Write On: Horror Writing with Seth Sherwood

“Comedy and scares are so similar. I've found that in a lot of my
scripts, it's almost like you're taking the peaks and valleys of
humor, and the peaks and valleys of scares, and flipping them on
each other. So, you have the scare that you come down from for a
moment of brevity and humor, or just character work, and then you
do another scare. You’ve relaxed them and then scare them again.
The effect is that you're making the audience have a good time,”
says Seth Sherwood, author of The Scary Movie Writer’s Guide.


In this episode, we speak with Seth Sherwood, writer of horror
movies like Leatherface and Hell Fest. He was also nominated
for an Emmy for writing the TV show Light as a Feather. I chat
with him about the long process of making Hell Fest with producer
Gale Ann Hurd, the difference between internal and external
horror, and his definition of grounded horror that’s so popular
these days. He also gives his advice on what he thinks is the
single best thing an emerging horror writer can do to help their
career. 


“Right now, the industry is in a retraction, there’s an implosion
and streaming is dying. When people ask me now how to break
in, I say I don’t know, but I think you’ll never go wrong in
actually trying to make stuff like short films. I know it’s a
whole other path and it’s a difficult thing to do but people will
always watch stuff before they read stuff if they’re not writers.
And those people are the gatekeepers. I always wanted to make my
own films, but my writing career took off and I'm actually in a
spot where I'm going backwards, where I have done so many writing
assignments in the last few years but things aren't getting made
– s­o, I’m going to go make a microbudget horror film on my own
with my friends. The thing that I wanted to do when I was 20
years old. Because at least it's a thing that can be seen. And
that has more weight than a script right now,” he says. 


To hear more about horror writing from Seth’s perspective, listen
to the podcast.