Grief doesn't resolve. Neither does good drama. MFA · Los Angeles

Stories
about
grief.

Christopher Shank
Photo: Ryan Jensen @r.jensen_photography

Guilt, and the places that won't let us go. Character-driven horror, grounded drama, and emotionally intense genre stories.

Austin · Nashville · Vail · Richmond

"I'm drawn to stories about grief, guilt, and the places we won't let go — and the people who force us to face them."

7Completed Scripts
10+Festival Recognitions
MFAScreenwriting
— Featured Script All Work →
Feature · Horror / Drama

Nobody
Leaves

When his brother dies, a young man stays in the town he should have left years ago and slowly becomes someone he doesn't recognize.

Comps: Hereditary · The Witch · Manchester by the Sea · A Ghost Story

Completed · Available Request Script →
01
— More Scripts View All →
Feature · Drama / Thriller
The Reservist

A punk-rock Army reservist who lost his brother in combat has seventy-two hours to decide who he is before the military decides for him.

Feature · Drama
Standby

When her husband's estranged father is hospitalized, a Korean-American woman finds herself holding together a family that was never hers to hold while her own life quietly accumulates around her.

Feature · Dark Comedy / Drama
The Battles of Birdtown

A musician returns home to bury his mother and discovers his family's grief has been turned into a story the whole town agrees on, except him.

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Selected Work — Scripts Available for Option, Rights, or Commission

Selected
Works

Character-driven horror, grounded drama, and intimate genre stories rooted in grief, guilt, and the places we can't escape.

Christopher Shank at work
Photo: Ryan Jensen @r.jensen_photography

Industry professionals — scripts available on request. Always open to conversations about stories.

Feature · Horror / Drama
Nobody Leaves

When his brother dies, a young man stays in the town he should have left years ago and slowly becomes someone he doesn't recognize.

Comps: Hereditary · The Witch · Manchester by the Sea · A Ghost Story

  • COLIN, 23 — Male. The protagonist. Stuck in a town he never planned to stay in, paying for something he can't name yet.
  • HANNAH, 16 (assumed to be college-age) — Female. Quiet. A one-night stand whose real age Colin doesn't know until it's too late.
  • DALLAS, 20/21 — Male. Charming, a little reckless. Colin's way into the night he shouldn't have had.
  • MOM, early 50s — Female. Cognitive decline. Wheelchair. More present than she appears.
  • DAD, 50s — Male. Steady. The one who says the true thing when no one else will.
♪ Listen to the Soundtrack
Completed · Available
Recognition
Available — Full script on request
View Sell Sheet →

Feature · Drama / Thriller
The Reservist

A punk-rock Army reservist who lost his brother in combat has seventy-two hours to decide who he is before the military decides for him.

Comps: Manchester by the Sea · Blue Valentine · Friday Night Lights · The Hurt Locker

  • ELIOT HOWARD, 23 — Male. Punk. Army reservist. Trying to hold two identities that don't fit together.
  • SOPHIE MARSH, 24 — Female. Smart, observant. Not performing anything. The clearest person in his orbit.
  • TYLER "TORCH" MORRISON, 23 — Male. Eliot's closest friend. Loyal, a little lost himself.
  • COOPER, 30s — Male. Eliot's commanding officer. Represents everything Eliot is resisting.
♪ Listen to the Soundtrack
Completed · Available
Recognition
Finalist — Richmond Film Festival, 2025
View Sell Sheet →

Feature · Drama
Standby

When her husband's estranged father is hospitalized, a Korean-American woman finds herself holding together a family that was never hers to hold while her own life quietly accumulates around her.

