John Jantunen (Guelph)

I've won a Praxis Screenwriting Fellowship and was short-listed for Terror and The Kid. In addition to the dozen odd scripst I've written, I've just finsihed my second novel. Recently, I was invited to read a short story at The Eden Mills Writing Festival and am currently shopping short stories to a variety of literary magazines. In contrast to my prose, which tends to lean towards Saramago, Bolano, McCarthy, and Gardner in style and content, when I sit down to write scripts, more often than not, I find myself channeling my inner teenage. My favourite genre during my adolescence was horror so I tend to lean in that direction though I have very little patience with the teenage in peril variety that formed a staple of those years. In recent years, I've found it's the Spanish who I've been most impressed with. They get it, more so that we North Americans. Horror is not about monsters and ghosts, it's about the choices the monster's and ghosts force us to make..

City Of God, Amores Perros, Man Bites Dog, Synecdoche, NY, The Devil's Backbone, Day Of The Beast, A Prohpet, Eastern Promises, Jesus Of Montreal, Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer, Ghost Dog: Way of The Samurai, The White Ribbon, Happy-Go-Lucky.

Haneke and Jarmusch and Leigh and let's add Darabont, to be fair. Odd choices, save the last, for a guy who writes mostly horror but then if you're looking for a place to drink, I say, you might as well make sure the well is deep and clear.