Four Minutes of Horror at LondonSWF by Suzy Miller

An email flew in from London Screenwriters’ Festival, calling out for maximum four minute horror audio scripts. To be recorded live with actors and mixed during the session with the legend that is Dirk Maggs.

I happened to have a few hours spare, and the sun was shining. I knew this was something I needed to create quickly or it just wouldn’t get done. I’d written and produced an immersive audio production a couple of years back and loved the whole experience. Writing for sound is sonic-cinematic, and horror is an ideal genre for this kind of narrative.

I sat in the garden for an hour and let the ideas stream in from wherever that mysterious place is, from which stories wait for us to open up to them, hearing the sounds in my head. On the computer I put it all down in Final Draft before the ideas could float away and within two hours start to finish, it was done.

I put it out amongst a few groups to get some feedback, but nothing came fast enough. I took the gamble and submitted it. At least it was in. I loved the experience so much, I wrote another short horror but not in time to submit.

And then at the festival, I dashed over to Dirk Magg’s session to arrive in a room where everyone was looking at me. My script had been selected, and two actresses were standing on the stage to record it.

One take. They nailed it.

Then as the mixer mixed, Chris interviewed Dirk and we were entertained for a while until the mix was done.

The recording was in a large room with not great acoustics, background sounds, and really the job they did under the circumstances was amazing.

(listen below)

Screenwriters can often feel a kind of snobbishness against audio drama. Not surprising since much of it is not going to draw you away from Netflix. But there is audio drama that exists out there, which takes you into a world and tells you stories that couldn’t be told as well if you made them into films. Because with good audio writing, the listener doesn’t need your pictures. They make their own.

You don’t have so much control as a writer of what those pictures are, but you can co-create with your listener something more powerful than what a more prescribed set of images could produce. And as a film maker, creating audio is faster, and less expensive. Actors rates are less for ‘radio’, each set up is a sound recordist moving from one place to another. No lights. No makeup.

You can also tackle sensitive subjects that might be trickier on film these days. For some reason, audio allows – like theatre – a creative freedom to explore politically or socially sensitive areas with – I’ve found – a greater freedom.

Writing for actors to move and be authentic is important to me. In some radio productions, you can hear the actors are standing by a microphone reading from a script. It pulls me out of the drama. Which is why my binaural production was recorded entirely on location, with the actors physically playing out their roles whilst the binaural 3Dio microphone (with the ears) was moving around to keep up with them – not the other way around.

Audio storytelling forces you to immerse yourself inside the world of the characters. Especially if you avoid the many radio conventions of voice overs – which too often are used for exposition and telling the audience what they’re seeing, instead of letting them work it out from the sound design. 

Andrew Sachs made a radio play back in the 1970s called Revenge, an audio drama without dialogue. That might be extreme, but it proves that using sound effects as part of the narrative story telling, is not only good audio writing, but it’s also sonic-cinematic.

It was exciting to experience the immediacy of a short audio being recorded and mixed and played back within one session at the festival. I’m now keen to write more and invite others to contribute four minute horrors, with a maximum of 3 characters. I want to put together a series of them to pitch to audio production companies.

Thank you, LSF 2026 – and Dirk Maggs!

If any of you writers are interested in coming on an interactive online workshop about writing for audio with a focus on immersive binaural, email me at su**@**************ow.com. And I’ll make it happen!