From Page to Picture: DATE FROM HELL

Read & Watch this award winning horror comedy about a date gone right in all the wrong ways & find out what it took to get it made.

A note from the screenwriter…

(Well, one of them anyway. )

After the success of Dog Years , I was contacted by an Austin filmmaker who was working with a new writer/director to get his first short film made. They knew the script needed a bit of work and reached out to me to do a rewrite and collaborate with them on the project. The film just happened to be being shot in my little tiny town outside of Austin and it seemed like a no brainer to jump on board.

CONTENT WARNING: the movie and the screenplay deal with mature themes and are not intended for younger audiences.

Date From Hell (watch it here) was the brain child of budding director Ven Scott and, since then, we have made six short films together and are currently in pre-production on our first feature film, a fun and twisty horror called BLOOD HOLLOW.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… make your damned movie! Make that first short film because you never know where it will take you!

The script for Date From Hell (you can read it here) is only 11 pages long which translated to 11:22 mins of screen. I am a big believer in the under 15 minute short film if a festival run is your goal. A very short short film is easy to squeeze in with longer screenings and, in theory, makes getting into fests a little more likely.

*Note to newer writers: This screenplay was written specifically for the producers and director. There is a big difference in how this type of work shows up on the page when compared to a spec script. Please keep that in mind as you are reading.)

As a writer, this one was a little different for me. Not only was this my first time rewriting/co-writing with someone , I was still fairly new to the horror genre. Thankfully, it was an awesome experience the collaboration felt like magic at times. My biggest focus in the rewrite was on character development and… toning down the “fart jokes” just a bit. In the end, I think we created something that does a good job of honoring the Comedy-Horror sub genre while still having something to say. Personally, I never want to write something that doesn’t have some sort of deeper theme below the surface, though that’s not always easy when playing in this particular sandbox. (I’d love to know what you think those themes might be for this one!)

So what ever became of this little bit of bloody fun?

Distribution for short films is very rare but DFH hit all the right spots and got “picked up” by horror streamer, ALTER, and is still on their platform today. We screened at some big events to packed rooms and we also got to fly to Los Angeles to pitch a feature version to a room full of studio execs. Too bad it was about five minutes before Hollywood shut down in the spring of 2020. Ah well. Who knows, maybe there’s still a full length Date From Hell somewhere in our future.

Writing and producing Date From Hell was a big education for us. We learned a lot about working as a team, about what it takes to film a horror movie on location at night, and a whole lot more. And really, that was kind of the point.

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