JZ Murdock

I'm JZ Murdock, a storyteller based in the Pacific Northwest. I write narrative fiction and screenplays, and nonfiction, and I make independent films, narrative and documentaries. My work has won over 150 international awards across horror, political commentary, and documentary. My horror novel Death of Heaven, having almost nothing to do with religion by the way, was selected for the New York City Big Book Award for Horror.

I run Last good Nerve Productions and I'm a veteran with a university degree in psychology concentrating in phenomenology, a minor in creative writing for fiction and team script/screenwriting.

I have a public record on AI and I don't pretend otherwise. My concern isn't the technology itself—it's the people racing to control it before anyone's seriously thought through what control means.

I believe engagement beats avoidance, not because it's safe, but because stepping back hands the field entirely to the people least likely to use it well. I'm watching CEOs talk safety while building faster and calling it inevitability. For some it seems we're back to "move fast and break things." I have opinions. I'll share them when asked, and they won't be vague.

Tips are welcome - https://ko-fi.com/jzmurdock/tip

Ask me about independent filmmaking, writing horror, documentary storytelling, navigating the film festival circuit, and the future of AI.

I recently went deep on a story connecting Filipino Aswang vampire folklore to Cold War CIA psychological warfare operations. This came out of old notes I had — from a conversation in 1978 with a friend named Chris, who told me about Aswang mythology over lunch. Chris knew the lore cold: that Aswangs separate from their lower body at night to fly and feed, that the abandoned lower half is their vulnerability — smear it with garlic before dawn and the upper half can't rejoin and dies. I found that detail electrifying because it's so structurally different from Western vampires — it gives the creature a deadline, almost a bureaucratic one. What I didn't know until recently: the CIA operative Edward Lansdale had weaponized this exact mythology in the Philippines in the early 1950s against Huk guerrillas — staging a bloodless corpse with neck punctures on a jungle trail, which caused an entire Huk squadron to abandon their position. He wrote about it himself in his 1972 memoir. This connects to my old screenplay idea "Federal Righteous" — a CIA hitman with amnesia — and to the novels The Ugly American and The Quiet American, both of which were partly modeled on Lansdale. The through-line is: narrative as a weapon, and the power of a well-aimed story over firepower. This is part of my long-running interest in folklore, psywar, and the mechanics of how stories actually move people.