Hi and welcome to my website – my name is Matthew Cooper, and I’m a BAFTA shortlisted UK scriptwriter for hire, with credits on the likes of EastEnders (for the BBC) and Emmerdale (for ITV) and Hollyoaks (for CH4) amongst many other scriptwriter TV credits stretching back to the 1990s in the UK, but I also have a darkly twisted secret life as a low budget horror auteur and even more secret life as an under the table off the radar fixer of horror movie scripts. But before we discuss my dark secrets let’s look back at my youth…

I grew up in the 1980s – the golden age of direct to video horror movies – I was a FANGORIA reading kid, who made mini horror movies using Super 8mm cameras (shooting on film at weekends with school friends). I made SFX masks, and lots of food colouring blood, I built stop motion creatures and tried to copy Sam Raimi’s crazy Evil Dead camera style.

Myself and my chums made every type of horror movie from werewolves to vampires and zombies too. I read horror fiction – started with Stephen King, and then moving onto H.P.Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos (more of that in a second).

Somehow, these short amateur films led directly to me winning a nationwide screenwriting competiton at age 18 – which resulted in me having a short film made and broadcast on CH4 when I was 19 years old. The short film ‘Family Style’ owed a lot to Stephen King’s Christine, and The Body – and was shot in moody black and white and featured Ewan McGregor in one of his first ever roles.

After Family Style was broadcast, I ended up selling a screenplay to Miramax in the UK, then landed an agent who got me work writing for UK soap Emmerdale (at 27 I was the youngest writer they ever had). From Emmerdale I went to Eastenders and then Hollyoaks, all in all I spent about a decade working in the trenches of UK TV as a scriptwriter.

During this time I was always working on original feature film scripts, comedies or thrillers or dare I say it – outright horror movies. But by the time I had broke my bones as a pro scriptwriter the UK film business was busy doing nothing indigenous to the UK, and was instead working its way towards being a production house for US films and TV (shot here, because of tax breaks, big well equipped studio spaces which were cheaper than the LA equivalent and reliably skilled and talented labour that the yanks didn’t need to pay health insurance for).

Ch4 and BBC films alongside the Arts Council and the BFI had kept the UK film business healthy in the 1990s – but by the time the 00s came along, most of that money had dried up – later Brexit and the collapse of viewing figures for UK broadcasters (viewers lost to US streamers and mobile first apps like YouTube) all but killed the market for UK set films (and the money for financing these films turned from a trickle to a drip).

in 2009 with TV work drying up, and not wanting to spend my career writing for the same soap for three decades (and the intendant madness, alcoholism, and ruin of talent that brings – with the biproduct of owning 22 properties financed by repeat fees and accidently becoming a slum landlord while claiming to be a left wing hippy) I decided instead to go work for a charity, the charity wanted creatives to spread the word on this new fangled Social Media business. I could write well, and had lots of imagination, which at the dawn of social media marketing, were useful traits…

So, while at the charity I learned how to generate engagement and retain attention online – this had a knock on affect on my screenwriting career. I got rid of my literary agent when I learned to use WordPress and was trained in Search Engine Optimisation (you’re reading this website because of that training – if I didn’t know how to do SEO you’d never find my website, thanks to the charity folks for that) and soon (from 2014 onwards) I was selling my services as a scriptwriter via this very website as the age dawned where people used Google to find experts in any field. I continued to work for the charity for over a decade – all the time taking scriptwriting work on the side.

Some of this ‘side hustle’ work led to the writing of first drafts on various (later) produced and theatrically released feature films. Then, around midnight one dark night and stormy night, I was contacted by a US producer who needed an instant rewrite (the producer was shooting a horror movie and was stuck somewhere in a studio in Eastern Europe with a crew standing around waiting) – he couldn’t raise anyone at the LA production office, the writer was AWOL, and the producer had an urgent pressing problem with a scene that needed fixing there and then. SO…I fixed it, over the phone. And the chap then paid me via PayPal there and then and rang off – back to the set with the problem solved, two extra lines here, and a change of prop there – and whamo the show went on.

