We are extremely pleased to introduce our Guest of Honor for 2018!

Chiaki J. Konaka was born in Tokyo in 1961. At an early age, he began making independent movies. In 1989, he became the screenwriter for the original video movie Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (which means "Evil Spirit"). This work was one of the first films in the "J Horror" movement, and influenced Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Shimizu, and others. Chiaki continued to write horror screenplays (Scary True Stories: Ten Haunting Tales from the Japanese Underground, Evil Dead Trap 2, and more) and published several books, including two about J Horror 's methodology - Charmed by Fear: Fundamental Rules of Horror Films (2003), Etiquette of Fear: Horror Cinema Technology. His novel, Marebito, was adapted to screen in 2004. Konaka wrote the screenplay and the film was directed by Takashi Shimizu.

Since then, he has written more than 200 scripts encompassing horror, SF series, movies, TV dramas, and animation. He is well known as screenwriter for "Ultraman Gaia", "serial experiments lain", "TEXHNOLYZE", "Devil Lady", "Bubble Gum Crisis Tokyo 2040", "Ghost Hound", and "Mononoke". Konaka is a well known to fans for putting Lovecraftian and Mythos elements in many of his works (notably "Ultraman Tiga", "Digimon Adventure 02", "Digimon Tamers", "THE Big-O", "MAREBITO", "GR Giant Robo"). In 1992, he worked on the a Japanese film adaptation of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". In 2002, he wrote the mythos novel Terror Rate, which was translated to  English in the anthology Inverted Kingdom, edited by Ken Asamatsu. His vampire novella will be translated into English in 2019.