Interview - Screenwriter Anthony D. Martinez
Anthony D. Martinez is the writer of Horror competition winning script, WAGES OF SIN.
Logline: In 1920s Harlem, a widowed numbers runner receives a mysterious poker invitation to clear her late husband’s debt , only to find herself trapped in a supernatural game run by the Devil and the Seven Deadly Sins, where every hand risks her soul.
After the competition win, we spoke with Anthony about the story and the journey to this win.
How did you first become interested in a career in screenwriting?
I came to screenwriting through an obsession with story as confrontation. I was always drawn to narratives that force characters to sit with the consequences of their choices, stories that don’t rescue people from themselves.
Film became the medium because it’s visual, communal, and unforgiving. You can’t hide in abstraction. Once I realized screenwriting allowed me to build moral pressure into a story, scene by scene, wager by wager, it became the only form that made sense for the kind of questions I wanted to ask.
Who or what inspired you to write this particular story?
The Wages of Sin came from thinking about sin not as a moral label, but as an economic system. In the script, no one is punished arbitrarily, every loss is transactional.
Louis doesn’t die because he’s evil; he dies because he accepts a deal he doesn’t fully understand. Evie doesn’t enter the game because she’s naïve; she enters because she’s competent, indebted, and convinced she can outplay the system.
That idea, that damnation often looks like opportunity, was the core inspiration. The Seven Deadly Sins aren’t metaphors here; they’re operators. They don’t tempt abstractly, they negotiate, collect, and enforce.
Each wager strips something essential: memory, appetite, identity, lineage, time. By setting the story in 1920s Harlem, a place shaped by ambition, survival, and structural inequity, the supernatural horror becomes an extension of a very real world where people are constantly asked to trade pieces of themselves just to stay afloat.
The Devil doesn’t create that system, he simply runs it efficiently.
What movies or filmmakers would you consider your greatest influences as a screenwriter?
I’m influenced by filmmakers who treat genre as architecture rather than decoration. Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Jordan Peele, and Ryan Coogler all understand restraint, how withholding information can be more disturbing than excess.
Films like Angel Heart, Se7en, Eyes Wide Shut, Sinners and The Devil’s Advocate showed me that horror is most effective when it’s patient, procedural, and morally precise. I’m less interested in shock than in inevitability, the feeling that once the first choice is made, the ending has already begun to close in.
How much planning and outlining went into your process of writing this script?
Extensive planning. This script is structured like the game it depicts. Every act escalates the stakes, every sequence has a cost, and every character who sits at the table leaves diminished in a specific way. The poker framework wasn’t aesthetic, it was structural.
I mapped out what each sin takes, how those losses echo later in the story, and how Evie’s strategy evolves as she realizes she’s not just playing cards, she’s being studied. Once the thematic spine was locked, the writing became about control: pacing scenes so the dread accumulates quietly before it ever explodes.
What advice would you give to aspiring screenwriters who are working their first script?
Finish the script, then finish another one. Don’t wait to feel ready. Don’t try to impress anyone. Write something that costs you a little to put on the page. Learn structure so you can break it intentionally, not accidentally. And trust the audience, if you do the work, they’ll follow.
Fear doesn’t come from explanation; it comes from recognition.
More about the writer:
I’m the founder of Urban Sixties Media, where I develop original film and television projects with a focus on elevated genre storytelling. My work often centers on power, morality, faith, and the systems, visible and invisible, that shape human behavior.
I’m particularly interested in stories where horror emerges not from chaos, but from order, from rules that make sense until you realize what they’re designed to extract.
In January, 2026, I was named to the International Screenwriter’s Association’s Top 25 Screenwriters to watch in 2026. I have two scripts currently in Development and Packaging with United Talent Agency. I am currently seeking representation as a writer.