I’d done this sort of over the phone fix lots of times when writing soaps. I’d also done it once or twice for UK producer friends. I went to bed and thought nothing of it. When I awoke, I was commissioned to fix a load of scripts, by the LA office of the producer I helped.

Gradually, this work because my full time living again – I’ve been hired to write original features as a ghost writer, or fix feature films under the table (for some pretty big players on Netflix backed productions).

By the time the pandemic came around I was the busiest scriptwriter for hire in the UK and the most in demand script consultant in the UK (I know this, because when an agent approached me to represent me – when the agent found out how much I was earning via my website – he was horrified and said, it was more than most -if not all – of his clients).

HIRE A HORROR SCRIPTWRITER

So, in 2019 – I’m now a script doctor. But somewhere within me was that 12 year old kid with a Super 8mm camera who wanted to be John Carpenter – that kid kept saying, ‘let’s just make a few weird low budget horror films, and just release them for free’. It won’t take too much time, we don’t need a crew, we don’t even need a script for the fist one.

This random, let’s just start making some low budget (read no budget) horror films and release them on YouTube led directly to what I called ‘The Sekurig’ trilogy of films. Three feature length (loosely connected) horror movies inspired by the work of (yes, you guessed it) H.P. Lovecraft.

The films are ‘Markham’ (2020) ‘At The Mountains of Madness’ (2021) and ‘When the Earth Gives Up The Dead’ (2022). All three films were shot, with budgets of less than a grand, in black and white on a mixture of super8mm film stock and low grade (1080p) video. All three were released on YouTube free to view.

The adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘At The Mountains of Madness’ the middle film in the trilogy got the most attention (and continues to do so) it’s the ONLY feature film adaptation of Lovecraft’s most famous story- despite everyone from Del Toro to Jim Cameron failing to adapt the story, me and my two actor chums managed to crack the tale despite having no budget, and being in the middle of lockdown due to a pandemic.

Horror scriptwriter for hire

The Sekurig trilogy films all had me as the total crew – camera, sound, edit and SFX – as well as writing and directing. I used some mates who were actors and horror film fans – Ashe Russell and Tony Coughlan are the main cast in all three films (as well as myself acting under the name of Gary Geeson). The films got rave reviews in horror fanzines (David Dent’s The Dark Eyes of London blog has been a great support) and I even sold a few DVDs of the films all across the world.

But that wasn’t the end of it – it was in fact, just the start.

The films proved so popular on my YouTube Channel that we began to get paid for them, and my approach to writing the script of ‘At The Mountains of Madness’ led to a small influx of HORROR SCRIPTWRITER FOR HIRE jobs (including helping out on some Netflix backed projects under the radar). And listen I DO charge most producers and directors who contact me an arm and a leg (I work to PACT minimums as a scriptwriter as a minimum – I usually go ABOVE PACT UNION rates on projects – UNLESS you tell me you’re making a LOW BUDGET Horror – then I get all misty eyed and agree to work for you pesky kids for half, hell even quarter of my normal fee (and remember I’m BAFTA shortlisted as a scriptwriter and Royal Television Society nominated for my writing on Emmerdale – I have 200 hours of TV with my name on it) and I WILL WORK FOR CHEAP IF YOU TELL ME ITS A HORROR MOVIE SCRIPT! There, I said it.

So, we immediately began a new round of more ambitious low budget horror films, and we formed a production company specifically to handle these low budget films – Warehouse Transmedia.

What followed next – was, more Lovecraft…

H.P. Lovecraft’s The SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH – written and directed by Matthew Cooper

Our next low budget horror film was a direct adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth – shot in three days for less than a grand budget – and we now intend to make at least one low budget horror movie every single year for the next decade 2026 to 2036.

2026 – will see the release of our next Horror feature – Whitby Goth Weekend Horror – which was entirely shot at Whitby Goth Weekend in 2025 – poster and trailer below.

HIRE A HORROR SCRIPTWRITER – so if you want to hire a horror scriptwriter (why would you still be reading if you didn’t?) Then get in touch with me, Matthew Cooper – horror scriptwriter for hire on matcoop23@yahoo.co.uk – you can trust me – I’m a Doctor – well a horror script doctor at least…