Tim Lucas
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Tim Lucas is a film critic, biographer, novelist, blogger, and publisher/editor of the video review magazine Video Watchdog.
Born May 30, 1956 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Lucas (according to autobiographic articles written for The Famous Monsters Chronicles and the 50th issue of Video Watchdog) spent most of his childhood in the homes of 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 15, when his first reviews were accepted by the influential fantasy film review Cinefantastique. He served as 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." 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.
It was in 1984, while reviewing Beta and VHS releases for the Chicago-based magazine Video Times, that (as New York Times critic Dave Kehr wrote in a December 23, 2005 blog entry) "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.
In October of 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, and Douglas E. Winter.
Lucas's critical biography Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (ISBN 0-9633756-1-X), a vast work 32 years in preparation with a special introduction penned by Martin Scorsese, was published in August 2007 by Video Watchdog. This 800,000-word mammoth 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 Lucas has been announced as the recipient of the rarely-presented Saturn Award for Special Achievement. His next work of non-fiction, Videodrome, a study of the 1983 David Cronenberg film, will inaugurate the new "Studies in the Horror Film" line from Millipede Press in the Summer of 2008.
Today, Lucas supplements 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. Other film-related books featuring his work include 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), and Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco.
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 Stephen R. Bissette's 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). After completing work on his Bava magnum opus, Lucas ended his decade-long hiatus from fiction with The Book of Renfield: 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 Un-dead. In October 2006, Rue Morgue magazine included Throat Sprockets on a list of 50 essential alternative horror novels.
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) of 2006. He repeated his Best Writer win in 2008. Though it lost to Joe Dante's Trailers from Hell website in the Best Website/Blog category, runner-up Video WatchBlog remained the competition's top-voted blog.
