Ever wonder what happens to scripts that place in competitions like KILLER SHORTS? Think you could make your own horror short script into a finished film? You’re in the right place. Dive into this interview and get inspired!
Jennifer Dunn is a tech entrepreneur and freelancer in Georgia who decided to start writing for TV. Lisa Jay is a visual artist and storyteller from “all over” who now lives in L.A., intent on directing horror features.
And now they’ve teamed up: Dunn and Jay are collaborating on a fully-funded horror short. They can’t wait—and neither can we.
Both women see producing Dunn’s script GRANDPA, a Killer Shorts 2021 semifinalist, as a vital step in advancing their careers.
Interview with Jennifer Dunn & Lisa Jay
Lisa Jay is an L.A.-based visual artist and storyteller, and a boss horror writer-director. 
Jennifer Dunn is a Georgia-based screenwriter, producer, and tech entrepreneur.
How did you two get to know each other?
Dunn: We met on Twitter. I always really liked Lisa, always thought she had really thoughtful things to say, and she didn’t put up with shit. [laughter] But then we met in Austin, and I just remember thinking, “Lisa’s so nice.” She’s just like she is online—which is not always the case—and she’s also just a peaceful and restful person.
Jay: I feel the same. We met online, and when I read Jenn’s stories I just was so impressed. But meeting her—Jenn is just, it’s that energy of a lot of the people I grew up around, just very authentic and calm, understanding, people who’ve seen a lot of sh*t and are really smart… They just know how to handle things. They’re kind.
Dunn: Let me say something about that too, about being authentic. Because I worked in tech for many years, with Silicon Valley people — and I always worked remotely and had clients, so I never had to go there — I’ve had people tell me, “You know Jenn, if you want to succeed in this work, you need to lose your accent.” And that just –… Tell a country girl to not be herself, she’s just gonna dig in. That’s not gonna work. I’m just not gonna do that, thanks for the “advice.” Also—I did try to be someone else for a long time. And I noticed that the friends I made were people who, I felt like they liked Pretend-Jennifer, who wasn’t being her true self. And it was harder, and took longer, to make real connections, in my years in tech. But then, when I started writing for myself again, my fiction, and just really put myself into it, I made so many close relationships. I just feel like people know me quicker. The people who read my screenplays know me immediately. That’s something I just had to get at by trial and error. I didn’t do it on purpose. [laughter]
Jenn, your script GRANDPA was a Killer Shorts semifinalist in 2021. Tell us what it’s about.
GRANDPA is the story of a non-verbal and quadriplegic girl who can’t ask for help, so must battle alone against the ghost of her Civil War-era ancestor, who’s intent on purifying his bloodline by murdering her.
I remember you saying that you wrote GRANDPA with the idea of producing it yourself. Why did you enter a script into a competition, if you already intend to produce it?
GRANDPA was my first horror script, so it was extremely validating to place as a semifinalist in Killer Shorts. When I first started screenwriting, I didn’t know what to do with my scripts, so I just started entering them into contests. For that reason, I’ve had a lot of experience with different competitions, and Killer Shorts is one of the most supportive. I’m especially grateful that they are so invested in us getting the film actually produced. They have always offered to help me signal boost any needs for the production, or any production news, and to me, that is really just above and beyond the call of duty.
Where are you each from? Has this had any influence on your writing and directing?
Dunn: I’m from a rural town in north Georgia, in the mountains. It definitely influences what I write. The film GRANDPA is based on a family story, on people who lived probably not even five miles from where I live right now, so yeah. A big influence.
Jay: I’m from Missouri and I grew up incredibly poor outside the suburbs of Kansas City, and spent a lot of time trying to hide who I was. Because I went to school with suburban kids, and I wasn’t—I spent the summers at my grandparents’ farm—and my family had a lot of old pictures and old stories. “This is where we came from,” you know. When I went to college, I hid that, kept it to myself, pretending that wasn’t my past—and now all of a sudden people are celebrating that and wanting to hear it. In some ways, it’s fun and exciting and freeing, and in other ways, it just feels really wrong to talk about. I don’t like being put on the spot sometimes. But I do feel a connection to Jenn, I do feel that we have a similar tug and pull of our backgrounds. I really love the story because of that, and I really love the way Jenn writes as well.
Everybody told me I couldn’t write. … I answered a Craigslist ad to do art direction. … I loved being on set. I watched the director and thought “That’s what I wanna do. I can write a film.” I gave myself permission to write. And then I couldn’t stop.
Lisa Jay
What got each of you started as storytellers? Were you influenced by a filmmaker, by a piece of media, your environment…?
Dunn: Mine was definitely family stories. When I was about fourteen, I got really into genealogy. I always looked at genealogy and family history as being a detective, figuring stuff out, that someone else was wrong about something but I was right. That was my way of being Nancy Drew. So hearing old family stories, we’ve had all these crazy things happen within a mile radius of where I live. We’ve had tons of murders, an insane amount of murders. Fires, an axe murderer—just hearing all these stories, this is my oral family history, I gotta pass them on.
Jay: I was an avid reader from the time I was a kid. I got in trouble at school ’cause I was always reading. But I could not write. And everybody told me I couldn’t write. Then when we moved to Santa Fe, I answered a Craigslist ad to do art direction, because I wanted to work on a film. And I loved it so much and loved being on set. I watched the director and thought “That’s what I wanna do.” And I thought, “I can write this stuff. I can write film. I can tell a story. I’m not writing a book here, I’m just telling a story.” So once I looked at it that way, I gave myself permission to write. And then I couldn’t stop. So that was really the thing that got me going, was to enter through art direction.
