Case study
How Killer Shorts rebuilt its screenplay contest and launched The Scream List with GravityKit
When the platform that ran the back end of the Killer Shorts horror screenplay competition shut down, contest director Alison Parker had to rebuild her entire submission and evaluation pipeline from scratch. Using Gravity Forms and GravityView, she brought contest submissions, feedback orders, and reader scorecards in-house on her own site, then went further and launched The Scream List, a live-updated directory that puts top-rated horror scripts in front of industry decision-makers.
Meet Alison Parker
Alison Parker is the contest director of Killer Shorts, a horror writing competition and feedback service for writers. Her background is in writing, filmmaking, and creative entrepreneurship, with a particular love for horror and the people who make it.
Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Alison directed and produced her own short films for many years and became involved in the city’s independent film community. That experience showed her how much community, collaboration, and the right connections matter for emerging filmmakers trying to find their people.
She founded Killer Shorts to build something genuinely useful for horror writers, not just another screenplay competition. What started as a small independent contest has grown into an international program with thousands of submissions and a passionate community of horror writers and filmmakers.
Discovering GravityKit
Killer Shorts relied on Coverfly to handle all of its backend contest management. When Coverfly shut down, Alison was left scrambling to build a replacement on her own site.
A fellow contest director recommended Gravity Forms for accepting submissions. I had never heard of it, but after falling down a YouTube tutorial rabbit hole, I quickly realized it was the exact tool I’d been searching for.
Gravity Forms solved the intake side. GravityView solved the other half of the problem: displaying and managing all of that submission data on the front end without writing code. Alison doesn’t consider herself particularly tech-savvy, which made that no-code path the deciding factor. Using Gravity Forms and GravityView, she was able to build a solution on the Killer Shorts site that, in her words, “improves upon our old platform.”
Building with GravityKit
Killer Shorts now runs its whole operation on Gravity Forms and GravityKit: contest submissions, feedback orders, reader scorecard submissions, and entry management. Payments run through the Gravity Forms Stripe and PayPal Checkout add-ons, coupons are handled with the Coupons Add-On, submissions flow out to Zapier, and documents are generated with Gravity PDF.
GravityKit powers the Killer Shorts Script Directory, a searchable archive of award-winning scripts from past seasons where industry professionals can filter by category and placement, search by keyword, and request scripts directly. Editor’s picks are highlighted at the top using Featured Entries.
The directory uses GravityView along with the DIY Layout, Advanced Filter, Featured Entries, Multiple Forms, and Dashboard Views extensions.
The Scream List
The project Alison is most excited about is The Scream List, an idea she had been carrying since 2019. It’s a live-updated directory of top horror short screenplays that earned a “Recommend” score through the Killer Shorts coverage service.
GravityView made it possible to bring The Scream List to life, a long-held vision of mine since 2019.
Built with Gravity Forms and GravityView, the page displays the top 20 scripts sorted by submission date. Each entry shows the script’s title, format, genre, page count, and logline. Visitors can browse the loglines and click Request to send a “Request to Read” through a pre-populated Gravity Forms form that routes directly to the screenwriter.
The impact
For Alison, the biggest change is ownership. Bringing the pipeline in-house gave Killer Shorts full platform independence, so the contest no longer depends on a third-party service that could disappear.
GravityKit saved my business. When Coverfly shut down, I had no idea how I was going to run our contest. GravityKit not only replaced them, but opened up entirely new possibilities.
Beyond streamlining day-to-day contest administration, The Scream List has become an automated script-request ecosystem that generates real career opportunities for the writers Killer Shorts serves. Alison says it has bridged the gap between emerging writers and industry decision-makers, leading to script options, podcast adaptations, and managerial representation.
She also credits the GravityKit support team with helping her get there.
Whenever I hit a wall, [GravityKit’s] support team was incredibly receptive to feedback. They have even implemented site updates based directly on my suggestions!
Alison plans to keep building on GravityKit. Further down the line, she wants to add a more social community aspect to the Killer Shorts website.
Would she recommend GravityKit to other WordPress builders?
100%. GravityKit can do it all. Invest in professional tools to operate at a higher level and you won’t regret it.
Takeaways
Killer Shorts shows what a non-developer can build when a critical platform disappears. Rather than looking for another hosted contest service, Alison rebuilt the whole pipeline on her own WordPress site with Gravity Forms and GravityKit, and came out ahead: full ownership of her operations, and The Scream List, a directory that turns submission data into real opportunities for writers. Two things stand out:
- No-code doesn’t mean basic: Submissions, payments, evaluation, and a public directory, all built without custom development.
- Support that acts on feedback matters: It’s what got Alison past the walls she hit along the way.
Ready to get
started?
GravityKit’s integrated toolkit of Gravity Forms add-ons transforms your data into actionable applications.
Browse more case studies
Think:Kids
Leadpal
Jacksonville Port Authority
Princeton University
South Florida Web Advisors
NSSL
Dragonfly
West Fork School District
HappyTree IT
Mediebruket
Bet Hannon
Experience Solutions
Slight Revision
LifterLMS
Jamie Madden
GCPE
Rochelle Victor
43Folders
Nile Flores
