Paul Harker
Award-winning Screenwriter and Producer
UK based screenwriter focused on feature scripts in the horror, thriller and urban drama genres. Seventeen time international screenplay competition winner for horror screenplays Red Mist (currently under option), Murderabilia and Rat, supernatural drama Daisy Daisy and urban crime thriller Headshot and a short film set in the English Civil War, The Blade.
Alongside narrative work, Paul also writes and produces short documentary films for ELP Films, a division of community interest company the East Leeds Project. Recent work includes We Will Be Pioneers for the East Leeds Project, and a film for the NHS and the UK Government funded Healthier Working Futures programme.
My writing channels Ken Loach and Shane Meadows, spliced and diced with Tarantino, Kubrick and 70s Spielberg. I write muscular, taut psychological horror and thrillers; working class explorations of masculine toxicity loaded with savage absurdity, filtered through a scuzzy socialist lens. My heroes are vulnerable, downtrodden, anxious and nervy, struggling to keep their nostrils above the waterline, but still clinging to seemingly unattainable redemptions.
I have been a visiting Lecturer in Screenwriting at the University of Leeds, Screenwriting Consultant at the London Horror Society and am currently Screenwriting Mentor at the Oakwood Film Academy. I am a Screenwriter for hire for new script commissions, redrafts, co-writing, polishes and notes. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss a new project.
We Will Be Pioneers
A micro edit of the short documentary film, We Will Be Pioneers, produced for the East Leeds Project. Directed by Ashley Karrell at Panoptical Films.
Written and Produced by Paul Harker.
The Old Turk
Directed by Jay Robey. Written and co-produced by Paul Harker.
Starring Keith Dickinson, Matthew Wignall and Giselle Cullinane.
Logline: A young man enters a pub to confront the dying ex-soldier who murdered his parents, only to discover the truth isn’t as he believed.
Paul Harker’s award-winning Screenplays
Daisy Daisy
Four time award-winning, low budget supernatural horror script.
Logline: A black, insomniac carer with unrealised physic abilities moves into a mansion to care for the dementia suffering owner, triggering supernatural events which force the carer to confront tragedies present and past.
Rat
Award-winning rural horror feature script.
Logline: In a coastal backwater, a pregnant newcomer becomes the object of a lonely Ratcatcher’s infatuation, but the arrival of her arrogant ex-lover triggers pest control of terrifying proportion.
Red Mist
Award-winning, low budget horror script, written as the first part in a trilogy. Currently under option.
Logline: The mundane, sexually-frustrated life of a struggling writer and his wife is thrown into chaos with the arrival of a charismatic but menacing lodger, a PhD student of mysterious background and savage sensibility.
Art is Dead
Award-winning art world drama script.
Logline: When a mysterious stranger offers a struggling artist a way of helping his terminally ill daughter, he must make a life or death decision.
Headshot
Award-winning urban crime thriller feature script.
Logline: Years after a Grandmother is forced to assume her missing, presumed dead, son’s hitman persona, her plan to escape to a new life with her Granddaughter is threatened when a Gangster gives her son’s killer a contract to execute her too.