Drew Daywalt (born January 5, 1970), is an American author and filmmaker. He is best known for writing the best-selling children's picture book The Day the Crayons Quit, and its sequel The Day the Crayons Came Home, both illustrated by Oliver Jeffers. Daywalt is also known for writing scripts for American television and Hollywood studio films, and for creating a number of short horror films for release on the internet.
Early life
Drew Daywalt was born in Hudson, Ohio, on January 5, 1970, the youngest of six children, to Charlene (née Bable) and Charles Daywalt. "I grew up in a house in Hudson, Ohio, that was notoriously haunted. It looked like 'The Munsters.'" The house had a storied reputation in the local area, having supposedly been a stagecoach stop, a brothel, and a respite on the Underground Railroad at various times.
Daywalt's older brothers, however unintentionally, fostered his interest in scary stories. He relates, "My older brothers would always let me stay up way too late on Friday nights, drink Mountain Dew, watch horror movies. I was always getting into their comic books ... Heavy Metal and Creepy and Tales from the Crypt. Also, at the time – this is going back to the mid 70s, almost into the early 80s – they were reading Tolkien and lot of that, so I had that as one side of my experiences. Growing up in a haunted house, watching horror movies with my older brothers and getting into their stash of horror magazines and comic books."
During the same period, Daywalt's mother, Charlene, would often come home from work and read to him from the works of well-known children's authors, like Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak. "I was constantly being inundated by other worlds", said Daywalt. "A lot of what I do, whether it's either horror or children's lit, comes from that period in my life."
The author/filmmaker said he first realized that books and movies "were actually written and created by other human beings" at the age of 7. "It was 1977. Summer. And my big sister had taken me to see the first Star Wars film. As the credits rolled at the end, and I sat there trying to catch my breath and fully digest what I'd seen, I saw the screenplay credit. I knew then that I wanted to tell stories."
Daywalt's family eventually moved to nearby Stow, Ohio, where he attended Highland Elementary School. After graduating from Stow-Munroe Falls High School in 1988, Daywalt pursued creative writing at Emerson College in Boston.
"My concentrations were in screenwriting and children's literature", Daywalt has stated. "Because at the time, my big plan was: if I really know children's literature and the history of fairy tales, and storytelling for kids in a meaningful and deep way, and I also learn screenwriting, I can go and work with Disney. That was my goal, was to get out [to Los Angeles] and work with Disney and Warner Brothers and write children's animation for TV and for film."
Career
Filmmaking
Daywalt first achieved fame writing and directing short films with the horror filmmaking YouTube channel Fewdio, co-founded by Daywalt in 2007. In a 2009 interview with Dread Central, Daywalt described the origins of Fewdio, saying, "We were all a little bit burned out on dealing with studio execs around the time the strike hit. I had been a script writer for 17 years, and I'd written for and rewritten everyone in town so I was ready for something different. We had done the Axe Body campaign – 'How Dirty Boys Get Clean' – that pretty much set us up financially so we could get through the strike. That's when we decided to do what we loved as children: make horror films. We really wanted to do something for ourselves. I read everything I could about cameras and saved up a thousand bucks, and we shot our first short, 'Cursed.'" Daywalt made numerous shorts with Fewdio, and his 2009 horror short "Bedfellows" won the Chiller-Eyegore Award for Best Short Film. Drew Grant of Salon described Daywalt's work with the group as "the first really great horror films for the Internet era." The group disbanded in 2010, however, and Daywalt went on to found his own YouTube channel, Daywalt Fear Factory.
In 2012, Daywalt directed his first feature-length film, the made-for-television fantasy horror film Red Clover (released as Leprechaun's Revenge) for SyFy Channel. The film was met with mixed to negative reviews.