Writer David Johnson has his first movie coming out this weekend – the horror-thriller Orphan. In this interview Johnson talks about writing the script for the movie as well as some interesting notes about his background. Some excerpts:

TF: A movie like this seems to stem from a history of horror and suspense thrillers, did you pick up a lot of influences from other films for the script?

DJ: I’d always been a horror fan. I actually started with suspense though, my family got me hooked on a lot of Hitchcock films such as Psycho and The Birds and those kinds of movies. For Orphan, I had one film in mind when writing, which was Shadow of a Doubt.

That film had the great idea that “the menace” wasn’t always a guy with a chainsaw, but rather crazy uncle charlie who only you know is crazy. In this case, it’s our main character Kate (Vera Farmiga), who learns about the true horror.

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TF: You worked with legendary writer/director/producer Frank Darabont for a while. Did you pick up a lot from working with him?

DJ: Oh, yeah. I was Frank’s assistant for five years and he sort of treated it as a student/teacher relationship. Like a graduate film school for me. I didn’t work with him on Orphan in particular, but in my writing in general, I was heavily influenced by his style of writing and especially his first take on characters in a story.

Here’s the trailer for Orphan: