We don’t always get the chance to sit down with someone who has done the work from nearly every angle. Eric Miller is an author, screenwriter, producer, and editor of multiple genre anthologies (one of which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award). He has written six produced screenplays, done uncredited rewrites on others, and is probably best known in cult circles for the Sci-Fi Channel film Ice Spiders.
His debut novel, Whatever Happened to Uncle Ed (2025), is the latest thing to come out of a career built on horror, humor, and a lifelong love for the darker side of genre fiction.
We sat down with him for a wide-ranging conversation. We got a book recommendation list that could honestly bury you, some genuinely sharp takes on the craft, and a lot of candid, real talk about what it looks and feels like to be a writer across multiple formats. Here is what stood out.
The Horror That Made Him
Miller grew up in the Midwest watching late-night television, back when there were two or three channels to choose from. He gives endless credit to Sammy Terry, one of the original horror movie hosts, and the ghoul with his rubber spider. Vincent Price. Pit and the Pendulum. The Hammer films with Christopher Lee. Those classics pulled him in first, and then he started reading.
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House showed up early. So did Robert E. Howard, who most people know only as the Conan guy but who was also a genuinely dark horror writer in his own right (and, as Miller noted, pen pals with H.P. Lovecraft).
From there, the list kept building: Poe, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. He borrowed Barker’s own line to sum up the whole philosophy: “I forbid my mind nothing.”
He actually favors Poe over Lovecraft, and he was clear about why. His take is that Lovecraft is more atmosphere than story, with exceptions; Poe is character and story first. And the story is what he keeps returning to throughout the whole conversation
A Reading List That Will Keep You Busy
More recommendations came out of this conversation than we expected. Several are worth passing along directly.
William Browning Spencer came up as a writer whom people do not talk about enough. His book Zod Wallop is about a children’s book author living in seclusion whose fictional stories turn out to be real; a man escapes from an asylum to tell him so. Resume with Monsters is, in Miller’s own words, “basically Office Space with Cthulhu.” Those both go on the list immediately.
Joe Lansdale got a strong shout-out. Nobody does weird fiction better, Miller said; if you get a chance to meet him at a signing, he is exactly the guy you want him to be. Tim Powers also came up specifically for On Stranger Tides, the official source credit on the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film. Miller’s read: considerably more of that movie came from Powers than most people realize.
And then there is Joe Abercrombie, whom Miller has clearly fallen hard for. He listened to the full first ten books on audio. He has reread them. He is currently working through The Devils. “I should just become Joe Abercrombie’s publicist,” he said, “because I talk about him more than my own stuff.” As Meaghan put it: “You are his publicist.” He did not disagree.
The Heroes and Best Served Cold came up as specific highlights within the First Law world. If you have not started there yet, apparently, now is the time.
Writing What You Know (and What You Don’t)
Miller is always watching. He pulls character traits from real people, setting ideas from places he has been, scenarios from staring out a window, and imagining the worst possible thing happening inside any given house. He talked about doing this as a kid, sitting in the back seat on long Midwest drives, looking at radar tower lights and dark suburban homes and just wondering what was over that hill.
“Monsters aren’t scary. People are scary.” He did not claim that line as his own, but he lives by it.
Ice Spiders is a useful example of the process running in a slightly different direction. He had never been skiing in his entire life when he got that job.
He called a friend who snowboarded, got the vocabulary, got the cultural texture, and wrote it. Some reviews specifically praised how accurately the film handled the skiing world. He was delighted. Honestly, so were we.
Most of what he writes is roughly 75% imagination layered over real observations, he said. That combination is what makes it feel grounded even when the spiders are the size of a bus.
Screenwriting Versus Novel Writing: Two Very Different Animals
This was one of the best parts of the conversation, and Miller was genuinely candid about both.
Screenplays have strict rules. Three-act structure, specific page counts, a balance between too much description and not enough. But the real challenge is not writing the screenplay. It is what happens to it after. Directors, producers, financiers, location managers; everyone has a note.
You have to learn, as he put it, to “take rewrites with grace.” He compared it to sending a kid off to school and watching other people shape them. You fight for the things that matter. You let other things go. And you learn (slowly, he admitted) which battles are worth fighting.
Novels are entirely different. You are the director, the producer, the art director, and the casting department all at once. Nobody is going to pull your scene because the location is not available. But that freedom means everything on the page is yours to own, which also makes it more exposed. “Your soul is much more on the plate in a novel,” he said. It is all you, and people read it with knives and forks.
His debut novel began as a short story, was adapted into a screenplay at one point, and then returned to novel form when he realized there was far more story to tell than any other format could hold. Some stories just need the space.
Horror That Means Something
Miller is not interested in horror that is just horror. He wants the thing underneath it.
He talked at length about Possum, the 2018 film by Matthew Holness (yes, the same person behind Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, which is the exact opposite emotional experience, and equally brilliant in its own way). Possum is a slow, quiet, devastating character study about a children’s puppeteer who was generationally abused. Miller has watched it multiple times. “Nothing absolutely graphic in it,” he said, “but it’s absolutely horrifying.” It stuck with him in a way that big, loud horror rarely does. If you are looking for a horror movie to watch, definitely check it out.
That same philosophy runs through Whatever Happened to Uncle Ed. At the center of it is a former high school basketball star dealing with the trauma of his past, inheriting a cursed house, and facing down the biggest bully imaginable in the climax.
Miller was bullied as a kid (not severely, he was clear about that, but enough). The book deals with child abuse and spousal abuse without turning those themes into the whole point. A light touch, handled with care. “I’m not a mental health professional,” he said, “and I’m not trying to make some big statement.” But he does not look away from those things either.
He also made the case for Kramer vs. Kramer as a horror movie (“someone’s taking your family from you, that’s horror“) and for The Silence of the Lambs as a horror movie full stop, which we are fully prepared to defend alongside him.
The Dream: Godzilla
We asked, toward the end, whether there was any franchise Miller would want to work on in any capacity.
“I would pick up trash and sweep floors to actually work on a Godzilla movie.“
He is a Toho fan first (Minus One came up and was called incredible), but he has come around on the American versions and offered a genuinely good framework for why both work: the American films are building global blockbusters; the Toho films are making something more personal and Japan-specific that still reaches the whole world. Two styles, same character, both improving.
What he loves about Godzilla is that the character functions even without a traditional personality. Godzilla is a force of nature. That was always the point. A monster born out of nuclear horror and national grief that somehow became one of the most recognized images on the planet. “If you show Godzilla to about six or eight billion people,” he said, “they instantly know what it is.” That is what staying power actually looks like.
You can find Miller’s work at bigtimebooks.com or ericmillerwrites.com. Whatever Happened to Uncle Ed is out now. His edited anthologies, including Hell Comes to Hollywood (Bram Stoker Award nominee) and the 18 Wheels series, are also available. And if you hate it? “We never met,” he said. “Put it down and go read The Blade Itself.”