Trapped in Geo Bradley’s clustered world, characters face outside threats and complex dynamics within themselves.

As a kid who would rewatch horror and thriller movies, the alumnus found it exciting to experience danger and fear from a safe distance, she said. Bradley’s commitment to screenwriting unfolded when she began creating short films with friends a few years after graduating from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts in cinema studies, she said. Her script “Rot” foregrounds an antisocial trauma cleaner living with obsessive compulsions, which Bradley said she has also experienced, and was recently selected for the Blumhouse and K Period Media Screamwriting Fellowship.

“Screenwriting is this thing that I really connected with because of the narrative and character-building aspects of it,” Bradley said. “I like the idea of being at the point of conception for an idea and wrangling a story out of the infinite possibilities that you start with.”

In “Rot,” the antisocial protagonist thinks he can cope with trauma, including the early loss of his hoarder mother, through the satisfying act of cleaning biohazards – until the job takes a toll on his mental state, she said. Bradley added that she metaphorically threaded the character’s occupation with his desire to cleanse his past.

While she consumes a wide range of films, Bradley said her curiosity gravitates to scripts that focus on particular professions or isolated social ecosystems. Apart from drawing inspiration from her own life, Bradley said she likes to dive into specific worlds outside of hers. Like most of her writing, “Rot” blends personal experiences with extensive research on professions unfamiliar to her, she said.

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Most of Bradley’s screenplays explore desire, obsession and repression – psychological themes that she said elevate anxieties but are fun to untangle. Horror screenplays showcase private fear and anxiety on top of encompassing other various emotions, Bradley said, making the genre personal. She said watching terrifying situations, which people sometimes refuse to talk about, rendered openly can be cathartic and satisfying. Her own memories associated with dark subject matter, as they linger and bother her, sometimes turn into inspiration, she added.

“To me, those (psychological themes) are always the most interesting characters and the most interesting feelings to resolve,” Bradley said. “Because they lead to a lot of extreme tensions and secrets and butting of heads and things that are really interesting dramatically.”

Nicholas Nyhof, Bradley’s undergraduate colleague, first began reading her scripts in 2018, he said, and has witnessed a more pronounced voice in every screenplay Bradley puts out. While Bradley hones in on more robust storytelling, Nyhof said a key theme stays throughout her script: human connections. Bradley renders complex relationships between characters, Nyhof said, regardless of their context.

Claustrophobic space is also a common setting in Bradley’s screenplay, said Frankie Whitty, Bradley’s colleague in the graduate program. Several of Bradley’s screenplays circle the interpersonal relationships of a trio, including “Tear Us Apart,” where three teenagers of a punk band travel for their summer festival tour, Whitty added.

Bradley said she likes to challenge readers’ expectations of open space with a clustered reality, such as how “Tear Us Apart” defies the liberating feeling associated with the open air on the road when the bandmates are forced to deal with their intricate relationships while sharing a packed, dirty RV. Another of her scripts, “Almost Nowhere,” which follows two freight hoppers and their stalkers, also contrasts the open Canadian wilderness along the railroad with the moving carriage that the duo cannot escape from, she said. By constraining her characters in a physical space, Bradley said she explores how they would react and work through their conflicts as the tight settings amplify tensions between them.

While her works induce anxiety, they never overindulge dramatic effect and are emotionally grounded, Whitty added. Even the so-called villains in Bradley’s scripts, she said, can be menacing yet relatable. Whitty said Bradley’s work navigates the gray area of moral conflicts, straying away from the binary of good versus bad characters. Immersing herself in Bradley’s nuanced character-building, Whitty said she often ends up feeling invested and roots for the characters to break free from the dangers confronting them.

“She gets you anxious, stressed but engaged and wanting to read the next page,” Whitty said. “It really grips you, and you need to know how these things are going to work out. And I think that’s because her characters are so well drawn that it’s very easy to empathize with them.”

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Whitty also said she appreciates how Bradley honestly showcases the flaws of her female characters in an industry that often reduces women’s personalities. Bradley said she naturally writes about the experiences of women and queer characters in her scripts, as she has ventured through them firsthand. In fact, “Rot” is the first screenplay she wrote led by a male protagonist, Bradley added.

Last year, Bradley rewatched the first horror movie she saw, “House of Wax,” in which the grimy scene of a man peeling the skin off of his friend still haunts her. She hopes to create films that also create a lasting mental image for viewers, she said, in addition to giving them insight into how they see themselves and the world.

“What I really would love for people to feel is, first, that they’ve experienced a world that they were maybe unfamiliar with or that they find aesthetically interesting,” Bradley said. “Or they’re drawn into this new context that they didn’t know about before, and they feel like they have a grounding in that world, and they’ll remember it.”