Horror 101
Wednesday, May 27, 2026 | 5-6:30 PM PT | Online

From slashers to hauntings, horror stories are evergreen–and they’re not all blood and gore. The genre offers opportunity for social commentary and understanding through a universal experience: Fear. This deep dive into the genre from Writing Pad instructor Cheryl Meyer will explore the form and its subgenres, as well as concepts around audience expectations, producibility, and the technical writing challenges of how to instill dread, foreboding, and tension on the page in a way that translates to the screen.

Cheryl Meyer

Cheryl Meyer is an award-winning screenwriter who loves to make her characters run for their lives through dark and messy situations. She earned a 2025 Canadian Screen Award for Best Writing and was named one of Playback Magazine’s Ten to Watch in 2024. Her horror film Carved reached number one on Hulu after winning Best Horror Comedy at the Nightmares Film Festival. Cheryl’s psychological thriller script Invalid was selected for the Wscripted Cannes Screenplay List. Her dystopian thriller All the Lost Ones was featured on The New York Times' "What to Watch", and her debut feature film, The Last Mark, was an official TIFF Industry Select. She currently has three horror feature films in development.

Cheryl recently received the STARZ #TakeTheLead Award and the Loreen Arbus Foundation Fellowship. Cheryl is an alum of the Series Mania Writers Campus, the TIFF Series Accelerator Lab, the Athena Film Festival Lab, and the WBD Diversity Showrunner Bootcamp. Cheryl also teaches horror screenwriting at Writing Pad, and has appeared as a guest speaker at TIFF Canada's Top Ten, ScreamFest LA, The Screenwriting Life Podcast, Vancouver Horror Show, The Canadian Film Festival, The Horrored Girls Podcast and The Ontario Screen Creators Conference.

Marilyn Friedman

Marilyn is a freelance journalist and the Co-Founder of Writing Pad, an award-winning creative writing school whose instructors are writers from the top TV shows and publications and has existed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and online since 2005. Her essays, stories, and op-ed’s have been published in the New York Times, Salon.com, Narratively, The Frisky, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is currently working on a pilot and a memoir about her experiences as a swing dancer. She has taught writing for fifteen years, including classes at Pixar, Walt Disney Studios, The Writing Salon, and the Southern California Writers Conference. Her poetry has been published in Pearl, Squaw Valley Review, California Quarterly, Karamu, and The Great American Poetry Show, and has written articles on love and dating for Match.com. Marilyn has a BA in English and Writing from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and a Master’s Degree from Boston University.