David James Schow was born in Marburg, Germany, and was later adopted by American parents residing in Middlesex, England.
After publishing non-fiction book and film criticism in newspapers and magazines, his first professionally published fiction was a novelette in Galileo Magazine in 1978. He spent the next decade honing his skills in the short fiction form, winning a Dimension Award from Twilight Zone Magazine in 1985 and a World Fantasy Award in 1987.
He began his screenwriting career in 1989 with an uncredited dialogue polish on "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child," followed by the purchase and production of his first teleplay and first screenplay, respectively, for the "Freddy's Nightmares" episode "Safe Sex" and the feature "Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III."
Schow is credited with inventing the term "stalk-and-slash" in 1977 to describe the genre later simplified as "slasher films," and similarly coined the notorious neologism "splatterpunk" in 1986. He wrote 41 installments of his popular "Raving & Drooling" column for Fangoria Magazine, reflecting the shifting climate of the horror aesthetic during the early 1990s.
Schow is the foremost authority on the 1963-65 television series "The Outer Limits." His revised, updated 1998 edition of his "Outer Limits Companion" contains everything anyone would ever care to know about this cult classic.
By 2006, Schow's published canon includes four novels, seven collections of his short stories, five books as editor, and numerous pseudonymously published series and tie-in paperbacks. He has written large text supplements for DVDs, contributed to several British documentaries for BBC4, and appears as an expert witness on DVD supplements for various films.
Schow has also co-produced and filmed much of the on-location supplemental material seen on the discs for "I, Robot" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe," and has made sneaky cameo appearances in his own films as well as those of friends.
