Halloween is the time of year when watching scary movies is a must. From Scream and The Exorcist to Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Friday the 13th, 'tis the season to turn off the lights and turn ...

There were nearly 500 new U.S. produced scripted shows that premiered in 2025, reported by The Wrap with around 10% considered horror or supernatural thriller. That leaves a lot of options to consider ...

When the Avengers assembled to face Thanos in the final battle of Avengers: Endgame, theaters erupted. Few scenes are as crowd-pleasing as the moment reinforcements arrive to save the day at the last ...

In "What to Expect in a General Meeting," I laid out what a general is: a professional introduction between a writer and ...

If you open almost any produced screenplay from 1975's Jaws to 2026's Project Hail Mary, you'll notice that despite the decades separating them, the formatting looks remarkably similar. There's a ...

One of the most common questions about screenwriting format for beginners is how to format a phone conversation. It seems simple enough at first glance, but once you start writing scenes involving ...

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey ihas hit the silver screen and inevitably will become one of the biggest and best movies of 2026. Whether the adaptation of one of two major epics attributed to Homer ...

There's an old narrative principle, first developed by Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov, later referred to as Chekhov’s Gun. The principle came from a Chekhov quote that stated, ...

A transition is a formatting element that signals a change from one scene to the next. In screenplay format, transitions appear flush right on the page, between scenes. They were a standard feature of ...

To put it as simply as possible, a scene is a single beat in your story, while a sequence is a series of beats that perform together to create a more impactful narrative shift that serves broader ...

Can using voice over help or hurt your screenplay? Is it lazy storytelling, or a great device used by some of the best filmmakers in cinematic history? The answer is yes and no. It all depends on how ...

Are the protagonist and the main character in your story the same person? More often than not, they are. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions to this. In fact, some of the most beloved films ...