Was horror always your chosen genre?
Dunn: My primary genre is drama, but family drama, and definitely generational trauma is a big thing I write about. That what happened to your great-great-grandma gets handed down to you, that whole epigenetics thing is really true, it’s like in your DNA. That’s what I’m gonna write, and I draw from my family stories all the time. There’s not a script I write that doesn’t have something in there from my family.
Jay: I always loved horror. I actually started, my first couple scripts were thriller comedies. [laughter] But horror is just who I am. It really does fit my personality better. And it’s such a great vehicle for telling great stories about social change or emotional issues. You can put so much subtext in horror. I find it easy to tell the kind of stories I want to tell through horror. I love it.
Is this the first time you’ve been in production on one of your own projects? How did you get started?
Dunn: No, I’m lucky enough to have had two of my scripts made. I directed neither of those, but I directed one I didn’t write. I really enjoy being in production, and I love producing. So I’m excited to produce this one too.
Jay: I think the first thing I did was the Roswell 48-hour Film Festival. And then, with a school in Albuquerque, I worked with their film department and used their crew, and it was their class project for a semester and I directed one of my shorts with their class. The next short I did on my own video camera, just two little kids, on my laptop, and I got a personal letter from Austin [Film Festival], handwritten, from their director of programming, saying “this was one of my favorite shorts, but we just couldn’t fit you into the program because of time.” After the really difficult experience before that one, making that little film on my own and getting that letter helped me a lot. And then I made several more on my own.
Where do you hope to be in five years? What are your goals for your career?
Dunn: This is very important to me: I want there to be more shows from the poor-person experience. In five years I want to be working on a TV show or have sold one of my TV shows that’s basically about poor, working-class, regular people in the South. It’s definitely not all just white people, it’s diverse. We’re overlooked in the national conversation. A lot of bad things that happen in the South are not ever on the national news, which unfortunately allows people to distrust or discount the news. “This coal-ash pit fire happened in my town and I didn’t see it on the news, so the news is fake.” It’s not serving anybody to leave a huge swath of the country out of our entertainment. So I want to sell a TV show or work on a TV show that talks about that experience.
Jay: I want to write and direct my own work. I think the way to get big in horror, you really do need to be directing your own work. And there’s a real lack of writers who understand being poor in America. And it’s not that I always write about that explicitly, but it’s there in my writing. I would like to help a huge part of the population feel more seen. We need more opinions and more viewpoints, and I want to help do that. So my five-year plan, I want to be the next Ari Aster or Robert Eggers, but I want to be the woman doing it. The next Lisa Jay. [laughter] And I think directing horror, with a quality script, and a quality production, is a huge first step. I love this project because it gets my foot in the door for directing, and that’s so hard to do as a writer. I take it very seriously and I’m very excited about it.
Jenn, I know when you decided to get into the industry, you took a different approach than most people. Can you talk about that?
Dunn: I took six months off from work, like a sabbatical. I always wanted to be a TV writer, so I thought “let me try this.” There happened to be a screenwriting conference nearby like a month after I started my sabbatical. So I went there, I met Gina, she became my good screenwriting friend. And that next month, some friends of mine were having a film festival in their town’s old theater. So I went, tried to be very open, and I met people from the film program that was like an hour and a half away by car, but hey, I’m on sabbatical, I can do it. They told me the thing that was different about their one-year program was they weren’t going to just teach you how to do one thing, like G&E, or camera, but you’d get to make your own movies. There was also a bit of competition element to it: they said only two students would be chosen to get their films made. And I’m a competitive person and just decided mine was gonna be one of them. [laughter] So that’s where I went. I think I went to the Screencraft Summit in April [2019], and I started school in August. And it was supposed to go until April 2020, but then COVID. In the meantime, I wrote my first TV script, I wrote BIRDSONG [which won the Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition], and then I wrote BABY SHOES, which was a short I ended up making during lockdown.
You’re allowed to fail over and over. [Filmmaking] is a very hard thing to learn and it takes some practice, just like anything.
Lisa Jay
What advice would you offer to a writer just starting out, or who wants to shoot their first short but never went to film school, and maybe doesn’t know where to begin?
Jay: I would say don’t spend too much money on your first one and think that it’s gonna be amazing, ’cause it’s not. And don’t get disheartened if things fall apart, because it’s not a judgment on how good you are. It’s a learning experience. And if things don’t work out well for many, many reasons, try again. Keep trying. You’re allowed to fail over and over. It’s a very hard thing to learn and it takes some practice, just like any sport, just like anything.
Dunn: I think classes really motivate me. Unfortunately, a lot of them are really out of reach of most people because they’re just too expensive. But look at continuing education classes, like video production certificate programs, sometimes they’re a lot cheaper than you think. Or online classes. The thing with those is, make sure you vet them really well. And if you’re brand-new to all this, you may not know anybody to check with, but Google the name of the class, jump on Twitter, and search for the name of the class or the instructor. Just to make sure it’s reputable. Classes have helped me tremendously.
There you have it! Straight from Jenn and Lisa to you:
Step one: Decide to create. Step two: Create. Don’t wait for permission!
We hope Jenn and Lisa’s energy and determination inspire all of you to do your best creative work and submit to the Killer Shorts Contest!
Both Jenn and Lisa are active on Twitter.
Gina DeAngelis on Twitter at Gene_D27 or GoshDarnMedia.
Killer Shorts actively promotes diverse voices. If you are female-identifying, a Person of Color, non-binary, or LGBTQ+ please email us at [email protected], or DM us on Twitter, for a discount code to submit your scripts.
