<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Stephen Volk (b. 1954) was born and brought up in Pontypridd, South Wales. After taking postgraduate Film & TV Studies at Bristol University, his first produced feature film script was for Gothic (1986), Ken Russell’s idiosyncratic retelling of the events that led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. He followed it with scripts for The Kiss (1988), The Guardian (1990), Superstition (2001) and Octane (2003), and is currently working on a feature adaptation of John Masefield’s children’s fantasy The Box of Delights and a script for BBC Films, The Interpretation of Ghosts. His short film The Deadness of Dad (1997) won BAFTA Best Short and Best Short Film awards at the Galway Film Festival and Celtic Film Festival. Volk’s “live” television play for Halloween, Ghostwatch (1992), managed successfully to pull off the difficult mock-documentary form six years before The Blair Witch Project, and caused questions to be raised in Parliament. It also has the dubious distinction of being later cited in the British Medical Journal as the first TV program to cause post-traumatic stress disorder in children. The writer’s subsequent credits for the small screen have included two episodes of the BBC anthology series Ghosts (“I’ll Be Watching You” and “Massage”) and an episode of the Channel Four show Shockers (“Cyclops”), while Afterlife is a new drama series combining psychology and the supernatural. Volk’s other credits include Answering Spirits, a 1992 theatrical play about spiritualism; he novelized his screenplay for Gothic, and his short fiction has been published in Samhain, All Hallows, Crimewave and the anthologies Midnight Never Comes, Shadows and Silence, Acquainted with the Night, 'Hideous Progeny, Poe’s Progeny, Postscripts 3 and Best British Mysteries 2005. He is currently working on his “first” novel.