A military brat born on an Air Force base in France, Landis was a child genius who breezed through school and already had a masters’ degree and job on Wall Street by the time he turned 20. On paper, Bill Landis was the last person anyone would’ve guessed would go on to found and codify an entirely new school of genre criticism. At the same time it documented, analyzed, and ultimately preserved subcultures and ways of life that would otherwise have been lost to time, many of which we’re only now beginning to assess, understand, and interrogate. The uninitiated could be forgiven for assuming he was nothing more than a troll of the early internet age, a self-important, foul-tempered weirdo whose primary claim to fame was sending abrasive emails to editors who’d been kind enough to print his work but not quick enough to put the check in the mail.Īnd that is a terrible shame, because, in an age before the internet, before magazines like Fangoria and Rue Morgue were running articles on social justice and the deeper themes of films like Get Out and Midsommar, before the Boulet Brothers helped codify the fusion of queer culture and horror, before words like “person of color” and “trans” entered the popular lexicon, Landis’ magazine Sleazoid Express helped lay the groundwork for modern genre criticism. They had come to bury Bill, not to praise him. The comments section quickly devolved into something approximating a roast, as those who’d known and loathed Bill came forward with their own backhanded reminiscences and final potshots at the not-so-dearly departed.

Tellingly, the greatest tribute paid to him was on the pornographic website Celebrity Skin, where writer Mike “McBeardo” McPadden penned a hilarious and irreverent eulogy recounting his turbulent time as Landis’ boss in the early 2000s, recalling him as a brilliant but troubled film journalist who spent just as much time terrorizing him for paychecks as he did writing content for the site. It was almost as if his importance were passed by osmosis, as though people knew that his passage meant something, though no one was quite certain what that something was.

He’d written a book about grindhouse theaters he was some sort of expert on 1980s New York he’d apparently published some kind of magazine. There were obituaries, sure–a few scant words on a website here, a passing reference to his death on a blog there. When Bill Landis dropped dead on the streets of Chicago in 2008, it was a bit like a tree falling in the woods: he was gone, but no one could really be certain it’d had an impact.

Sleazoid Express by Bill Landis