We Need to Talk About Horror

Eva Aridjis is a Mexican-American filmmaker. She has directed five feature-length films and has screened her work at dozens of festivals including Sundance, Edinburgh and Los Angeles. Eva’s first narrative film The Favor, which explores the strained relationship between a teenage boy (Ryan Donowho) and the man who adopts him (Frank Wood), screened at art house cinemas in the U.S. and aired on the Sundance Channel. Eva’s second narrative feature The Blue Eyes tells the story of an American couple who travel to Chiapas, Mexico and encounter a shape-shifting witch. The film screened in theaters in Mexico and features an original score by JG Thirlwell. Children of the Street is a documentary which shows the plight of four street kids living on the streets of Mexico City. It was nominated for two Arieles (Mexican Academy Awards) and won the Best Documentary prize at the Morelia Film Festival. Eva’s award-winning documentary La Santa Muerte examines a religious cult of people who worship death as a saint and is narrated by Gael García Bernal. Chuy, The Wolf Man is a portrait of a Mexican family with hypertrichosis and highlights the discrimination they suffer due to the hair on their face. The film screened in cinemas in Mexico and received glowing reviews. Eva taught Screenwriting at NYU’s Grad Film Program (where she received her MFA) and wrote on El Candidato (Amazon/Televisa) and Narcos: Mexico Season 2 (Gaumont/Netflix). She is currently developing two episodic series including a sci-fi one, as well as directing two documentaries and co-writing a book which will be published by Harper Collins in 2021.

Jennifer Reeder constructs personal fiction films about relationships, trauma and coping. Her award-winning narratives are innovative and borrow from a range of forms including after school specials, amateur music videos and magical realism. These films have shown consistently around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, The Berlin Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The London Film Festival, SXSW, The Venice Biennale and The Whitney Biennial. Her awards include several that have qualified her films for Oscar nomination. She won a Creative Capital Grant in Moving Image in 2015, short film funding from Rooftop/Adrienne Shelly Foundation in 2016 and short film funding from the Hamburg Film Fund in 2016.

Writer, producer and director, Lou Simon was born in Havana, Cuba, and at age nine her family immigrated to Miami, Florida to escape the communist regime. Lou started writing short stories at the age of 10. In 2010. While helping a friend work on a screenplay, Lou discovered her true gift — Screenwriting. Not wanting to wait to be “discovered,” Lou went on to write, direct and produce her first feature film. Never having been on a film set before, this was, in essence, her film school. Since then, Lou has written, produced and directed four feature films in four years: HazMat, Agoraphobia, All Girls Weekend, 3: An Eye for An Eye. All her films have obtained distribution throughout the world, and Lou, herself, has won Best Director. During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, Lou made a feature film titled 73 Minutes, observing all social distancing requirements. The film is currently in post-production and will start the festival circuit in 2021.

Terrie Samundra is a Director and Screenwriter whose debut feature, the Netflix Original Film Kaali Khuhi is set for a 2020 release. Samundra is the Writer-Director of the short films Ice Cream Wallah, Kunjo, and A Short Tale of Xuan, which have screened in film festivals internationally, garnering accolades. She is a Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab alumna, a SFFILM/Kenneth Rainin Screenwriting fellow and alumna of the Sundance Women in Film Finance Lab. She has written extensively with her creative partner David Walter Lech on the original screenplays Kaali Khuhi, Woman on the Hill, Betamax, Western Interior Seaway, and the episodic series The Ballad of Pooja and The Blood Below. Samundra is a National Geographic Grant recipient, a Princess Grace Award recipient, and an active member of the Writer’s Guild of America. She’s a comic book and genre geek, and represented by the Gersh Agency.

Recognized as one of Hollywood’s top new writers, Tricia Lee has been named on the CAPE List (BlackList), Young & Hungry List, Athena List and BitchList. Mother-Daughter, her feature script being produced by Janet Yang (The Joy Luck Club) is a semi finalist in The Academy NichollFellowship, grand prize winner Francis Ford Coppola’s ZoetropeScreenplay Competition, top 14 finalist Universal Studios Writers Program, winner Cinequest Best Feature Screenplay, winner WeScreenplay Diverse Voices Features, and selected for the prestigious ProducersGuild of America Power of Diversity Master Workshop. Currently, she is attached to direct a feature produced by Viola Davis’ company JuVee Productions and will be directing a William Hung (American Idol) biopic which she also wrote and is being produced by Don Handfield (The Founder), Tony and TimBui (won Sundance Grand Jury Prize & Audience Choice Award). Lee has directed 3 award-winning features including Blood Hunters, which sold to Hulu and was presented in Cannes by Frontieres and Silent Retreat, which was theatrically released across Canada and sold to NBC Universal’s Chiller Network.