CURRENT PROJECTS:

Deborah Voorhees has lived a colorful life—filmmaker, director, writer, journalist, editor, teacher, Hollywood B-scream starlet in Friday the 13th, and a Playboy Bunny--which has given her much fodder for her filmmaking.

Voorhees is currently in development with three feature films with her producing partner Karen Criswell, an 18-year veteran with DreamWorks studio as Vice President of operations and independent film producer.

Ruthless Games We Play: After discovering that his younger brother was a pawn in a twisted game of the rich, a troubled womanizer struggles with how far he is willing to go to avenge the death of his brother.

Dead Girl: A one-time-popular high-school swimming champion struggles to harness her superpowers and regain her life after a rare mutation turns her into an Undead Creature that her peers and townspeople fear.

I Remember Me: In this nail-biting thriller, a mother struggles to help her little girl, who suffers from flashbacks and memories of being another child in another time and place. Their quest for answers has them both face-to-face with the same killer who killed the child in her past life. This time the killer is after her again.

PAST PROJECTS:

13 FANBOY: Most recently, Voorhees directed and produced, with her partner Joel Paul Reisig, the horror thriller 13 Fanboy about an obsessed fan who stalks the real-life actresses from Friday the 13th with the intent to kill. The film opened in limited theaters and is currently on Showtime. At the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, 13 Fanboy was on the cover of Rue Morgue’s magazine, the festival’s official magazine for its festival market.

Among her other films and accomplishments:

• Voorhees directed Catching Up, an edgy-dark comedy, about a socialite, who is obsessed with murder. Catching Up has won the Award of Excellence at the Hot Springs International Horror Film Festival and is the official selection of Something Wicked Film Festival, Texas Frightmare, Palm Springs International Film Market, and Idaho Horror Film Festival.

• In 2015, Voorhees’ screenplay Genevieve was an official selection of the Beverly Hills Film Festival.

• Her short film and music video Hip Hop Hamlet was an official selection of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare Film Festival, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

• Two shorts played in 2016 at the Elsinore Shakespeare Conference in Denmark (Othello: Good Night My Sweet and Hip Hop Hamlet)

In 2014, Voorhees released her first full-length feature film Billy Shakespeare, which asks: What if William Shakespeare never existed until now? Our Modern Bard is caught in a love triangle of confused sexuality, cross-dressing, mistaken identity, and bedroom trysts. The film won the Bardie Award from The Shakespeare Standard. The quirky, off-beat film has been compared to the indie hit Waiting for Guffman and is now available on Amazon. 

The film has received many stellar reviews:

“BILLY SHAKESPEARE is a spicy little independent film by Deborah Voorhees that imagines what might happen if William Shakespeare tried to make it as a writer in today's Hollywood rather than Elizabethan England. Quirky characters, compromising situations, and the kind of deadpan humor that fans of Waiting For Guffman will recognize collide with hilarious moments of camp to create a madcap world in which young Billy just can't get a break,” writes Ellen Dostal with Broadway World.

“…hilarious campy romp,” says film critic Robert Kirchgassner with The Examiner.

“Billy Shakespeare…for any Shakespeare lover should not miss for the world,” writes Germana Maciocci, Italian film and theater critic with The Shakespeare Standard.

“No other Billy like it! He's out of the box!" writes Arje Shaw Broadway playwright

“Jason D. Johnson's interpretation of the title role is a marvel of emotional complexity. The element of comedy is at once rambunctious and bittersweet,” writes film critic Michael H. Price

“Definitely, a future cult movie like Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Sharon Stewart, fan

Voorhees also shoots music videos, which include work for international performer The Sonnet Man, Brooklyn rapper Devon Glover, who raps Shakespeare’s sonnets and soliloquies; indie rockers Gleewood, out of New Mexico; and soulful indie-Americana artist Thom Chacon.

Voorhees also shoots live concerts, theatrical productions, and dance performances. 

Before directing and writing screenplays, Voorhees worked in Hollywood as an actress for Paramount Pictures’ horror franchise Friday the 13th, Part V, CBS’s nighttime drama Dallas, NBC’s detective drama Riptide, the day-time soap Days of Our Lives, and many others. 

As a screenwriting coach, Voorhees has worked with author Hardy Roper to adapt his fast-paced book Assassination in Galveston. She edited Roper’s Saving Jake. Voorhees has also penned seven screenplays including an adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.

During her tenure as a journalist, she interviewed three government assassins extensively over a decade to create the composite lead character Jake in her unpublished fictional novel Memoirs of a Hit Man.

As an 18-year veteran journalist, she has written and edited for The Dallas Morning News, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Front Desk magazine, Modern Luxury magazine, and The Shakespeare Standard. Her career as a writer began in 1990 at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. As a 16-year veteran journalist (mostly with The Dallas Morning News), she has covered a variety of stories: a mother on death row for killing her abusive husband, a schizophrenic psyche patient at the Austin State Hospital (who’s also a nationally known folk artist), the fall of communism through the eyes of a Russian immigrant, a profile on Texas rancher Nan West (she’s good with a gun, but never goes into town unless she dons a dress), a horseback adventure through the Badlands of Mexico (she rode illegally across the border for that story), master African-American muralist John Biggers’ journey through the white art world.

After journalism, Voorhees worked as an instructor (2006-2011), teaching British and American literature and journalism in New Mexico and Texas, and Acting for Film at Eastern New Mexico University.

Voorhees is a devoted life-long student, voraciously learning all she can. While in college, Voorhees graduated magna cum laude in 1990 from Texas Woman’s University with a degree in journalism. She has also studied Shakespeare online with Professor Jonathan Bate at the University of Warwick and Professor Michael Dobson at the University of Birmingham (respectively). For more than a decade, Voorhees has been devouring all things regarding filmmaking: camera, lights, sound, editing, color grading, and much more.