Daniel Kraus really likes to work. Kraus, 34, is both a published horror novelist and a filmmaker, not to mention an associate editor of Booklist, and he marvels at how busy he is. “Mostly,” he says, “I blame my various careers on a screwed-up brain that, somewhere along the line, fused together the receptors for pleasure and work.”
In high school Kraus commandeered his dad’s mini-VHS camera and began making short horror movies. Then he remade dozens of Hollywood pictures, starting with Misery and including Reservoir Dogs, The Blob, and The Godfather. He cast his friends and put up posters to announce his screenings, which were usually in someone’s living room. When Fairfield got a public access TV station, he even got some of his movies shown on it.
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Kraus entered the University of Iowa in 1993 thinking he’d become a novelist. The first period of his first day of school, he found himself listening to Holstein introduce his class on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Kraus remembers the professor as “intimidating as hell,” owing to “his brilliance, his confidence, and, on occasion, his anger.” Even so, Kraus says, Holstein taught him “more about writing than any writing or English teachers. While they were going through motions I’d gone through on my own in high school, he would analyze text and make me look at my own writing in a more nuanced way and think about layers to narrative and symbolism. He’s the passionate, challenging, inspirational teacher you dream about getting.”
For the next three years, while Kraus was writing articles, mostly about film, for Gadfly, Salon, Maxim, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy, he also tailed Hewett. He captured the sheriff placating a church group riled up over a nudist camp, apprehending a near-naked fugitive in the woods, and so close to throwing up over a fatal stabbing that he made Kraus turn off the camera.
While making Musician Kraus rediscovered his itch to write novels and began work on one. Inspired by Ray Bradbury and, as ever, Stephen King, The Monster Variations tells the story of small-town kids on summer vacation who defy a curfew meant to protect them from whoever it is driving around in a truck running down boys. Random House published the book last year.
Shaven-headed and fit at 72, Holstein delivers his lectures with the cadences and profanity of a drill sergeant. A marathoner, he runs hard, lifts weights, and tests his marksmanship by firing at cans with his son Joshua, an army veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The editing of Preacher will have to wait until he finishes his third novel. “As a vacation from the books, I make the movies,” Kraus says.
Sheriff Mon 5/17, 8:15 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, $10
Musician
Thu 5/20, 8:45 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, $10
