Joe R. Lansdale Guest Blog: Receiving Inspiration from Popcorn
It’s time for the final installment in our four-day guest blog from author Joe R. Lansdale, and today the topic is one that’s near and dear to many drive-in movie fans’ hearts: Popcorn!
The question posed to Joe is: From what we understand, popcorn plays a special role in your life. You write of “popcorn dreams” in one of your story collections. How did you come up with the Popcorn King (a demonic character from the first Drive-In story), and is it connected with this?
My wife used to make some the greasiest, most fattening popcorn you could imagine, and we’d eat a huge sack of it apiece. It would give me a stomach ache and bad dreams, many of which I turned into stories. In fact, The Drive-In was a dream at first, became an article for Twilight Zone Magazine, and Pat LoBrutto, who published The Magic Wagon at Doubleday, read it and asked if I’d like to do a novel from it. I hadn’t really thought of that, but I thought it was a good idea. I wrote the book and finally came to like it after it was finished and I read the proofs, but it started with a popcorn dream.
I don’t eat popcorn like that anymore. Thank goodness. Or I’d be as big as a house!
Tomorrow we’ll be posting all the details of our contest tie-in to these Drive-In blogs so stay tuned! A summary of The Complete Drive-In follows below.
Synopsis:
Friday night at the Orbit Drive-in: a circus of noise, sex, teenage hormones, B-movie blood, and popcorn. On a cool, crisp summer night, with the Texas stars shining down like rattlesnake eyes, movie-goers for the All-Night Horror Show are trapped in the drive-in by a demonic-looking comet. Then the fun begins. If the movie-goers try to leave, their bodies dissolve into goo. Cowboys are reduced to tears. Lovers quarrel. Bikini-clad women let their stomachs sag, having lost the ambition to hold them in. The world outside the six monstrous screens fades to black while the movie-goers spiral into base humanity, resorting to fighting, murdering, crucifying, and cannibalizing to survive. Part dark comedy, part horror show, Lansdale’s cult Drive-In books are as shocking and entertaining today as they were 20 years ago.
For more on the author, be sure to read Elaine Lamkin’s recent interview with Joe R. Lansdale.
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