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When Heidi was four-years-old, her mom couldn’t afford a great daycare for her and her little sister, so the girls got dropped off at the Lollypop Ranch each day. What her mother didn’t know was that during nap time the daycare workers would play old black and white horror movies on a movie projector while the children tried to sleep. These are Heidi’s earliest and fondest memories of film. Now, we’ll never know what possessed these (deranged?) daycare workers to show scary movies to children, but two outcomes were likely for Heidi: become a serial killer or a fan of all things horror. Luckily for her friends and family, Heidi became the latter.

 

She enjoys writing horror as well. Heidi’s most recent feature script, Black Sunday, a horror-thriller set during the Dust Bowl, has received quite a bit of attention. It won Heidi one of three prestigious 2016 Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowships and she's excited to be flying to LA in August for meetings and mentorship set up by the Screencraft crew. Her one-on-one interview with Ken Miyamoto on the Screencraft site is here.

 

Black Sunday was also one of three winners in the Atlanta Film Festival Screenwriting Competition. Heidi and 2 other winners attended a writers retreat outside of Atlanta and worked with 3 accomplished mentors improving and developing their scripts. In other competitions, Black Sunday was named a finalist in the Emerging Screenwriters Competition and the Breaking Walls Thriller Screenplay competition. It was a semi-finalist in the Austin Film Festival’s Screenplay Competition, Screencraft’s Horror Screenplay Competition and the Bahamas International Film Festival (BIFF) Screenwriters Residency Program. At Final Draft's Big Break screenplay competition it was a quarterfinalist.

 

Her short script, Haunted House Hunters, was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition, DC Shorts Screenplay Competition, and the Holly Shorts Film Festival screenplay competition. She’s currently a MFA in screenwriting student at Hollins University. She is also working on new horror feature scripts titled Welcome Home Barbara and B&B.

 

Contact her at: hrwscripts@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter at @heidiwillis

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