American screenwriter Zachary Donohue and British horror writer T.W. Burgess were longtime fans of each other’s work. The two connected via countless Zooms and just found themselves talking horror in every conversation. Those chats eventually led them to discover they each had their own idea for a haunted road movie, and the writers decided to combine efforts and create one together.
Burgess had a strong following as an accomplished author of graphic novels, comics and stories (“Malevolents,” “Early Haunts”) and Donohue had crafted the 2013 horror title, The Den, among others.
“We had a mutual affinity for each other’s work,” Donohue states. “Plus, Thom is from England, so stories of hauntings are in his genes.”
The trope of the haunted highway exists around the world, Burgess notes. “We both had affinity for films like The Hitcher. But we began to wonder, why has no one done something which was supernatural-based?” Adds Donohue, “Usually these haunted road stories are about someone who died on that road and is now haunting it – about a specific haunted road. We wanted to make it broader, something scarier, and just demonic. Where every road is haunted, and they’ve always been haunted.”
“We wanted to do something totally different,” Burgess says. “It’s not just a ghost of a road, but something more malevolent and more all-encompassing. So what does that look like?” They began exploring the typical things that might plague drivers, like becoming lost, losing a sense of time – even flat tires – and asking themselves, ‘What might that look like as a scare?”
Donohue states, “He’s not a creature – he doesn’t just come out and kill you. Part of his mythos is that he wants to torment you, to ride you the whole distance you can go, until you break down, literally,” often causing his victims to crash themselves into their own deaths.
At the center of the story is the young couple, Tyler and Madi. “We wanted a movie with characters you would root for, going through this journey,” Donohue explains. “Tyler has this idealized, romantic version of the American road trip, almost like a Jack Kerouac novel. He’s so ebullient and charismatic about that dream, that Madi can’t help but fall in love with it, as well.” But as the movie goes on, he says, “The reality of some of the hardships and complications that come with living on the road – including the dangers of living on the road – car crashes, sleeping in parking lots at night – she starts to realize, ‘Maybe this isn’t the life for me. But I love this guy so much.’ It’s really a movie about the two of them advocating for what they want, but also trying to figure out if what the want is with each other.”
Burgess and Donohue sent a “pitch deck” (a step prior to creation of a screenplay) to horror producer Gary Dauberman, p.g.a. at Coin Operated
“Zach and Thom and have a knack for coming up with immediately commercial ideas. I had been looking for ways to subvert the usual haunted house tropes and when I saw the deck and heard the pitch, I knew a ‘a haunted house on wheels’ was something I hadn’t seen before… or at least for a long time. The scare ideas just automatically started to flow. Beyond that, I also saw a lot of potential in the character of the Passenger, this demonic entity stalking the roads…” says Gary.
Enough so that Dauberman brought it to his friend and fellow veteran horror producer Walter Hamada, p.g.a., whose 18Hz Productions (named for the frequency above which only ghosts can hear) crafts cool horror titles for Paramount Pictures. “What we liked about it,” says Executive Producer Nathan Samdahl, “was wanting to do something in a subgenre of horror, which is ‘road horror.’ And also because this was something we haven’t seen very often, where instead of a real person doing the haunting, it’s a demonic entity that’s stalking the highways. We thought that combination of things was really interesting.”
“I like movies that scare me – and making movies that scare me,” Hamada states. “And the thing that scares me the most is the supernatural. Certainly anything demonic, that has religious undertones, automatically freaks me out. And this movie captures all of that.”
Like Dauberman, Hamada was taken with the writers’ thoughtful approach, of rooting the story in a believable relationship, with relatable issues any couple might have. “The scariest movies are the ones that are the most relatable, with regular people in regular situations – and then something scary thrown on top of it. That’s why we love haunted house movies. And when this idea came along, it was such a fresh spin – a haunted house movie on wheels.”
The lead characters, Madi and Tyler, and their relationship, he notes, “They really nailed. They were this relatable couple that you rooted for. And in a scary movie, you need characters that you root for. You don’t want characters that you hope will die. There is a real heart to them in their journey. And Zach and Thom had that right out of the gate.”
Regarding the scares, “They did a great job picking out the kinds of iconic road trip moments, things you take for granted – putting on a seat belt, rearview cameras, fixing a flat tire – and subverting them. Basically, what we strove for was how to ruin a road trip for people everywhere. How do we make people think twice, if they’re going to go on a road trip this summer?”
Norwegian horror stylist André Øvredal’s Passenger unfolds as a lean, unnerving supernatural thriller that transforms the familiar American road trip into a corridor of escalating dread.
Ever since seeing director Andrḗ Øvredal’s horror thrillers, Troll Hunter (2011) and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), Hamada had been trying to join efforts with him. “When we got the draft for this film,” he says, “André was the first guy we went to. And when he responded, we were ecstatic, because we had been tying to get to do something with him for so long. He came in immediately, totally grasped what the movie was, and had such great ideas. He took everything and took it up a notch.
