. If it didn’t, we say this sincerely: do not stop writing. Many entries hovered on the brink of selection. Every year we watch writers break through after refining, rewriting, and returning with sharper claws. Horror thrives on persistence, and so do horror writers.

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We are thrilled to announce that the next contest is now open, boasting an increased prize pot and the same promise as always: every script will be read at least twice, often more when the judges begin their spirited debates.

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Thank you to our writers for the nightmares. Thank you to our judges for surviving them.

 

Stay spooky,

David York & The Contest Judges