Tim Lucas
Encyclopedia
Tim Lucas is a film critic, biographer, novelist, screenwriter
, blogger, and publisher/editor
of the video review magazine Video Watchdog
.
, 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
.
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.
, 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. The magazine's 20th Anniversary issue was published in June 2010. More recently, 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").
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
and Joe Dante
. It also 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. In the aforementioned Il Fatto Quotidiano interview of 2010, Quentin Tarantino
hailed Mario Bava
All the Colors of the Dark as "the best book on films ever written."
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.
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").
(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. A film adaptation is presently in the works as the author's directorial debut.
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 Undead.
Lucas has since written a third novel, The Only Criminal, another "graphic novel idea written in classic novel form," but it remains unpublished.
All the Colors of the Dark in 2007, Lucas has devoted his free time to pursuing a career in screenwriting. He wrote his first scripts 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' optioned screenplays include 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, with Ernest Dickerson
set to direct).
According to an interview in the Oregon-based fanzine Sinister Press, Lucas spent most of his off-magazine time in 2008 and early 2009 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 August 2010, Lucas' work went before the cameras for the first time when his original short film script The Baggage Claim was filmed in Monessen, PA at The Factory Digital Filmmaking School of the Douglas Education Center
, with Irene Miracle
directing and Tom Savini
and Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni
starring. (Given its provenance, the project was widely mistaken by online sources as a horror film, but Lucas has described The Baggage Claim on his Facebook
page as "a romantic film with fantastic elements.")
According to his Facebook
page, Lucas returned to The Factory in November 2010 to direct a promotional trailer and dialogue scene for a proposed feature film adaptation of his novel Throat Sprockets
, executive produced by Robert Tinnell
. The dialogue scene, a self-contained six-minute short adapted from the novel's "Transylvania mon amour" chapter, features Christopher Scott Grimaldi as Ad Man (unnamed in the novel) and Brandy Loveless as Nancy Reagan. The short had its World Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, Quebec on July 18, 2011, as a lead-in to the documentary Jean Rollin - Le Reveur Égare.
, its fifth annual win in this category) and Best Website (Video WatchBlog). He continued his winning streak as Best Writer in 2008 and 2009. With his wife and business partner Donna, Lucas was inducted into the Monster Kid Hall of Fame at the Rondo Awards ceremony in May 2011.
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
, blogger, and publisher/editor
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...
of the video review magazine Video Watchdog
Video Watchdog
Video Watchdog is a bimonthly, digest size film magazine started in 1990 by publisher/editor Tim Lucas and his wife, art director and co-publisher Donna Lucas....
.
Biography and early career
Lucas, born in Cincinnati, OhioCincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio. Cincinnati is the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located to north of the Ohio River at the Ohio-Kentucky border, near Indiana. The population within city limits is 296,943 according to the 2010 census, making it Ohio's...
, 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
Norwood High School (Ohio)
Norwood High School is a public high school in Norwood, Ohio. It is the only high school in the Norwood City School District. Norwood High School has a number of distinguished graduates including former Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Ralston, professional baseball player Carl Bouldin, professional...
'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
Cinefantastique
Cinefantastique was a horror, fantasy, and science fiction film magazine originally started as a mimeographed fanzine in 1967, then relaunched as a glossy, offset quarterly in 1970 by publisher/editor Frederick S. Clarke...
. 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
Purdue University
Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...
s literary quarterly Modern Fiction Studies on the occasion of its Autumn 1981 issue, dedicated to British novelist Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
. 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
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
.
Video Times
It was in 1984, while reviewing BetamaxBetamax
Betamax was a consumer-level analog videocassette magnetic tape recording format developed by Sony, released on May 10, 1975. The cassettes contain -wide videotape in a design similar to the earlier, professional wide, U-matic format...
and VHS
VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
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 OverviewOverview
Overview may refer to:* A generalized treatment of a topic, cf. summary, outline* Overview * An overview articleOther uses* Overview an American indie rock band* Overview and Scrutiny* A Brief Overview a Beck compilation...
, produced by Michael Nesmith
Michael Nesmith
Robert Michael Nesmith is an American musician, songwriter, actor, producer, novelist, businessman, and philanthropist, best known as a member of the musical group The Monkees and star of the TV series of the same name...
