Tim Lucas (born May 30, 1956) is a film critic, biographer, novelist, poet, screenwriter, blogger, and publisher/editor of the video review magazine Video Watchdog.
Lucas, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, was the only child of Marion Frank Lucas, a typesetter and musician, and the former Juanita Grace Wilson; his father died six months prior to his birth, on November 14, 1955, of a congenital heart ailment at age 33. He subsequently spent most of his childhood in the homes of various relatives and caregivers, seeing his widowed mother only on weekends, when she took him to drive-in theaters. After publishing single issues of two fanzines, he became a film critic and cartoonist for Norwood High School's newspaper The Mirror while still a freshman. He began writing professionally at the age of fifteen, when his first reviews were accepted by the influential fantasy film review Cinefantastique. He served at one of the magazine's midwestern bureaus for the next ten years.
Though Lucas never formally graduated high school, he succeeded in placing an essay in Purdue University's literary quarterly Modern Fiction Studies on the occasion of its Autumn 1981 issue, dedicated to British novelist Anthony Burgess. Jokingly, Lucas has described this accomplishment as his "honorary doctorate" because his letter of acceptance was addressed to "Dr. Timothy Lucas." His article, The Old Shelley Game: Prometheus and Predestination in Burgess's Works, was subsequently anthologized in Modern Critical Views: Anthony Burgess (1987, ISBN 0-87754-676-2), a collection "of the best criticism available upon the novels of Anthony Burgess" in the words of its editor, Harold Bloom.
Video Times
It was in 1984, while reviewing Betamax and VHS releases for the Chicago-based magazine Video Times, that "Tim pretty much invented video reviewing as a genre distinct from movie reviewing," innovating the way in which home video releases are generally reviewed today. While other writers at the time preferred to review only the films, without venturing any comment whatsoever on their presentation, Lucas focused on how films were being treated by this new medium: the transfer, the picture cropping, the completeness of the source element. Pleased with his work, the editors of Video Times hired him to edit and co-author a series of twelve paperback video guides published in the summer and winter of 1985 by Signet Books. Of these, he wrote the introductions to all twelve and the entirety of four: Movie Classics, Horror, Science Fiction & Fantasy and Mystery & Suspense. The books, his first as a published author, were formally credited to "The Editors of Video Times" with Lucas receiving credit only on the copyright pages.
Video Watchdog
In October 1985, Video Times published the first installment of a new Lucas column, Video Watchdog, in which he investigated the changes made to various films (usually horror, cult and fantastic) when they appeared on video. With the dissolution of Video Times in 1986, the column resurfaced as a shot-on-video featurette, hosted and narrated by Lucas, in Pacific Arts Corporation's one-shot video-magazine-on-video experiment Overview, produced by Michael Nesmith. Video Watchdog was subsequently reborn in the pages of the Fangoria spin-off Gorezone, where it regularly appeared from 1988 to 1992. These early Watchdog columns were later collected with other relevant material in The Video Watchdog Book (1992, ISBN 0-9633756-0-1).
With his wife Donna Lucas, Lucas launched Video Watchdog as a separate magazine in June 1990 with a focus on extremely detailed articles that made it a key source of serious film criticism. Video Watchdog added full color covers with #13 (September/October 1992), increased its frequency from bimonthly to monthly with #55 (January 2000), and changed to a full interior color format with its 100th issue (October 2003). The magazine's unique approach to reviewing home video releases has since been widely adopted as the norm, especially by online critics. Its contributors include many renowned authors of film reportage and also fiction, including Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, David J. Schow and Douglas E. Winter.
Video Watchdog won the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award as Best Magazine every year from 2002 through 2006, the first five years the award was presented.
Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark
Lucas's critical biography Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (ISBN 0-9633756-1-X), a vast work thirty-two years in preparation, with a special introduction penned by Martin Scorsese, was published in August 2007 by Video Watchdog. This 800,000-word mammoth received words of praise from such filmmakers as Guillermo del Toro, Joe Dante and Martin Scorsese, and won numerous awards. It was honored as Best Book of 2007 by The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards and the Sex Gore Mutants website, as an Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal winner in the Performing Arts category, and The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films recognized Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark by having actor John Saxon present Lucas and his wife Donna with the rarely-presented Saturn Award for Special Achievement. In November 2008, the book also received the International Horror Guild Award as the best Non-fiction work of 2007.
