Catherine Smyth-McMullen is an award-winning film and tv screenwriter, with a focus on genre.

Catherine’s feature The Other Lamb held its world premiere at TIFF 2019 as a Special Presentation, garnering rave reviews — The Hollywood Reporter calling it “a visionary tale… that hits the sweet spot between The Handmaid’s Tale and cult horror” and Slash Film praising it as  “a fierce and striking depiction of resiliency… a screenplay that possesses a poignant relevancy which has reverberated throughout history.” 

The Other Lamb has since screened in competition at BFI London and San Sebastian, as well as at acclaimed genre-festival Fantastic Fest. The script was previously on the 2017 Black List, The Hit List, and The Blood List as one of the year’s best unproduced scripts, and was nominated for an Australian Writers Guild Award for ‘Best Feature Adaptation’. Produced by Rumble Films’ Stephanie Wilcox and David Lancaster (Drive, Whiplash, Nightcrawler), IFC Midnight released the film theatrically and digitally in 2020.

Catherine has sold and set-up pilots with SyFy, Warner Bros., Netflix, AMC and eOne. She was a writer on the first season of Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed comic The Sandman for Netflix, writing the acclaimed anthology episode ‘Dream Of A Thousand Cats / Calliope’. She was a writer and consulting producer on Two Sentence Horror Stories for The CW, writing the premiere episode.

Catherine has also worked extensively in Australian rooms and development as a writer, script editor and script producer. She was a writer on the second season of the award-winning Australian drama series Bloom. Her original digital short Parked was produced by Princess Pictures, and funded by Screen Australia and YouTube.

Catherine’s work has won or been shortlisted for many other national and international awards. Her pilot Awake won one of science-fiction’s top honors, the John Hinde Award from the Australian Writers’ Guild. She won the Ustinov Award for Television Writing from the International Emmys for her pilot Living Metal, which was also nominated for the Australian Writers’ Guild Monte Miller Award. Her feature screenplay Driven was a Semifinalist in the 2016 Academy Nicholl Screenwriting Awards. She was on the 2017 Young & Hungry List of up-and-coming screenwriters, and the 2016 Inside Film List as one of the Australian screen industry’s ‘Rising Talents’. She also wrote the adaption of Wentworth VR, which won the Screen Producers Australia Best Interactive or Game Production of the Year 2018.

Before becoming a screenwriter, Catherine worked extensively as a production freelancer in various departments. Her professional credits include HBO’s The Leftovers, Syfy series Hunters and Childhood’s End, teen series Nowhere Boys, unscripted shows Real Housewives of Melbourne and Formal Wars, and feature films Cut Snake and Paper Planes.

On her upcoming slate, she is currently in development on a series for First Option and Dreamchaser, as well as a book series adaption with producers Gale Anne Hurd and Phillip Kobylanski at Valhalla Motion Pictures (The Walking Dead, Terminator, Aliens), as well as an original pilot for AMC. She is also working on her next feature, an adaption of her own award-winning horror short story The Nest.

For a full CV please contact info@rgm.com.au.