. Video Watchdog was subsequently reborn in the pages of the Fangoria
Fangoria
Fangoria is an American magazine devoted to horror and exploitation films, which has a number of associated brands:* Fangoria Comics* Fangoria Films* Fangoria RadioFangoria may also refer to:* Fangoria , a Spanish electro pop band...
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
Kim Newman
Kim Newman is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternate fictional versions of history...
, Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell
John Ramsey Campbell is an English horror fiction author.Since he first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, critics have cited Campbell as one of the leading writers in his field: T. E. D. Klein has written that "Campbell reigns supreme in the field today", while S. T...
, David J. Schow
David J. Schow
David J. Schow is an American author of horror novels, short stories, and screenplays. His credits include films such as The Crow and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Most of Schow's work falls into the sub-genre splatterpunk, a term he is sometimes credited with coining...
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. The magazine's 20th Anniversary issue was published in June 2010. More recently, director Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
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").
Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark
Lucas's critical biography Mario BavaMario Bava
Mario Bava was an Italian director, screenwriter, and cinematographer remembered as one of the greatest names from the "golden age" of Italian horror films.-Biography:Mario Bava was born in San Remo, Liguria, Italy...
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
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
, was published in August 2007 by Video Watchdog. This 800,000-word mammoth received words of praise from such filmmakers as Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, novelist and designer. He is mostly known for his acclaimed films, Blade II, Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy film franchise. He is a frequent collaborator with Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi and Doug Jones...
and Joe Dante
Joe Dante
Joseph "Joe" Dante, Jr. is an American film director and producer of films generally with humorous and science fiction content....
. It also 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
Independent Publisher Book Award
The Independent Publisher Book Awards , launched in 1996, are designed to bring increased recognition to titles published by independent authors and publishers...
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
John Saxon (actor)
John Saxon is an American actor who has worked on over 200 projects during the span of sixty years. Saxon is most known for his work in horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Black Christmas, both of which feature Saxon as a policeman in search of the killer...
present Lucas and his wife Donna with the rarely-presented Saturn Award
Saturn Award
The Saturn Award is an award presented annually by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films to honor the top works in science fiction, fantasy, and horror in film, television, and home video. The Saturn Awards were devised by Dr. Donald A. Reed in 1972, who felt that films within...
for Special Achievement. In November 2008, the book also received the International Horror Guild
International Horror Guild
The International Horror Guild was created in 1995 as a way to recognize the achievements of those who create in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy. The IHG presented the International Horror Guild Award. Nancy A. Collins, the founder of the award, felt there was a need for an award granted by...
Award as the best Non-fiction work of 2007. In the aforementioned Il Fatto Quotidiano interview of 2010, Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
hailed Mario Bava
Mario Bava
Mario Bava was an Italian director, screenwriter, and cinematographer remembered as one of the greatest names from the "golden age" of Italian horror films.-Biography:Mario Bava was born in San Remo, Liguria, Italy...
All the Colors of the Dark as "the best book on films ever written."
Videodrome
Lucas' most recent work of nonfiction, Videodrome, a study of the 1983 David CronenbergDavid Cronenberg
David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the...
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
Dennis Daniel
Dennis Daniel is an American media personality. He has been a public figure in radio, TV and film criticism for over 25 years. His regular voice and many character voices have been heard on thousands of radio and TV commercials nationwide.- Writing :...
), Horror: Another 100 Best Books (edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
Kim Newman
Kim Newman is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternate fictional versions of history...
), The BFI Companion to Horror (edited by Kim Newman), The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg
David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the...
(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
Jesús Franco
Jesús "Jess" Franco is a Spanish film director, writer, cinematographer and actor. His career took off in 1961 with his cult classic The Awful Dr. Orloff, which received wide distribution in the United States and England...
.
From 1988 to 1992, Lucas contributed a number of comics stories to Stephen R. Bissette
Stephen R. Bissette
Stephen R. Bissette is an American comics artist, editor, and publisher with a focus on the horror genre. He is best known for working with writer Alan Moore and inker John Totleben on the DC comic Swamp Thing in the 1980s....
