Fangoria 312

I just like the cover. Okay?

Sort of a modern, classic design.

Fangoria Announces New "Legends" Magazine: George A Romero

Those folks at Fangoria continue to try new things. After an apparently successful one-shot revival of its old Gorezone sibling magazine last year, Fango is announcing a one-shot magazine devoted to horror legend George A. Romero. It's appropriately dubbed Fangoria Legends Presents George A. Romero, and it will be sold only via Fangoria's website beginning in March 2012.

They're only printing 1,000 copies of it, so order it ASAP when it's available, because it's not likely to last long in the online store.

Fangoria Goes All Corman-ish on Us

Fangoria magazine, fresh off winning "Magazine of the Year" from This Is Horror, sports a (mostly) black-and-white cover to herald a major Roger Corman interview.

Schlockmania Ponders Fangoria #10

in which Don Guarisco confronts the question of the ages: Which is scarier – an exploding head or a Faeries TV special?

As I noted in my comment to Don's writeup, I have to wonder if Fangoria #10 can go down in history as the first magazine to put an exploding head on its cover. Has anyone else done it? Famous Monsters? Castle of Frankenstein? Car and Driver? I think not.

Read Don's description on Schlockmania.

Ed's Pop Culture Shack Takes the Fangoria Challenge

It looks like Schlockmania has competition:

Check out Ed's Pop Culture Shack for a new series of Fangoria magazine restrospectives, starting with the earliest issue in his collection, #2 from 1979.

Readers of my blog already know about Schlockmania's fun series chronicling the early years of Fango.

Is there room for both series? Absolutely. It's fun to get each person's take on the issue, the films highlighted inside, and the times (the '70s were a definite watershed for many folks!). I like them both, and I recommend them for any movie magazine fan and horror film fan who wants to do some digital time traveling back to those pre-digital days.

As everyone knows, I like to do that.

.

Fangoria #300 - Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Red

Chris Alexander, editor of horror magazine Fangoria, posted the cover of issue #300 on Facebook a few days ago, and it's already the talk of the internet (if, by "the internet," you mean the dozen or so people who have commented on the page). Even former editor "Uncle Bob" Martin weighs in.

What has people talkin' and squawkin' is the return of the logo used in the mag's earliest years, beginning with issue #2. Hey, they even threw in the "Monsters, Aliens, Bizarre Creatures" tagline that adorned the first couple dozen issues or so of the magazine until Martin was able to give it the old heave-ho.

Frankly, I always liked this version of the logo; I thought it stood out on newsstands and it was clean yet had depth. I particularly did not like the logo that replaced it and which lasted for decades until a recent redesign which, oddly, made it look great. I don't know if this is a permanent change or just a 300th-issue homage. I also don't know if the tagline will remain. It's all up to the mag's publisher, editor, and designers. And newsstand feedback, no doubt.

But, as I hinted when I noted the inaugural issue by editor Alexander seven months ago, I think it's great that he's confident enough to make changes to the magazine. The mag is arguably more interesting than it has been in many years, and I find myself reading far more of each issue these days than I did when there was an overload of teen-torture films previewed inside. The magazine's smart, quirky, unpredictable, energetic, and sorta gross – exactly as Fango should be.

Fangoria #300 goes on sale in January.

Just Found This Two-Year-Old Interview with Horror Historian Tom Weaver

While searching for something else online, I came across this interesting interview with Tom Weaver on ClassicHorror.com.

Weaver is well-known to anyone who's read Starlog or Fangoria for the past couple decades. His stock in trade is the extensive, well-researched interview with classic filmmakers. In the ClassicHorror.com Q&A, he says he thinks he's done about 600 of them so far; a fair number of them have appeared in Starlog and Fango, and sometimes it seemed he was a regular fixture of their pages. (Always a fan of Weaver's interesting articles, I once wrote to Fangoria expressing surprise that they'd gone something like two consecutive issues without publishing a Weaver article; it was meant as a compliment to the man, and I received a nice response from him.)

Anyway, check out the ClassicHorror.com interview. He begins with a fascinating (well, for us writers and editors, at least) story about how he got his start interviewing these folks: sending audio cassettes with a list of his questions and having them record their answers and return the tapes.

PS: Weaver's interviews have also been collected in many books. His latest seems to be A Sci-Fi Swarm and Horror Horde: Interviews with 92 Filmmakers.

Unearthing the History of Fangoria: Schlockmania on Issue #7

If you've been enjoying the Starlog Project here on this blog, but you like your genre magazines a little more ... wet, then you should check out Don Guarisco's ongoing exploration of the early issues of Fangoria, Starlog's unruly younger brother.

Don's just posted his writeup for Fango issue #7, which was something of a turning point for the horror film magazine. As then-editor "Uncle Bob" Martin notes in a comment he posted to the article, it was the first issue of the magazine to actually make money. It was also the issue (if you ask me) where Fango's horror specialization started to gel.

Read Don's description of the issue, and Uncle Bob's additional background info, for more.

From WEIMAR WORLD SERVICE

The Chris Alexander Era at Fangoria

The editor is gone, long live the editor.

It's not got quite the ring of the king's death, but you get the point. When an editor leaves a publication, especially if that editor has been there a long time, it's a momentous event. It can be an exciting time for readers, as they wonder what will change. Will their favorite parts of the publication be ruined? Will their most disliked parts of the magazine be remedied? Will the changes be refreshing?

