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We Want to Pay You to Write Horror Articles for Bloody Disgusting
For the past few years now, the Bloody Disgusting platform has been wide open for literally *anyone* to contribute to, and that’s all been part of our initiative to make sure we’re spotlighting a wide array of fresh, diverse and exciting voices on the horror scene. It’s through this “open door” initiative that we’ve been able to bring countless freelance writers into the fold – writers who need not have connections or any set level of experience in order to have their work featured here on the site. This initiative has been incredibly important to me personally, as it’s the sort of opportunity I spent years hungry for in the time between starting my own little blog and becoming part of the Bloody Disgusting family.
Now more than ever, in these scary and uncertain times, we’re looking for new writers.
The global coronavirus pandemic has been sweeping the entire world and changing normal life in ways most of us have never had to deal with before, and one particular industry that’s already been hit hard by the pandemic is the movie industry. Productions around the world have been shut down, major movie releases postponed, and movie theaters closed for indefinite periods of time. This has rapidly become “the new normal,” and even the experts can’t say with any degree of certainty when our lives will start going back to the old normal.
For years the term “slow news day” has been found in the comments sections of various different articles that were, truth be told, published when the news cycle was anything but slow, but right about now we certainly can’t deny that “slow news day” is part of that “new normal” for sites like this one. With no new horror movies being made or released in theaters, well, the horror movie news cycle has dried up in a way we haven’t quite seen before. How are we going to weather this storm in the coming weeks and months?
We’re going to beef up our editorial content. And that’s where YOU might come into play.
For the foreseeable future, we’re opening that open door wider than ever before, and we want to give horror writers around the world the opportunity to write some articles and make some money. Not only do we want Bloody Disgusting to continue pumping out interesting, fun and informative articles in the same way we (hopefully) always have, but we also want to make sure that we’re supporting the writers who are currently struggling due to everything that’s going on around us. So if you’ve ever wanted to write for Bloody Disgusting and you’re finding yourself with a little bit more extra time on your hands, that opportunity has arrived.
What are we looking for, you ask? Well, pretty much anything other than news and new release movie reviews. Opinion pieces. List-based content. A cool thing you found on the internet and want to write about. You name it. Think outside the box. We don’t have word limits or deadlines, and we don’t have any real specific guidelines in place. We want to hear YOUR ideas, and when we feel that they’re right for the site, we want to give you a blank page to fill out with your words. And yes, above all else, we want to pay you what we’re able to. It may not be much, and I assure you none of us are making much to do this, but we do have a budget for freelancers and we do want to make sure we’re spreading it to as many as we can.
How do you pitch us an article? Good question.
We’ve set up a brand new e-mail address for this very purpose:
Pitches@Bloody-Disgusting.com
We’re looking for fully-formed article ideas here, with a quick and to the point overview of what you’re looking to write about and maybe even a potential headline idea for the article. You don’t need to include a resume or anything of that sort, but if you do have a couple links to articles you have previously written, go ahead and include those. But again, we have no experience requirements to write for Bloody Disgusting, so that’s all entirely optional. Many great writers may have never written a single article before. And all of us here at BD understand that.
One thing I do want to mention is that we absolutely will not have the time to reply to every single pitch that we receive, so please do keep that in mind. If you don’t hear back from us for several days, it’s perfectly fine to give us a little nudge, but please understand that we’re doing the best we can – we are, after all, a very small team – and will reply to as many e-mails as we possibly can. Truthfully, that will be a fraction of them. But don’t let that stop you.
TIP: To make sure you’re getting our attention, put your article headline in the subject!
If you have any questions, please drop them in the comments section below and I will do my best to hang around here in the coming days and answer as many of them as I can.
Stay inside. Watch horror movies. Write about horror movies. We’ll get through this together.
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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