's graphic horror anthology Taboo
Taboo
A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...
, including three stories that formed the genesis of his first novel, Throat Sprockets
Throat Sprockets
Throat Sprockets is an erotic horror novel by Tim Lucas, published in 1994. It concerns an unnamed protagonist's obsessive quest to learn all he can about a mysterious film called 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
Taboo
A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...
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").
Novels
Lucas has also enjoyed critical success as a novelist. Throat SprocketsThroat Sprockets
Throat Sprockets is an erotic horror novel by Tim Lucas, published in 1994. It concerns an unnamed protagonist's obsessive quest to learn all he can about a mysterious film called Throat Sprockets...
(1994, ISBN 0-385-31290-3), the fulfillment of an uncompleted graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
serialized in Taboo
Taboo
A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...
, 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
Terri Windling
Terri Windling is an American editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults. Windling has won nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and her collection The Armless Maiden appeared on the short-list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award...
and Ellen Datlow
Ellen Datlow
Ellen Datlow is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist.-Biography:Datlow was the fiction editor of Omni magazine and Omni Online from 1981 through 1998, and edited the ten associated Omni anthologies...
's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror is a reprint anthology published annually by St. Martin's Press. In addition to the short stories, supplemented by a list of honorable mentions, each edition includes a number of retrospective essays by the editors and others....
, and was chosen by novelist Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due is an American author.-Biography:Tananarive Priscilla Due was born in Tallahassee, Florida, the oldest of three daughters of civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights lawyer John D. Due Jr...
for inclusion in Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005, ISBN 0-7867-1577-4). In October 2006, Rue Morgue magazine included Throat Sprockets
Throat Sprockets
Throat Sprockets is an erotic horror novel by Tim Lucas, published in 1994. It concerns an unnamed protagonist's obsessive quest to learn all he can about a mysterious film called Throat Sprockets...
on a list of 50 essential alternative horror novels. A film adaptation is presently in the works as the author's directorial debut.
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
The Book of Renfield
The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula is a 2005 novel written by Tim Lucas. It is an unofficial prequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula. Like the original novel, Renfield is an epistolary novel written in series of written documents. It focuses mainly on Renfield, mostly remembered as a minor...
(2005, ISBN 0-7432-4354-4), a complement to Bram Stoker's Dracula
Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor...
that focuses on the character of Renfield
Renfield
R. M. Renfield is a fictional character in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.-In the novel:A description of Renfield from the novel:R. M. Renfield, aetat 59. Sanguine temperament, great physical strength, morbidly excitable,...
and how the circumstances of his tragic past predisposed him to become the ideal pawn for the Lord of the Undead.
Lucas has since written a third novel, The Only Criminal, another "graphic novel idea written in classic novel form," but it remains unpublished.
Screenwriting
Since the completion of Mario BavaMario Bava
Mario Bava was an Italian director, screenwriter, and cinematographer remembered as one of the greatest names from the "golden age" of Italian horror films.-Biography:Mario Bava was born in San Remo, Liguria, Italy...
All the Colors of the Dark in 2007, Lucas has devoted his free time to pursuing a career in screenwriting. He wrote his first scripts in the late 1980s with two exploratory drafts of Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...
written as a favor to writer-director David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg
David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the...
. These unproduced drafts introduced the idea of combining scenes from the novel by William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
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' optioned screenplays include The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes (co-written with Charlie Largent), a comedy about the filming of Roger Corman
Roger Corman
Roger William Corman is an American film producer, director and actor. He has mostly worked on low-budget B movies. Some of Corman's work has an established critical reputation, such as his cycle of films adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 2009 he won an Honorary Academy Award for...
's 1967 film The Trip
The Trip (1967 film)
The Trip is a cult film released by American International Pictures, directed by Roger Corman, written by Jack Nicholson, and shot on location in and around Los Angeles, including on top of Kirkwood in Laurel Canyon, Hollywood Hills, and near Big Sur, California in 1966...
(currently optioned by Metaluna Productions for director Joe Dante
Joe Dante
Joseph "Joe" Dante, Jr. is an American film director and producer of films generally with humorous and science fiction content....