Videodrome
Lucas' most recent work of nonfiction, Videodrome, a study of the 1983 David Cronenberg film, inaugurated the new Studies in the Horror Film line from Centipede Press in September 2008. The book is an amalgam of Lucas' previously unpublished production history, written in 1983, and new chapters encompassing essay, criticism, and personal memoir.
Video WatchBlog and other writing
From October 2005 to February 2009, Lucas supplemented his editorial duties with Video WatchBlog, a popular essay blog that touches on film, music and literary as well as personal subjects; NoZone, a DVD column for the British monthly Sight and Sound; and frequent contributions of liner notes, audio commentaries and archival materials to DVD releases. Video WatchBlog received the Rondo Award for Best Website/Blog in 2007 and Best Blog in 2009. Lucas officially retired his blog on February 26, 2009 but continues to use the space to make announcements pertaining to Video Watchdog magazine and his other professional activities.
Other film-related books featuring his work are The Book of Lists: Horror (edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison and Scott Bradley), Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (edited by Ellen Datlow), If Looks Could Kill (edited by Marketa Uhlirova), The Famous Monsters Chronicles (edited by Dennis Daniel), Horror: Another 100 Best Books (edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman), The BFI Companion to Horror (edited by Kim Newman), The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg (edited by Piers Handling), The Eyeball Companion (edited by Stephen Thrower), The Hong Kong Filmography by John Charles (with a foreword by Lucas), José Mojica Marins: 50 anos de carreira (edited by Eugenio Puppo) and Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco.
From 1988 to 1992, Lucas contributed a number of comics stories to Stephen R. Bissette's graphic horror anthology Taboo, including three stories that formed the genesis of his first novel, Throat Sprockets, two ("Throat Sprockets", "Transylvania mon amour") illustrated by Mike Hoffman and the last ("The Disaster Area") drawn by David Lloyd. Lucas' other Taboo stories were "Sweet Nothings" (illustrated by Simonida Perica-Uth) and "Blue Angel" (illustrated by Stephen Blue).
In 2006, Lucas became a published poet when he placed several poems in the Manchester, England-based journal The Ugly Tree. They appeared in issues #13 ("The Breakfast Bell", "Mario Bava" and "Think of the Things You Could Drop in Black Ink") and #14 ("Crapulous Elektra").
Lucas has also enjoyed critical success as a novelist. Throat Sprockets (1994, ISBN 0-385-31290-3), the fulfillment of an uncompleted graphic novel serialized in Taboo, is about a man whose life is altered by a chance encounter with an erotic and disturbing film of mysterious origin. It was singled out as the year's best first novel in Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and was chosen by novelist Tananarive Due for inclusion in Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005, ISBN 0-7867-1577-4). In October 2006, Rue Morgue magazine included Throat Sprockets on a list of 50 essential alternative horror novels.
After completing work on his Bava magnum opus, Lucas ended his decade-long hiatus from fiction with A Gospel of Dracula (2005, ISBN 0-7432-4354-4), a complement to Bram Stoker's Dracula that focuses on the character of Renfield and how the circumstances of his tragic past predisposed him to become the ideal pawn for the Lord of the Undead.
Lucas has written a number of screenplays, beginning in the late 1980s with two exploratory drafts of Naked Lunch written as a favor to writer-director David Cronenberg. These unproduced drafts introduced the idea of combining scenes from the novel by William S. Burroughs with scenes from the author's personal life, including the infamous "William Tell incident," which Cronenberg retained when writing his own screenplay for the feature film produced in 1991. Lucas' most recent screenplays are The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes (co-written with Charlie Largent), a comedy about the filming of Roger Corman's 1967 film The Trip (currently optioned by Metaluna Productions for director Joe Dante), and Scars & Stripes (written with E. Yarber), an original horror script (currently optioned by Livestock Entertainment).
According to an interview in the Oregon-based fanzine Sinister Press, Lucas is presently scripting Me and the Orgone, based on Orson Bean's 1971 book about his experiences in Reichian therapy and also The Weight of Salt and Soul, an original screenplay based on the life of Ishi written in collaboration with the artist Diane Pfister.
In 2007, Lucas won in three different categories of The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards: Best Writer, Best Magazine (Video Watchdog, its fifth annual win in this category) and Best Website (Video WatchBlog). He continued his winning streak as Best Writer in 2008 and 2009.
