Roberto Alvarenga grew up in the Bronx, New York. He is the eldest son of Mauricio Alvarenga and Alice Toro, a very caring and hardworking couple from El Salvador and Puerto Rico respectively.
Growing up in the ’80s, Roberto’s parents worked hard to make ends meet so escape from the harsh landscape of the city came when Mauricio took Roberto and his two younger brothers to the local movie theater on the weekends. It was then that the films from such directors as Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Rob Reiner, inspired Roberto to learn more about filmmaking.
Convinced he had to get a traditional education to achieve financial success in business, Roberto graduated in 1998 with a Bachelor’s degree in International Business and in 2001 a Master’s Degree in Business Administration but the love for films never left him. Two years after finishing his MBA program, he enrolled in New York Film Academy for a summer certification program to learn about screenwriting. In 2016, Roberto returned to school at Southern New Hampshire University for his second master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing.
He wrote his first screenplay during slow shifts working at a gym part-time. That screenplay was not very good but it would ignite a 15-year writing journey that produced several short scripts, a few feature screenplays, and a couple of nondescript short films. Roberto became enamored with the horror genre, drawing new inspiration from the works based on authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz as well as films by John Carpenter and Stanley Kubrick.
Since then Roberto has had screenplays recognized in prominent screenplay competitions:
In 2015, his supernatural horror feature screenplay THAT NIGHT AT THE BAR was a quarterfinalist in The Blue Cat Screenplay Competition.
In 2020, Roberto’s horror short MICHELLE’S GRIFFIN place in the quarterfinals of the inaugural Killer Shorts Screenplay Competition and earned a semifinalist finish in the WeScreenplay Shorts Contest.
In 2022, His short horror story THE DEVIL TOOK THE CALL has so far placed in the quarterfinals of The Script Lab Free Screenplay Contest and in the ScreenWriter’s Network Short Film Screenplay Competition Spring 2022
Roberto writes horror stories that combine the supernatural with fantasy and gore. He aspires to become the next Guillermo Del Toro. Roberto currently lives in New City, New York with his wife Samantha and their two daughters, Ellie and Cami.