Comps: Past Lives · Rabbit Hole · Mass · Pieces of a Woman

  • MOLLY PARK, 30s — Female. Korean-American. Psychologist. Holds everything together while her own life piles up.
  • CALEB FINCH, 30s — Male. Molly's husband. Good man, mid-collapse. Doesn't know how much Molly is carrying.
  • CONRAD, 60s — Male. Caleb's estranged father. Dying. More complicated than Caleb's version of him.
♪ Listen to the Soundtrack
Completed · Available
Recognition
Available — Full script on request
View Sell Sheet →

Feature · Dark Comedy / Drama
The Battles of Birdtown

A musician returns home to bury his mother and discovers his family's grief has been turned into a story the whole town agrees on, except him.

Comps: The Bear S1 · Ordinary People · Beautiful Boy · Short Term 12

  • CRAIG BATTLE, 29 — Male. Musician. Left town, never fully landed anywhere else. Coming home is the worst thing that's happened to him in years.
  • JACK BATTLE, late 50s — Male. Craig's father. Built a monument out of the family's grief and lives in it.
  • DIANE BATTLE, mid-40s — Female. Craig's mother. The accident. The reason everyone is here.
  • NOLAN, 30s — Male. Still in Birdtown. The version of Craig's life that stayed.
♪ Listen to the Soundtrack
Completed · Available
Recognition
AFF — Semifinalist
Inroads — Quarterfinalist
ScreenCraft — Quarterfinalist
View Sell Sheet →

Feature · Drama
How to Disappear Completely

A widow brings her late husband's ashes to the desert house where he spent his last summer, and spends four days with the friends who each loved a different version of him.

Comps: Rachel Getting Married · Mass · The Big Chill · The Humans

  • VANESSA, 36 — Female. The widow. Organized her grief into something that looks like composure. It isn't.
  • JACK, 42 — Male. Restless. Deflects with humor. Struggling to connect with anyone since Logan died.
  • MEL, 35 — Female. Sharp, guarded. Jack's partner. Running out of patience for what he won't say.
  • CLAIRE, 35 — Female. Fixer. Keeps trying to make things better. Makes them worse.
  • ETHAN, 34 — Male. Claire's husband. Carrying something he hasn't told her.
  • ERIK, 36 — Male. Checked out. Present physically, nowhere else.
  • LAURA, 35 — Female. Erik's partner. Exhausted in a way that predates this weekend.
♪ Listen to the Soundtrack
Completed · Available
Recognition
Second Rounder — Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition, 2025
View Sell Sheet →

Short · Drama / Sci-Fi
Keep Driving

On the anniversary of his daughter's death, a rideshare driver accepts a late-night fare to the middle of nowhere — and spends the drive in conversation with a passenger who might not be human, discovering that the grief he couldn't speak to the living he's somehow able to speak to whatever this is.

Comps: Midnight Special · Aftersun · Thunder Road · Under the Skin

  • Character breakdown coming soon.
♪ Listen to the Soundtrack — Coming Soon
Rewrite in Progress
Recognition
Official Selection — Richmond International Film Festival, 2025
View Sell Sheet → Request Script →
Short · Drama
Me, The Dog, and The Dark Fog

On the worst night of his life, a man is interrupted by an ex-girlfriend, a small dog, and a fog that has no business being there.

Comps: A Ghost Story · The Vast of Night · Lamb

  • WILL HARGROVE, 32 — Male. The whole film. Quiet, precise, at the end of something.
  • TERESA, 30 — Female. Will's ex. Shows up without knowing what she's walking into. Figures out enough.
  • PAT, late 40s — Female or Male. Will's therapist. On screen. Watches carefully. Knows the difference between knowing the language and using it.
♪ Listen to the Soundtrack — Coming Soon
Completed · Available
Recognition
Nashville — Semifinalist
AFF — Second Round
Vail — Quarterfinalist
View Sell Sheet →

Additional Work Available

A selection of features, shorts, and pilots — including social thriller HERE FOR THIS and sci-fi drama THE TWILIGHT — available to industry professionals on request.

Request Access →
Writer-Director

Films

"Short films are where story, style, and performance collide. They're the proof."

