If there's one genre I think is always marketable, it's horror. We're getting a ton of them every year. That's because they come with a built-in audience and usually excel at the box office.

But the other side of this is that people have seen a ton of horror movies. And I'm not just talking about the public, but execs, agents, and managers are reading horror movies probably every day.

In…

Movie genre and TV genres are how we pick what we want to entertain us or inspire us.

We've all logged onto Netflix or Amazon, even wandered the Blockbusters of old, peering up and down aisles or scrolling through endless topics, trying to decide on the genre of film or television we want to watch. The genre we wind up picking depends on our mood, the day we've had, and sometimes it depends…

I know I'm not alone in writing the easiest, loudest emotional beat in the toolkit: the dead wife. Or the murdered girlfriend. Or the kidnapped daughter.

These ideas are simple and easy, that's why we do them. But if you want your script to stand out, it's time to stop putting women in refrigerators and to get more original.

It feels like "stakes," right? Wrong. It’s actually just a trip to…