In a summer when Netflix and Paramount are pouring billions into New Jersey soundstages, a scrappy studio on the Jersey Shore is making a stranger bet: that the next great American horror movie is already sitting in some unknown local writer’s laptop, one page away from getting made.
Ask Coleman Wilson what actually scares him and he doesn’t hedge, doesn’t reach for something tasteful about grief or the fear of being forgotten. He gives you one word, all caps, the way he’d text it: “NEEDLES!”
That’s the guy who’s going to read your horror script.
Wilson and his co-founder, Madison Santos, run Unlimited Studios, a 3,000-square-foot production house on Myrtle Avenue in Long Branch and the first real film studio the shore town has ever had. This summer, a month after a ribbon-cutting pulled hundreds down to the boardwalk, the two of them did the thing no ambitious young studio is supposed to do. They skipped the agents. They skipped the packages and the attached names. They threw open a call to every unknown, unrepresented, never-produced writer in New Jersey and asked for the single scariest thing they’ve got, on one page. No fee. No representation required. Best nightmare gets made.
“Send us your nightmares” is how they’re selling it, and they mean it about as literally as a sentence can be meant.
The timing is not an accident. Horror is the loudest it has been in a generation, the last reliable corner of the movie business where a microbudget and a genuinely sick idea can still become a phenomenon overnight, where something shot for the price of a tentpole’s catering can outgross the tentpole in the theater next door. It has always belonged to the outsider, the film-school dropout, the person with more nerve than money. Santos knows precisely why she planted her flag there. Horror, she says, “has been the go to breakout genre … you can make it low budget with undiscovered talent and still be a cult classic breakout hit.”
She is also not just doing hometown boosterism. “And with Jersey as a backdrop, with the history, passed down local horror tales like the Jersey Devil, it is the perfect location to do Horror!” she says, and the history runs a great deal deeper than most people outside the state realize. There is a genuine case, one the genre bible Dread Central has made outright, that New Jersey is the unsung horror capital of America.
Start with the slashers. The most sacred campground in the genre, Camp Crystal Lake, was invented, but Friday the 13th (1980) was shot at a real Boy Scout camp, No-Be-Bo-Sco in Blairstown, that horror pilgrims still tramp out to visit. Four years before it, Alice, Sweet Alice staged its religious-terror nightmare on the streets of Paterson and half-invented urban gothic doing it. When the makers of The Amityville Horror (1979) were locked out of the actual Long Island house, they rebuilt the haunt on the water in Toms River, with Point Pleasant filling in the rest, which means the most famous haunted house in American movies is, technically, a Jersey Shore rental. The Prowler (1981) turned Cape May into a slaughterhouse and turned Tom Savini loose on the gore. And Troma gave the world Toxie in The Toxic Avenger (1984), “the first superhero from New Jersey,” out of the fictional toxic-waste town of Tromaville, which may be the most Jersey origin story ever committed to film.
The folklore never stopped feeding the screen, either. The Jersey Devil, the state’s homegrown cryptid loose in the Pine Barrens since the 1700s, spawned 13th Child: The Legend of the Jersey Devil (2002) and a steady drip of Pine Barrens indies. Hollywood keeps driving back, too. Steven Spielberg leveled Bayonne and Newark for War of the Worlds (2005). The sleeper smash Smile (2022) shot across New Jersey on its way to a small fortune. Backroads, boardwalks, rotting industry, deep pine woods, a devil in the trees: the state has been lending horror its bones for half a century, usually without the credit.
And the clearest proof the vein is still live is the franchise that started all of this coming home. Crystal Lake, the A24 prequel series for Peacock, with Linda Cardellini as a young Pamela Voorhees, drags the whole blood-soaked mythology back to its New Jersey roots, and it premieres Oct. 15, in the very stretch of weeks Unlimited will be sitting its own finalists down. Nearly half a century after Jason’s mother first picked up a knife by a Jersey lake, prestige horror is returning to the scene of the crime.
That is the vein Unlimited is trying to open, and to keep open. The kid whose one-pager wins this thing would be writing straight into a bloodline that runs from Blairstown to Bayonne, and would get the movie made a few blocks from the Atlantic instead of three thousand miles from home.
Which is a pointed thing to attempt right now, because the giants are landing on her state as she says it. Netflix is sinking close to a billion dollars into a campus at the old Fort Monmouth, barely fifteen minutes up the road. Paramount is building in Bayonne, the same Bayonne Spielberg once blew apart. Lionsgate has set up in Newark. Juiced by tax credits worth as much as 40 percent, New Jersey is about to go from three purpose-built soundstages to more than thirty. Everybody, as Santos puts it, is watching the concrete get poured.
“Concrete is not a movie,” she says. “A stage is an empty room until somebody writes something worth putting in it.” She would rather find the next Jersey horror director on her own floor “than read about one in five years who had to leave the state to get made.” Then the line that doubles as the studio’s entire thesis: “We are not just renting space. We are reading.”
So what gets you past the first cut? Not competence. Competence bores them. A third reader named Jamie wants “a new interpretation of monsters,” something “outlandish,” something that puts your real fears on the page. Santos wants fresh concepts, sharp twists, “female empowerment,” a story with something on its mind. What none of them wants is your reboot. “We’ve all seen the jump scare killer movie a hundred times,” Wilson says. He is after “real human tension, fresh mythology, or psychological dread,” not, as he memorably files it under, “bad cell coverage.”
And the fears they cop to are the good kind of specific. Santos: bugs, “on, around, or coming out of someone,” plus true crime, “things that really happen.” Jamie: the uncanny valley, “something being off ever so slightly.” Wilson, as established: needles.
The part that should make every frustrated writer in the tri-state sit up straight is the promise buried under the gimmick. Everyone sends the same one page to the same inbox, and the kid writing at a kitchen table, the founders insist, lands in the same stack as the represented pro with credits. “100% yes they’re in the exact same pile,” Wilson says. “We didn’t start Unlimited Studios just to reshuffle the same Hollywood Rolodex … A good script is a good script.” Or, as Jamie tells anyone convinced their name is the thing holding them back: “Your name is only there because we have to get in contact with you, not because we are judging YOU.”
There is a catch, and it is the honest kind. Whatever you cook up has to be buildable for under a million dollars. Dream smaller, in other words. Dream scarier.
The rest is a three-round gauntlet that runs through the fall, all of it spelled out at unlimitedstudiosnj.com. The one-page pitches come first, and that window slams shut Aug. 31. Writers who make the cut send full scripts next, 70 to 110 pages of horror or psychological thriller that can actually be shot in New Jersey, in a round that runs Aug. 21 through Sept. 14. Then, from Sept. 14 to Oct. 19, three finalists sit down on camera, pitch decks in hand, to find out whether they can actually hang, because by then, Santos says, the writing is a given. The real test is whether you can watch a room full of strangers take your baby and start changing it. “your favorite scene could get cut – is that something you can handle?” she says.
And if you’re the one? The prize isn’t a plaque or a coffee with a development exec who never calls back. They option it “with the goal of producing it ourselves.” They make your movie. Here. At the shore.
Which is the whole slightly romantic, entirely unproven idea at the center of this thing: that somewhere between the Parkway and the Atlantic there is a monster nobody has met yet, the next Jersey Devil, the next Camp Crystal Lake, and the only thing standing between it and a soundstage in Long Branch is one page nobody has read. The wall is white. The room is empty. Wilson and Santos are waiting to be scared.
Send them your nightmares. Submit them here https://unlimitedstudiosnj.com/horror-script-submission-2026/
