D
aniel Kraus remembers the exact moment the idea hit him. He was 15 years
old, and he was standing on a tennis court in Fairfield, Iowa, where he
grew up. “The extent of the idea,” he says now, “was the Creature from the
Black Lagoon is put in a lab; a janitor finds him and decides to break him
out and put him in her tub. And that was it for many years.”



For any author, having a film auteur turn one of your ideas into a
critically acclaimed movie would be a career pinnacle. And yet Kraus’s next
project is just as surreal, if not more so. It was announced on February 14
that Kraus had been chosen by the estate of George Romero, the legendary

director of horror classics such as Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, to finish a novel the filmmaker left behind before his death in 2017.

So when Kraus mentioned his janitor-meets-creature idea, Del Toro was

immediately intrigued, but Kraus steered the conversation back to Trollhunters, the project at hand. “I didn’t want to be, like, pitching him ideas, so I was kind of embarrassed,” he says now, but del Toro kept coming back to the creature idea. He told Kraus it was going to be his next movie, and optioned the idea from him the same day.

The projects were produced simultaneously, and while del Toro worked on
both, Kraus kept himself completely isolated. He never visited the set or
even saw production stills in order to avoid being influenced by them. But
while each work stands alone, the coauthors thought making them too
different would be too gimmicky, like producing an alternate ending. “We
didn’t want to be quirky about it,” says Kraus. “Often books come out
before movies, but why? Why can’t it be the other way around? We just
wanted to make a piece of literature that was a work of art on its own, but
didn’t feel like it had to be showily different.”



Strickland’s wife, Lainey, who appears for only a few minutes in the movie,
is also a prominent character in the book. Having essentially become a
single mother while Strickland was away for more than a year, she chafes
against her return to the role of a doting wife, and embarks on an
ambitious endeavor of her own that will bring her into contact with Elisa’s
neighbor and friend, Giles, and Elisa herself.



In a tweet a few months later, when the movie was released in the U.S.,
Kraus marveled again at the “strange, impossible trip” from the cornfields
of Iowa to the big screen. Del Toro responded, “I often wonder: What if I
had not asked ‘What else are you working on these days?’ that cold Winter
morning six years ago? The key to this all was your seminal idea. I bless
that egg sandwich breakfast!”