Working from a Halloween/horror theme, dozens of writers from the Tennessee Screenwriting Association competed for a trophy, a prize package that included Final Draft 13, and the bragging rights for the scariest short script in 2024!
The winner of this year's Short 'N Scary contest is Mike Bentley for his short script "Gray Hare." Mike was given the award by Alvaro Rodriguez ("Machete," "From Dusk Till Dawn 3") at the Script-Com Screenwriters Conference in Nashville, TN.
Upon accepting his trophy, Mike said that winning this contest has given him the confidence to shoot his script and turn “Gray Hare” into a film in 2025! It's worth noting that Mike's script won unanimously. It was the highest ranked in the early round, then swept the finals as every second-round judge’s top pick.
Contest Manager Carrington Fox gave this report:
"Well, that was terrifying! For our inaugural Short 'N Scary script contest, we had a bloodbath of entries with 39 submissions by 26 writers. Far more than we expected, which is exciting for next year.
Horrifying themes ranged from artificial intelligence to zombies to cannibalism. Y’all are a funnier bunch of ghouls than we expected, submitting several hybrid horror-comedies."
We had two rounds of judging. Thank you to Bob Giordano, MK Kopp (who was on her honeymoon in Africa) and Peter Kremer, who was also overseas during much of the judging. A special thanks to Diane and Dennis Burton, who jumped in to help us read the last-minute influx of scripts and to our final round judges, Larry Underwood (aka "Dr. Gangrene"), Bob Saenz, and Alvaro Rodriguez. For the record, all scripts were judged anonymously. None of the judges or anyone from TSA knew who the writers of these scripts were during the judging rounds.
A few interesting stats:
We had a few more submissions by male writers than by females.
The overall technical quality of scripts was high and we hope to use some of these scripts as teaching tools for future TSA workshops.
The inaugural Short 'N Scary contest was a blockbuster hit, and we can’t thank you enough for participating. We hope you’ll come back next year."
The following scripts were deemed by our judges to be "Frightfully Good" and worth mention as runners-up in Short 'N Scary:
'FRIGHTFULLY GOOD' (Honorable Mention):
Night of the Swingin’ Dead – Jason Allen
ZARS: Pizza and the Pomeranian – G. Robert Frazier
Goodnight, Mike – Heidi-Marie Ferren
Lena – Jason Allen
Yearbook of the Dead – Corbin Eaton
The Poe-ster – Judy Klass
The Handyman – Jeremy Michael Johnson
Monster Mansion – Jason Allen
'SCARY GOOD' (Top Finalists):
The Halloween Short Film Festival – Jason Allen
Zarya – Jason Allen
Check out the list of our runners-up, judges, and other spooky tidbits about this year's Short 'N Scary script contest by watching this video:
Congrats again to Mike and the other writers who participated in Short ‘N Scary. For those of you who submitted and didn’t win this time, we go back to our motto: JUST KEEP WRITING!
Stay tuned for details on TSA's next screenplay contest - Short 'N Sweet - which is based around a Valentine's Day theme and has a deadline of February 14, 2025.
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