), and Scars & Stripes (written with E. Yarber), an original horror script (currently optioned by Livestock Entertainment, with Ernest Dickerson
Ernest Dickerson
Ernest Roscoe Dickerson A.S.C. is an American film and television director and cinematographer. He directed generally urban films sometimes with supernatural stories like Juice, Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight, Bones and Never Die Alone...
set to direct).
According to an interview in the Oregon-based fanzine Sinister Press, Lucas spent most of his off-magazine time in 2008 and early 2009 scripting Me and the Orgone
Me and the Orgone
Me and the Orgone – The True Story of One Man's Sexual Awakening is an autobiographical account written by American actor and award-winning director Orson Bean about his life-changing experience with the controversial orgone therapy developed by Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich.The book...
, based on Orson Bean
Orson Bean
Orson Bean is an American film, television, and Broadway actor. He appeared frequently on televised game shows in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including being a long-time panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth....
's 1971 book about his experiences in Reichian therapy
Reichian therapy
Reichian therapy can refer to several schools of thought and theraputic techniques whose common touchstone is their origins in the work of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich...
, and also The Weight of Salt and Soul, an original screenplay based on the life of Ishi
Ishi
Ishi was the last member of the Yahi, the last surviving group of the Yana people of the U.S. state of California. Ishi is believed to have been the last Native American in Northern California to have lived most of his life completely outside the European American culture...
written in collaboration with the artist Diane Pfister
Diane Pfister
Diane Pfister is an American artist and art lecturer whose work was first recognized in London, England, and other territories of the United Kingdom...
.
In August 2010, Lucas' work went before the cameras for the first time when his original short film script The Baggage Claim was filmed in Monessen, PA at The Factory Digital Filmmaking School of the Douglas Education Center
Douglas Education Center
Douglas Education Center is a private, for-profit, higher education career school located thirty miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.-History:...
, with Irene Miracle
Irene Miracle
Irene Miracle is an American film and television actress and director.-Early life:Irene Miracle was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma and is of Scots-Irish, Russian, French and Osage descent.-Acting career:...
directing and Tom Savini
Tom Savini
Thomas Vincent "Tom" Savini is an American actor, stuntman, director, award-winning special effects and makeup artist. He is known for his work on the Living Dead films directed by George A. Romero, as well as Creepshow, The Burning, Friday the 13th, The Prowler, and Maniac. He directed the 1990...
and Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni
Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni
Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni is an American actress, musician, and artist.-Early life:She was born in Manhattan; she and her parents moved to Rome, Italy when she was four years old...
starring. (Given its provenance, the project was widely mistaken by online sources as a horror film, but Lucas has described The Baggage Claim on his Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
page as "a romantic film with fantastic elements.")
According to his Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
page, Lucas returned to The Factory in November 2010 to direct a promotional trailer and dialogue scene for a proposed feature film adaptation of his novel Throat Sprockets
Throat Sprockets
Throat Sprockets is an erotic horror novel by Tim Lucas, published in 1994. It concerns an unnamed protagonist's obsessive quest to learn all he can about a mysterious film called Throat Sprockets...
, executive produced by Robert Tinnell
Robert Tinnell
Robert Tinnell is a motion picture screenwriter, director, and producer. He is also the author of several comic books and graphic novels, notably with a horror slant.-Biography:...
. The dialogue scene, a self-contained six-minute short adapted from the novel's "Transylvania mon amour" chapter, features Christopher Scott Grimaldi as Ad Man (unnamed in the novel) and Brandy Loveless as Nancy Reagan. The short had its World Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, Quebec on July 18, 2011, as a lead-in to the documentary Jean Rollin - Le Reveur Égare.
Other awards
In 2007, Lucas won in three different categories of The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards: Best Writer, Best Magazine (Video WatchdogVideo Watchdog
Video Watchdog is a bimonthly, digest size film magazine started in 1990 by publisher/editor Tim Lucas and his wife, art director and co-publisher Donna Lucas....
, its fifth annual win in this category) and Best Website (Video WatchBlog). He continued his winning streak as Best Writer in 2008 and 2009. With his wife and business partner Donna, Lucas was inducted into the Monster Kid Hall of Fame at the Rondo Awards ceremony in May 2011.