David J. Schow was born in Marburg, Germany and was adopted by American parents then living 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. He won a Dimension Award from Twilight Zone Magazine (for most popular short story) in 1985 and a World Fantasy Award (best short fiction) in 1987.
He commenced screenwriting in 1989 with an uncredited dialogue polish on A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child, after which both his first teleplay and first screenplay were bought and produced (the Freddy's Nightmares episode "Safe Sex" and the feature Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III respectively).
After inventing the rubric "stalk-and-slash" in 1977 to describe the genre later simplified as "slasher films," Schow similarly coined the notorious neologism "splatterpunk" in 1986. To reflect the shifting climate of the horror aesthetic during the early 1990s, he logged 41 installments of his popular "Raving & Drooling" column for Fangoria Magazine. This and other non-fiction op-ed material was collected in the book Wild Hairs (2000), which won the International Horror Guild's award for best nonfiction in 2001.
Schow is the world’s foremost authority on the 1963-65 television series The Outer Limits. The revised, updated 1998 edition of his Outer Limits Companion contains everything anyone would ever care to know about this cult classic.
As editor, Schow’s works include the three-volume Lost Bloch series (1999-2000-2002; exploring the pulp work of Psycho author Robert Bloch), the John Farris short story collection Elvisland (2004), and The Art of Drew Struzan (2010).
Schow's published canon includes eight novels, seven collections of his short stories, and a number of pseudonymously published series and tie-in paperbacks done earlier in his career.
Schow's television work includes The Outer Limits (1995), Perversions of Science (1997, a Tales from the Crypt spinoff), The Hunger (five episodes,1997-2000), and Masters of Horror (two episodes, 2006-2007).
In the early 1990s he screenwrote the cult classic The Crow (1994) and most recently has worked on Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) and The Hills Run Red from Warner Premiere and Dark Castle Entertainment (2009).
He wrote large text supplements for such DVDs as Reservoir Dogs and From Hell, contributed to several British documentaries for BBC4 both on- and off-camera, and appears as expert witness on DVD supplements for such movies as The Dirty Dozen, The Green Mile, Incubus and Creature from the Black Lagoon. He co-produced and filmed much of the on-location supplemental material seen on the discs for I, Robot (2004) and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe (2005). He also makes sneaky cameo appearances (credited and uncredited) in his own films as well as those of friends.
Upgunned is the latest novel in what Schow calls his “blue steel” phase of modern hardboiled writing jacked up with “horror perceptions,” which commenced with the Hard Case Crime novel Gun Work (2008) and continued in the Thomas Dunne-published Internecine (2010), which Publisher’s Weekly called “a smart new thriller … hip, hardboiled entertainment.”
Schow lives in the Hollywood Hills (right under the sign) in a 1926 house christened Ravenseye.