Transforming a passion into a full-fledged career has been Ryan Turek’s (BFA 1998 Film and Video) specialty. Fresh out of the College, the SVA alumnus turned directly toward his enthusiasm for horror movies. Cut to 21 years later, and an unconventional but fruitful career in film as journalist and filmmaker, and Turek is coming full circle to introduce 2018’s Halloween—a passion project he co-produced—at the SVA Theatre’s annual After School Special next week at a midnight madness screening. (The event will also feature fellow SVA alumni Warren Drummond, a storyboard artist, and Michael Simmonds, a cinematographer, both of whom also worked on the film.)

Ambitious and entrepreneurial, Turek began his career as a film blogger. But before that, he was just one of many who moved to LA with dreams of making it big in Hollywood, spending his free time—when not penning what he described as “bad spec screenplays”—writing on horror message boards. Connecting with the community there, his passion, knowledge and insight soon spiraled into writing for Fangoria and some of the early horror fan blogs that soon gained legitimacy. Eventually, he co-founded Dread Central, a prominent horror film site that still thrives today.

“I moved out to L.A. with the hopes and dreams of becoming a film director,” he said with a chuckle, acknowledging the wide-eyed confidence of it all. “I quickly learned that it is not all that easy. However, horror always remained something that I absolutely loved and I knew no matter what I was going to do in this town it had to be related to this genre.”

Traveling to all the horror-film festival and conventions, Turek quickly carved out a unique brand and identity for himself that made him stand out from the pack of growing film bloggers. “The notion of being a quote-unquote horror journalist was something I just kind of coined for myself,” he said. “And then I started introducing myself like that when I went to horror-movie conventions and it grew its own life.”

Turek spent 14 years as horror-film journalist and then one day, circa 2014, got a call to meet producer Jason Blum, the founder of Blumhouse Productions, the world’s premier horror studio, which has made films like the Academy Award-nominated Get Out, Us, popular horror franchises like The Purge, Insidious, Sinister, Paranormal Activity and many more.