Good horror stories are hard to come by, often we are left with over dramatized clichés like The Happening, The Wicker Man, or The Mist. I have unfortunately seen all of those terrible terrible films, The Mist being especially bad. If you have seen The Mist then you know what I am talking about when I say the ending to that movie was one of the worst decisions I have ever seen anyone make in a film ever.
With all these bad horror stories going on, it's good to see something original break onto the scene. So original in fact, it started on Reddit.
In 2011, Dathan Auerbach posted on Reddit (in the r/nosleep sub-page) the begging of a short story that would quickly gain in popularity.
-It started when he was six years old, a series of unexplainable footsteps—“muffled, rhythmic beats” gently thumping on the carpeted floor. They woke him up every night, jolting his childish imagination and bringing him “back to consciousness, terrified.”
The post "Footsteps" gained nearly 3,000 upvotes and launched Auerbach, a 27-year-old philosophy teacher, down a path that would forever change his life. He, along with help from Kickstarter, has now chronicled and expanded his short story into a full length book titled Penpal. You can buy the book here.
Auerbach's story didn't stop there however. He is now in the works of landing a movie deal with Rich Middlemas, an Oscar winning producer from Undefeated. He blames the Internet for his success.
“The Internet has opened up doors that were seemingly hermetically sealed for a lot of people,” Auerbach said. “This means there’s a lot more content out there, for better or worse, but the fact of the matter is that for the first time in a long time the public has tremendous control over what gets seen and what rises to the top, and there’s no way that’s a bad thing. There are a lot of talented people out there without an agent or publisher, and now they have the ability to get their work in front of people whether a publisher thinks it’s economically viable or not.”
Sidenote: one of my roommates does script coverage regularly and he likes what you wrote.