Darren Callahan

Callahan wrote several radio dramas in the 1990s and early 2000s, including Uncle Ant (1997), The Wave (1998), The Death Guard (2000), The Carnival of Spies (2001), and The Tokyo Tourist Bureau (2005). He was awarded the NPR Best Audio Drama Award. In the 2010s, Callahan wrote, directed, and scored several of Glass City Films' productions, including Under the Table, Children of the Invisible Man, Don't Call Me Loretta, Death & Devils, and the film version of Desperate Dolls. He produced Emily Bennett's Chat Room (2015) and scored for the films Cry It Out, American Barbarian, LVRS, Safe Haven, and All the Flowers That Cut Through the Earth. Callahan's screenplays are typically within the horror, science fiction, and sexploitation genres. In 2014, Desperate Dolls was put on at Strawdog Theatre. Reviews were mixed, with some praising Callahan's use of suspense and the choreography of the murder scenes, while others criticized it for romanticizing violence against women and for being "more exploitative than an homage to past exploitation films." Among Callahan's many other feature-length screenplays are Kiss Me With Blood, Nerves, Red Park Road, and Summer of Ghosts, all of which have been published by Hooper Cinema Classics. Some of his stage plays include Horror Academy, Mass Grave, Sub-Genre, The Double Negative, and The White Airplane. In 2019, Hooper Cinema Classics published a two-volume set of his work. The first book, Devil Films, included the screenplays All These Devils, All These Demons, and All These Witches, and the second book, Sex Films, included Sexxina, All a Girl Can Get, and Pleasure Zone IV. In 2020, Battery Filmtext began publishing a 24-volume set of 24 of Callahan's sexploitation screenplays, including Documentia, The Battle For Carlyle, and Salamander Lake. Filmstrips, a selected compilation of his film scores, and two volumes of his mid-2000s stage plays were released in 2020. In 2021, he adapted Brian Pinkerton's Rough Cut into a screenplay entitled Low-Budget Horror. Hooper Cinema Classics also released The Fifth Terror (2021), a collection of five of Callahan's feature-length horror screenplays. Another edition featuring a sixth story was released shortly after. All These Devils (2017) and Terror/13 (2018) have been a finalist and semi-finalist, respectively, in Shriekfest's script competitions. In ScreenCraft's contests, Terror/13 (2018) was a semifinalist and In Control (2019) and Demon Wasp (2022) were quarterfinalists. In 2019, In Control was a top 10 finalist in the PAGE Awards' science fiction category and All These Devils was a semifinalist in the Austin Film Festival's Drama Feature Screenplay category.