David J. Schow

David James Schow was born in Marburg, Germany and was adopted by American parents then living in Middlesex, England. After publishing non-fiction book and film criticism in newspapers and magazines, his first professionally published fiction was a novelette in Galileo Magazine in 1978. He spent the next decade honing his skills in the short fiction form. He won a Dimension Award from Twilight Zone Magazine (for most popular short story) in 1985 and a World Fantasy Award (best short fiction) in 1987. He commenced screenwriting in 1989 with an uncredited dialogue polish on "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child," after which both his first teleplay and first screenplay were bought and produced (the "Freddy's Nightmares" episode "Safe Sex" and the feature "Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III" respectively). After inventing the rubric "stalk-and-slash" in 1977 to describe the genre later simplified as "slasher films," Schow similarly coined the notorious neologism "spl