“I really fell for the characters, the fact that they felt like real people with issues that were handled in a real way,” Øvredal explains. “Not a heightened level, where it’s conflict just to have conflict. But it felt like a quiet, realistic handling of their internal problems that I could relate to, directorially.” And then there’s the scares. “The horror and suspense scenes were very inspiring – the tension, the mood and the tone. The fact that we’re doing a haunted house with a moving home!” he laughs. “Just the idea of this highway myth, that can affect anybody who’s driving on American highways, how it can infiltrate their lives – and become not only an obstacle, but a symbol of the obstacles in their relationship, as well.”
The religious aspect of the story was something Øvredal also found appealing. “It’s about two people just trying to fit together, in a way, and make life work for them together. But then to have this kind of religious battle going on between St. Christopher and this demonic entity, in over their heads, is like an eternal battle. It was a really intriguing aspect to the film that was always there, but that we leaned into, as we were developing it.”
The idea of a horror movie based in van life was intriguing to everyone, with plenty of opportunities for great scares.
“Making a movie around van life, being out in nature and being alone on empty roads leans directly into the fear of the unseen, of the unknown of the horrors of being in darkness, like we have in this movie,” Øvredal states. Notes Executive Producer Jenny Hinkey, “When you’re out on the road, at campsites and dark roads, you don’t have that sense of security that you have when you’re in a house with walls, where there’s more predictability, and you’re walking in the same door every day, seeing the same things. There’s just an inherent instability in moving around from night to night, not knowing what’s out there in the dark and what you’re going to encounter next.”
While the idea of living out ideal moments, waking up in a different national park every day, in a life of apparent leisure might seem aspirational, Hamada says, “Who wouldn’t want to do that and leave the grind behind? And that’s Tyler and Madi at the beginning of the movie. But when you put two people in a tiny van and put them on the road, it heightens everything. Then throw in a demonic entity, and you’ve got something incredibly scary.”
While the idea of living out ideal moments, waking up in a different national park every day, in a life of apparent leisure might seem aspirational, Hamada says, “Who wouldn’t want to do that and leave the grind behind? And that’s Tyler and Madi at the beginning of the movie. But when you put two people in a tiny van and put them on the road, it heightens everything. Then throw in a demonic entity, and you’ve got something incredibly scary.”
The two first meet Diane when they come to a popular van meet, filled with everyone living those aspirational moments. But then, later, when they track Diane down at a nomad camp, they see the true reality of such a life. “You see the duality between more of these weekend van lifers, who have souped up their vans – the perfect version of what living on the road is,” Donohue explains. “But then they meet a van life establishment of people, who’ve been living on the road for a long time, some of whom maybe haven’t chosen to be there, but are there by necessity. There’s horror that’s taking place, but there’s the realization that maybe in the long haul, this romantic version of being on the road might be pretty hard to sustain.”
Over the next six months, 18Hz took the core building blocks that Donohue and Burgess had provided and crafted the script together with them. “It was an exercise of how can we amp it up? How can we make it even scarier?” says Hamada. “We had locked in the scares,” explains Donahue. “But Andre likes to ‘kick the tires’ – ‘Is this working? Is this the scariest it can be?’ Then it was about Andre telling us how he was going to shoot it. So it’s up to us to provide the linkage that coalesces with that.”.
How Zachary Donohue & T.W. Burgess Crafted the Screenplay
Donohue and Burgess built the screenplay for Passenger by fusing two complementary sensibilities: Donohue’s precision‑engineered psychological tension and Burgess’s deep grounding in folklore‑driven horror.
Their collaboration begins with a simple, brutal premise: a couple witnesses a fatal highway accident and discovers they did not leave the scene alone, and they treat that premise not as a jump‑scare engine but as a slow‑burn, dread‑accumulating structure.
The pair approached the script by asking a single guiding question: What if the open road, the symbol of freedom, became the most inescapable trap imaginable? From that question, they built a narrative architecture where geography becomes pressure, movement becomes futility, and the supernatural antagonist operates with the cold logic of inevitability rather than spectacle.
Donohue, whose work (The Den) is rooted in digital paranoia and psychological erosion, shaped the screenplay’s procedural tension, the rhythms of travel, the rituals of van‑life, and the small decisions that accumulate into catastrophe. He focused on the couple’s interiority: how fear corrodes intimacy, how exhaustion distorts perception, how being hunted turns ordinary spaces (a gas station, a rest stop, a motel) into stages of escalating threat.
Burgess, a graphic novelist and horror storyteller, brought the mythic spine: the demon’s rules, its origin, its logic, and the folkloric undertones that give the entity weight beyond a simple monster chase. His influence is felt in the screenplay’s sense of the uncanny, the idea that the stalker is not merely pursuing but claiming, that the couple has crossed into a story older than they understand.
