Tim Lucas (born May 30, 1956) is a film critic, biographer, novelist, screenwriter, blogger, and publisher and editor of the video review magazine Video Watchdog.
Biography and early career
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. Tim Lucas 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. He began writing professionally in 1972 when he became a regular reviewer and correspondent for the influential fantasy film magazine Cinefantastique. He wrote for the magazine for 11 years.
Though Lucas did not graduate high school, he succeeded in placing an essay about Anthony Burgess in the Autumn 1981 issue Purdue University'''s literary quarterly Modern Fiction Studies. His article, The Old Shelley Game: Prometheus and Predestination in Burgess's Works, was subsequently anthologized in Modern Critical Views: Anthony Burgess (1987, ), a collection "of the best criticism available upon the novels of Anthony Burgess" in the words of its editor, Harold Bloom.
Video Times
In 1984, Lucas began reviewing Betamax and VHS releases for the Chicago-based magazine Video Times. The editors then 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 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 fantasy) 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 for a few years. These early columns were later collected with other material in The Video Watchdog Book (1992, ).
With his wife, Donna Lucas, Lucas launched Video Watchdog as a separate magazine in June 1990. 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). Its contributors include Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, David J. Schow and Douglas E. Winter.
The magazine's 20th Anniversary issue was published in June 2010. Director Quentin Tarantino praised Video Watchdog in the pages of the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano as "l'unica rivista di cinema autorevole al mondo" ("the only reliable film magazine in the world"). In October 2016, Lucas said Video Watchdog would cease publication with its 184th issue
Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark
Lucas's critical biography Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (), a vast work thirty-two years in preparation, with an introduction by Martin Scorsese, was published in August 2007 by Video Watchdog. This 1,128-page work received words of praise from such filmmakers as Guillermo del Toro and Joe Dante. In the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano in 2010, Quentin Tarantino called it "the best book on films ever written."
Videodrome
Lucas' Videodrome, a study of the 1983 David Cronenberg film, inaugurated the Studies in the Horror Film line from Centipede Press in September 2008. The book contains Lucas' previously unpublished production history, written in 1983, and new chapters of essay, criticism, and personal memoir.
Spirits of the Dead
Lucas' Spirits of the Dead (Histoires Extraordinaires), is a 232-page monograph about the 1968 anthology film based on three Edgar Allan Poe tales, directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. It was published in the UK by PS Publishing's imprint Electric Dreamhouse.