Final Frame Judges Announced!
2025 JUDGES
The judges for the Final Frame competition are always an essential part of an ever-evolving film family we love to see at StokerCon. Four returning judges and two new additions round out the discerning minds tasked to evaluate the evening’s selections. We’ll have fun hearing them scream along with the audience during an evening of cinematic mindbenders leading up to their prize determinations for Grand Prize, Runner-Up, Best Writing in a Short Film, and more!
(in alphabetical order)
AARON DRIES is the author of Dirty Heads, A Place for Sinners (featured in 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered), House of Sighs, and Where the Dead Go to Die, some of the “frightening and all too real” (Paul Tremblay on Cut to Care) works he’s done to date. His professional experience in frontline mental health and crisis intervention has greatly influenced his work, resulting in fiction that “works from the inside out with great skill—because he knows that horror hurts” (Mick Garris, Stephen King’s The Stand). He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Awards, winning the Ditmar, Australian Shadows, and the Aurealis.
CRAIG ENGLER is the co-creator of the TV series Z Nation and executive producer of the Netflix spin-off, Black Summer. He worked at the Syfy Channel and Chiller TV before becoming the head of Shudder at AMC Networks in 2018. While at Shudder, he brought back one of TV’s most iconic horror hosts with the launch of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, which famously “broke the Internet” when it debuted. He greenlit and oversaw the Creepshow TV series, the revival of Slasher, and The 101 Scariest Movie Moments of All Time, all of which also ran on AMC. He spearheaded the acquisition and development of more than 100 horror films, including a revival of the V/H/S/ series, the viral lockdown sensation Host, and the Peabody Award-winning film La Llorona. The Shudder original films Revenge and Tigers Are Not Afraid helped establish the careers of superstar directors Coralie Fargeat (The Substance) and Issa Lopez (True Detective: Night Country). And the $15,000 movie Skinamarink became an indie sensation when Shudder released it in theaters before its streaming debut, earning more than $2 million at the box office. Engler is currently at work on several horror screenplays and a horror novel.
JAMIE FLANAGAN is a Bram Stoker Awards®–winning author, actor, and screenwriter. Screenwriting credits include Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, The Fall of the House of Usher, AMC Shudder’s Creepshow, Peacock’s Hysteria!, and Amazon’s upcoming series adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. Screen appearances include Doctor Sleep, Absentia, The Haunting of Hill House, The Midnight Club, Hysteria!, and others. Member: WGA East, HWA, SAG-AFTRA.
JAMAL HODGE is a multi-award-winning filmmaker, a Bram Stoker Award & Elgin Award-nominated poet, and a member of the SFPA and HWA. His films have screened at over 100 film festivals worldwide. As a director, he’s created narrative and documentary work for Investigation Discovery, PBS, and Black Oak TV. As a producer, he’s helped shape the animated feature Pierre the Pigeon Hawk, starring Snoop Dogg, Jennifer Hudson, and Whoopi Goldberg. In literature, his poetry collection The Dark Between the Twilight and his anthology Bestiary of Blood: Modern Fables & Dark Tales both debuted at #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Release chart. Outside of magazines such as Space & Time, Penumbric, and The Siren’s Call, his work can be found in the anthologies: Hotel Macabre Vol. 1, Long Division: Stories of Social Decay & Societal Collapse, Chiral Mad 5, Qualia Nous V.2, You Are Not Alone In The Dark, Unioverse: Stories of The Reconvergence, The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022, The HWA Poetry Showcase Volumes 8 & 11 among others. www.Writerhodge.com
LISA MORTON is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and 200 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include the novella Placerita (co-written with John Palisano) and the Rondo Hatton Award-winning The Art of the Zombie Movie. She also hosts the popular weekly “Ghost Report” podcast and a newsletter about the paranormal (The Whole Haunted World). Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.
L. MARIE WOODis an International Impact, Golden Stake, and two-time Bookfest Award-winner, as well as an Ignyte and four-time Bram Stoker Award® nominated author. She has won over 50 national and international screenplay and film awards. Wood is also the Vice President of the Horror Writers Association, founder of the Speculative Fiction Academy, an English/Creative Writing professor, and a horror scholar. Learn more at www.lmariewood.com.