Keep Driving cinematic reference image
Still from Midnight Special
In Production

Keep Driving

Short · Drama / Sci-Fi

On the anniversary of his daughter's death, a rideshare driver accepts a late-night fare to the middle of nowhere — and spends the drive in conversation with a passenger who might not be human, discovering that the grief he couldn't speak to the living he's somehow able to speak to whatever this is.

"This film started as a misread. I saw a trailer for Drive My Car and came away with a story that wasn't in the trailer at all — a driver, a passenger, a night that doesn't end where it's supposed to. What I wrote first was simpler: two people trying to save each other over the course of a long ride. One suicidal, one not far behind. It played Richmond in 2025 and something about the room told me there was more inside it.

So I went back in. Added a genre element, loosened the grip, let the story breathe into stranger territory. What came out is something I'm more afraid of — which usually means I'm on the right track. Two men, one night, a destination that turns out to be a question. What does it mean to stay? What does it mean to go back? And what do you do when the person asking you that question shouldn't exist?

We've self-greenlit this film. We're doing a sweded version first — part storyboard, part rehearsal, part test — so we understand every cut before we call it a locked shot. Then pre-production, a crew, locations, cast. The goal is Richmond 2026, Atlanta, Austin, and Sundance. We're making something worth the submission fee."

  • ✓Script locked (V16)
  • ✓Self-greenlit
  • ✓Production partner confirmed
  • ✓Richmond IF 2025 — Official Selection
  • Sweded version (storyboard/rehearsal run)
  • Pre-production
  • Location scouting
  • Casting
  • Principal photography
  • Post-production
  • Festival submissions

Target festivals:
Richmond · Atlanta · Austin Film Festival · Sundance (if warranted)

Budget:
Self-financed (lean festival version)

Actor-Driven

Performance is the architecture. Everything else — the frame, the cut, the score — exists to protect what happens between two people when the scene stops pretending.

Controlled Tension

Suspense lives in restraint. The shot that holds a beat too long. The line reading that doesn't land where you expected. Pressure that builds in silence and pays off in something quieter than an explosion.

Emotional Specificity

I'm not interested in general sadness. I want the specific texture of grief at 11:37 PM on a Tuesday, driving to nowhere because driving is easier than stopping. That specificity is what makes a story feel like it happened to someone real.

Journal — Not a Newsletter. Not a Brand. Just the Thinking Between Drafts.

Journal

"What would the fifty-two-year-old version of me beg the thirty-seven-year-old version to do?"

Christopher Shank writing
Photo: Ryan Jensen @r.jensen_photography
Christopher Shank

About

Christopher Shank portrait
Photo: Ryan Jensen @r.jensen_photography

I write about grief because I haven't figured out how to stop.

Most of my scripts start the same way — someone in a room they should have left, carrying something they can't put down, circling a truth they already know but won't say out loud. That's not a formula. That's just what keeps coming out when I sit down to write.

I grew up in the South and I've spent enough time around dead-end towns and masculine silence and the particular way families avoid the things that are killing them to know that those aren't regional specifics — they're universal. Everyone has a place they can't go back to and can't stop thinking about. I make films about those places.

The work falls somewhere between character-driven horror and grounded drama. Not because I planned it that way, but because grief and dread occupy the same room in the human mind, and I'm not interested in pretending otherwise. My comps tend toward Aftersun, Manchester by the Sea, Hereditary — films that trust the audience to sit with something unresolved and find meaning in the unresolvedness.

I hold an MFA in screenwriting. My scripts have been recognized by Austin Film Festival, Nashville, Vail, and Richmond. I'm currently in pre-production on Keep Driving, a short film I'm directing that began as a misread of a foreign film trailer and evolved into something I'm more afraid of than anything I've written — which usually means it's working.

I'm based in Atlanta. Los Angeles is at the end of a plane ride and is hearing about me as we speak. I'm always interested in thoughtful conversations about stories, collaboration, and what it means to make something that stays with someone.

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