Together, they crafted a script built on compression and escalation. The first act grounds the couple in realism, the van, the relationship, the road, before the accident ruptures the world. The second act tightens the noose: the entity appears not as a creature but as a presence, a pattern, a pressure that cannot be reasoned with. The third act becomes a test of identity and endurance, where the couple’s emotional fractures mirror the supernatural threat closing in.
Throughout, Donohue and Burgess avoid exposition; they let fear emerge from pattern recognition, from the audience noticing what the characters cannot yet articulate.
Their most important craft choice is restraint. The screenplay refuses to explain too much, show too much, or break its own rules. The demon is terrifying because it is consistent, relentless, and uninterested in theatrics.
This discipline allows André Øvredal to direct the film with the same atmospheric precision he brought to The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: a horror story where the terror is not in the creature but in the inescapability of its pursuit.
In essence, Donohue and Burgess crafted Passenger as a road‑trip nightmare stripped to its essentials, a supernatural pursuit story where dread accumulates mile by mile, and where the horror is not the demon itself but the realisation that some forces, once invited, never stop moving toward you.
ZACHARY DONOHUE (WRITTEN BY) is an emerging voice in genre filmmaking who is known for crafting stories with grounded human emotion that are universally relatable and scary. Best known for his debut feature The Den (2013) — Donohue wrote and directed one of the earliest and most influential entries in the screenlife horror format — a film that earned him critical recognition and a cult following for its inventive, ahead of the time approach to digital-age fear. Most recently, Donohue co-wrote Passenger, directed by André Øvredal for Paramount Pictures.Up next is another project with Gary Dauberman’s Coin Operated for Screen Gems, Human Remains, a supernatural thriller that Donohue wrote, continuing his exploration of tension, atmosphere, and character-driven horror.
Expanding into serialized storytelling, Donohue created and produced the indie cosmic- horror/mockumentary series The Unknowable: Darkland (2026), an eight-episode miniseries (22-minute episodes) for Cineverse’s SCREAMBOX streaming platform, on which he served as Creator and Producer. Donohue’s screenplay The Becoming (co-written by Lauren Thompson) was featured on the 2015 Blood List, spotlighting the best unproduced horror and thriller scripts of the year — an early acknowledgment of his distinctive voice in genre cinema. Since then, Donohue has continued to develop a body of work that combines sharp conceptual hooks with emotional depth and cinematic tension. Over the course of his career, Donohue has collaborated with and developed material for some of the genre’s most respected creators, including Kevin Williamson, James Wan, and Nick Antosca.
T.W. BURGESS (WRITTEN BY) is a British screenwriter, author and digital artist known for his work in supernatural horror. He gained widespread recognition following the debut of his indie comic Malevolents, acclaimed by international horror Manga artist Junji Ito. His publication Early Haunts remains one of the most successful supernatural horror anthologies funded on the Kickstarter platform.
Burgess has continued to build his reputation through a range of horror IPs, including Mister Howl and Shadowbox, as well as video game projects such as Pylons. Also working with Niantic Lightship within XR gaming experiences. T.W. Burgess is represented by Adam Marshall at Entertainment 360.
ANDRÉ ØVREDAL (DIRECTOR) is a Norwegian filmmaker who most recently directed the upcoming horror-thriller PASSENGER for Paramount Pictures.
André first gained international notoriety with his critically acclaimed found-footage mockumentary, TROLLHUNTER, which premiered to rave reviews at Sundance and earned him a spot on Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch list.
André then went on to direct the seminal supernatural horror film THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE, starring Emile Hirsch and Brian Cox, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the People’s Choice Award in TIFF’s Midnight Section. The film was released by IFC Midnight and Lionsgate to critical success.
Øvredal then went on to direct Guillermo del Toro’s live-action adaptation of SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK for Lionsgate. This supernatural horror feature, based on the children’s book series of the same name, was released theatrically in 2019. A sequel is currently in development.
Øvredal then directed THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER for Amblin and Universal, which earned praise from movie legends including Guillermo Del Toro, who called it “gorgeous, lavish, and savage,” as well as Stephen King, who wrote that it was “a throat-ripping good time, [and] reminded me of the best of the Hammer movies from the 60s and 70s.”
As an undergrad at the Brooks Institute of Photography and Motion Pictures in California, Øvredal co-directed the first feature in the history of the school. This thriller FUTURE MURDER was released as one of 80 first-time films in a special DVD series in the USA. It became the second biggest seller in the series, released in several countries, and was shown at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. From there, Øvredal became one of Norway’s most successful directors of commercials with almost two hundred commercials in Norway and abroad before transitioning into narrative features. He has directed award winning short and feature films and has participated in the acclaimed course Method Acting for Directors held in Oslo by New York University drama teacher Marketa Kimbrell.
