Thanks to a referral from an online acquaintance, I was asked to moderate a dialog with bestselling author Daniel Kraus at the newly re-opened River Oaks Theater in Houston. His recent novel, Pay the Piper, is a collaboration with the late horror director George A. Romero. Kraus found the half-finished manuscript among the papers in Romero’s archives in Pittsburgh. He had previously completed Romero’s other novel The Living Dead by invitation of the Romero trust, so he was a natural to complete this one, too.
No one knew Pay the Piper existed. It’s something of a departure for Romero in that it features no zombies. Instead, it is set in a small town in the Louisiana bayou where an ancient evil has decided its time for the descendants of pirates and slave traders to pay the ultimate price for the sins of their ancestors while someone else is intent on buying up all the properties. The novel has a touch of Stephen King’s It, a soupçon of Bradbury by way of a carnival, more than a dash of Lovecraft, and so much more.
I was thrilled by the invitation, especially since the featured film to follow our palaver was Creepshow, which was the first movie I ever rented on VHS after I got a VCR in 1984. (I like to say that the front-loading Panasonic—which weighs a ton, has thirteen push-button channel selectors, each with its own fine-tuning button, and a “remote” that is only somewhat remote in that it is attached by a cable—still works while several of its replacements have come and gone over the years. I never got to see Creepshow on the big screen when it first came out, so this was a treat.
The River Oaks Theater has been around since 1939. It is a historic landmark and a throwback to vintage cinemas, with curtains, a lowering silver screen, golden statuary embedded in the walls, and an overall ambiance that reminds me of the Capitol Theatre in Dalhousie, N.B., where I grew up. Art Deco style, probably. There are three screens—a large one downstairs and two smaller ones upstairs—and the downstairs screen had just been upgraded to a larger one before this event. It’s a dine-in theater, where you can place rather posh food orders from your seat.
Brazos Books co-sponsored the event, providing books for sale and signing at a table in the lobby. When I got there, Artistic Director Rob Saucedo briefed me on the agenda. There was a table on the stage where Kraus and I could sit while we talked. We each also got a can of Pay the Piper branded IPA (from Orono, Maine!) to wet our whistles. Since Kraus was the guest of honor, I did my best to keep the discussion focused on him and his work, as well as his interest in Romero.
I had done my due diligence, researching Kraus enough to be able to ask hopefully intelligent questions (you can see my scribbled notes in the picture above, under the mike), but we also dug into Creepshow since that was what the audience was also there to see.
The movie holds up pretty well for its age—42 years—and it looks great on the big silver screen. The two stories that still work the best, I think, are Something to Tide You Over (despite some laughably ancient A/V tech) and The Crate. The cast is overall excellent, especially pre-Cheers Ted Danson and pre-Airplane Leslie Nielsen. Kraus said he’d heard from Romero that King didn’t like Viveca Lindfors’s performance as Bedelia in Father’s Day but I think it works better than Ed Harris’s odd dance maneuvers! (Whatever happened to Elizabeth Regan, who played Harris’s wife?)
I’d been on the road since before 5 am because I had to take a business trip to Galveston, a 90-mile drive, so I was pretty tired when They’re Creeping Up on You! came on, so I may actually have dozed off a couple of times during that segment. All in all, though, it was a fun evening.
