British screenwriter blending grounded emotional storytelling with bold, genre-driven worlds — psychological horror, folk-inflected thrillers, and gritty character drama.
Andrew Hayward is a British screenwriter known for blending grounded emotional storytelling with bold, genre-driven worlds. His work spans psychological horror, folk-inflected thrillers, and gritty character dramas — often exploring trauma, isolation, and the uncanny lurking beneath everyday life.
Before turning to screenwriting, Andrew trained and worked as a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in neuroscience and an MSc in psychology — a background that informs his interest in behaviour, perception, memory, identity, and the pressures that shape people. His screenplays include Cobra, a raw coming-of-age story set in 1980s northern England; Night Cleaner, a surreal horror-comedy rooted in working-class nightshift life; and Gregory's Game, a chilling urban legend reimagined through claustrophobic, character-driven terror.
Andrew is driven by a fascination with the invisible stories beneath the surface — ghosts, both literal and metaphorical. He often draws from real places, forgotten histories, and a very British sense of dread.
He is developing several feature projects and seeking collaborators who share a love of distinctive, emotionally resonant storytelling with teeth.
After the sudden death of his dad, a young boy is forced to live with his abusive mother and struggles to deal with school bullies. A chance encounter with a kindhearted couple offers him — and a wrecked sports car — hope of a new life.
Young Manchester street photographer Lip buys a battered vintage Nikon F3 and discovers its lens reveals more than ordinary photographs. As Lip becomes obsessed with the city’s notorious “Pusher” legend — a shadowy figure blamed for drownings and disappearances along Manchester’s canals — each photograph draws him deeper into an urban nightmare that may be anything but a myth.
Young single mother Madison “Mads” McCarthy, obsessed with the music and style of the 1980s, takes a night-cleaning job at an eerie railway depot to build a better future for her baby daughter. After a bizarre induction with a foul-mouthed cleaning crew, Mads discovers the small print: the Night Cleaner works alone. Left among deserted trains with only her Walkman and imagination for company, her first shift begins slipping into an increasingly strange and threatening world where music, fantasy and reality collide.
During a modern air raid on London, eight-year-old Flo is separated from her parents and trapped in the Underground, where she meets Jack — a boy from the Blitz who never made it back to the surface. As the tunnels begin to fracture time, stillness brings safety while movement destabilises reality, and Flo must navigate a collapsing overlap of past and present to find her way back to her mother.
In a brutal post-civilisation wasteland ruled by the wealthy Builders, rival Greaser clans send motorcycle gladiators into the Murderdrome — a lethal wooden arena where victory promises freedom and defeat means death. When Wreckers captain Dex is killed in the race, his twin children Rho and Chi are torn apart, setting them on radically different paths through a society built on spectacle, servitude and blood.
A forbidden children’s game hidden beneath a Midlands canal system awakens an ancient force tied to grief, shame and collective memory. Beginning with six teenagers trapped in haunted canal tunnels, the trilogy expands as Dudley council turns the legend into a tourist attraction and a haunted livestream ultimately spreads Gregory’s rules nationwide — transforming a local ghost story into a national nightmare.
An evil elevator with psionic powers and the deeply disturbed young man who operates it conspire to kill anyone who dares cross them.
After discarding his medication, a mentally disturbed porter, plagued by myriad malevolent voices and visions, murders passengers and crew aboard a sleeper train.
Inspired by a modern art exhibition, a grief-stricken reverend attempts to create the world's first nativity to use real humans — before the ghosts of his wife and daughter can stop him.
A school teacher intervenes when she suspects the evil entity that terrorized her childhood has returned to haunt her star pupil.
A 70-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease discovers a key that unlocks a door to a macabre secret.
After crossing paths at a road traffic accident, an angel and demon must withstand mysterious forces if their forbidden love affair is to survive.
In the wild west of England, an unemployed gamer turns his life around by going up against the best cowboy assassins in town. The problem is, he's a lousy shot — and his childhood crush has been sent to kill him.
In a world where death is processed like paperwork, two operatives must guide the deceased through a system that allows no mistakes — only corrections. Every episode begins with a death: the outcome is fixed, but the process is not.
Five legendary assassins, now retired and forgotten, live quietly in Dudley and reluctantly return to work while navigating ordinary British life. Each case is handled with deadpan professionalism: Dennis logs the crime, the team assembles at the Broken Badger, and the problem is quietly concluded before anyone knows they were there.
Set inside the systems that quietly organise modern life, Conclusion Status follows a different institution in each standalone story as procedures built to remove uncertainty begin replacing human judgement. Across hospitals, helplines, corporate offices, laboratories, logistics networks and government systems, traces of an elusive administrative doctrine called The Long Order begin to surface. The same unsettling pattern appears everywhere: when a system works perfectly, the people inside it may become the problem it decides to correct.
Available for feature, short, and rewrite work.