David James Schow was born in Marburg, Germany and was adopted by American parents then living in Middlesex, England.

After publishing non-fiction book and film criticism in newspapers and magazines, his first professionally published fiction was a novelette in Galileo Magazine in 1978. He spent the next decade honing his skills in the short fiction form. He won a Dimension Award from Twilight Zone Magazine (for most popular short story) in 1985 and a World Fantasy Award (best short fiction) in 1987.

He commenced screenwriting in 1989 with an uncredited dialogue polish on "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child," after which both his first teleplay and first screenplay were bought and produced (the "Freddy's Nightmares" episode "Safe Sex" and the feature "Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III" respectively).

After inventing the rubric "stalk-and-slash" in 1977 to describe the genre later simplified as "slasher films," Schow similarly coined the notorious neologism "splatterpunk" in 1986. To reflect the shifting climate of the horror aesthetic during the early 1990s, he logged 41 installments of his popular "Raving & Drooling" column for Fangoria Magazine. This and other non-fiction op-ed material was collected in the book "Wild Hairs" (2000), which won the International Horror Guild's award for best nonfiction in 2001.

Schow is the foremost authority on the 1963-65 television series "The Outer Limits." The revised, updated 1998 edition of his "Outer Limits Companion" contains everything anyone would ever care to know about this cult classic.

Schow's published canon (by 2006) includes four novels, seven collections of his short stories, five books as editor (including the three-volume "Lost Bloch" series and John Farris' "Elvisland") and a number of pseudonymously published series and tie-in paperbacks done earlier in his career.

He wrote large text supplements for such DVDs as Reservoir Dogs and From Hell, contributed to several British documentaries for BBC4 both on- and off-camera, and appears as expert witness on DVD supplements for such movies as "The Dirty Dozen," "The Green Mile," "Incubus" and "Creature from the Black Lagoon." He co-produced and filmed much of the on-location supplemental material seen on the discs for "I, Robot" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe." He also makes sneaky cameo appearances (credited and uncredited) in his own films as well as those of friends.