I have been searching for a subject for my next Guest Appearance, and it has taken longer than I wanted. Thankfully, I had a nice conversation with a couple of members of my coffee klatch recently, and it triggered a talk about horror movies and watching them in our local theater when we were much younger.

The talk revolved around some of the movies we liked and then one thing led to another, and I could not help mentioning my movie going experiences at the Geneva Theatre (aka “the Smith Opera House”, and now more recently the “Smith Center for the Performing Arts”) when I came to Geneva as a student in 1968. I remember going to the Geneva Theatre and also the other theater in the city on Exchange Street, and initially enjoying the usual fare of mainstream movies.

My concentrated brush with horror movies started in 1978 when I and the four other founders took over the Geneva theatre and started managing it while constituting a board of directors to ultimately purchase the building for the community.

In those early days, we struggled to pay the bills partly by running second-run movies. The basic deal was that for 40% of the take, the studios let us show movies 3-6........

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