In 1999, Dalton sold his first screenplay to the direct-to-DVD market and sold more than 40 screenplays over the next 20 years, with more than two dozen becoming films on television, at film festivals, on streaming, on video store shelves and in dollar bins. In 2018 Dalton moved to writer/director with The Girl in the Crawlspace while continuing to write screenplays for other genre directors. He was born in Muncie, Indiana. In 1987, he was the first scriptwriter to win a David Letterman Telecommunications Scholarship from Ball State.