Some magazines barely change when there's an editor. For you old-timers, do you really remember a change in Omni or Future Life when their editors switched? Of course not. And until recently, Playboy's editors (called editorial directors, because Hugh Hefner really calls the editorial shots) were somewhat commoditized. But for many periodicals, a new editor is an opportunity to take a fresh look at things. Sometimes that means things that were hallowed for good reasons are given short shrift; other times things that were ignored or given short shrift finally get their due. That's just life.

Earlier this winter, Tony Timpone gave up the reigns of Fangoria magazine, the horror film bible. Timpone joined the Starlog Group (then known as O'Quinn Studios) family as a contributor, first as a freelancer, then as a junior staffer. When first Bob Martin and then David Everitt left their Fangorian editor's desks in the mid-1980s, Starlog editor David McDonnell temporarily took over editing Fangoria while a young Timpone was brought up to speed. (Or so goes the lore.) Timpone then assumed command, after a bit more than a year of McDonnell's leadership, and remained there for about a quarter century.

In this past decade, Fangoria ran into a rough patch, not unlike that faced by many periodicals publishers. At its height, Starlog Group published dozens of magazines a year. As of 2000, it was publishing about a dozen (let's see if I can remember them all: Starlog, Fangoria, Comics Scene 2000, Teen Girl Power, Black Elegance, Belle, Wrestling All-Stars, TV Wrestlers, Wrestling Scene, Fight Game, Sci-Fi Teen, Sci-Fi TV, and probably some more (there were a number of wrestling titles I don't remember nor do I care to). Then the financial rug was pulled out from under the company, and it was sold to Creative Group, with only Starlog and Fangoria ultimately surviving. A few years later, Creative Group itself went belly-up, and the two magazines were bought by former Creative Group executive Tom DeFeo. And there you are, up to the present.

I started this blog post by noting that sometimes a change of editors doesn't make much difference, but that does not seem to be the case here. Alexander has been putting his stamp on the publication, and he promises to keep changing as he goes. His initial moves appear to be focused on moving away from a frantic coverage of every possible major film of the day (though Fango still covers them), and more toward a wide-ranging coverage of the horror – for lack of a better word – lifestyle. Music. Classics. Monsters. Exploitation films. Games. We can probably expect that mix to change over time, as Alexander gets his editor's feet underneath him and as the horror film and TV worlds evolve. But for now, it's a nice change, especially if it results in one less article about some tortured-teens movie.

Like most readers, I like some and don't like some of what he's doing. (I would, for example, dearly love to see the magazine redesigned; it's about 15 years behind schedule for a visual revamp.) But I am pleased to see he's confident enough to make changes, so that makes me, as a reader, confident enough to sit back and see what he continues to do with his new baby.

We're also seeing a lot of Alexander in the current issue (number 294); his byline (solely or shared) is on about seven feature articles (depending on how you define some of the articles), not counting departments. That's a lot of Alexander in one magazine, but it's not unprecedented. As former editor Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin has written elsewhere, he and his co-editor David Everitt were writing practically the entire magazine back in the early 1980s. Sooner or later, Alexander might crack, and police will find him on the top of a high-rise with a dangerous weapon. But for now, this über-hands-on approach will also help him really establish his mark on the magazine.

Fango itself will continue to change, of course. Fangoria #294 is the first one I can think of that includes an ad (a one-third pager) for adult videos; even Playboy doesn't advertise X-rated products, so Fangoria's powers that be have obviously chosen to go in a direction never before visited by this magazine, as far as I know. But when times are tough, as they are in almost every business these days, it's hard to say no to almost any ad.

I'm sure some readers, who grew up with Timpone's Fangoria, will be sad to see him go. Others are probably eager for a change. I have no horse in this race. I only tangentially met Timpone; I was being given a tour of the Starlog Group offices in 1999 by a former publisher, when he engaged Timpone in an animated discussion about David Cronenberg's latest film. (Always being more a Starlogger than a Fangorian, I was more excited about seeing all the cool space art paintings on the wall and seeing Starlog editor David McDonnell's office. Sorry, Fango Faithful.) And I have never met Chris Alexander. (I mean, we're best buds on Facebook, but by that measure, I'm pals with Barack Obama, too. Me and 8 million other people.)

However, I am currently a magazine editor and have served in various editorial positions at publications for more than two decades. So I kind of instinctively sympathize with -- and envy -- anyone who gets the chance to sit in the editor's chair of a publication. Especially if that publication focuses on horror, fantasy, or science fiction. How much more fun can life be? My web site sports the following quote from German politician (and future post-war chancellor) Konrad Adenauer in 1917: "There is nothing better that life can offer than to allow a person to expend himself fully with all the strength of his mind and soul and to devote his entire being to creative activity."

If you love and enjoy genre entertainment, what better thing in life is there than editing a leading magazine that covers these topics?

Fangoria Fans Finally Find an Online Project of Their Own

As my Starlog Project (in this blog and on its permanent site has grown (currently at issue #83), I've seen the enthusiasm people have for this classic science-fiction magazine they read as a child, as a teen, and well into their adult lives. It has also been enjoyable for me to go through these 30-year-old magazines and chronicle their content, design, the big movies and TV shows they covered, and more.

In an earlier post on this blog, I noted that I probably wouldn't have time to do a similar project for Starlog's sister magazine Fangoria, but I knew there were many -- dare I say rabid? -- fans of Fangoria, and surely one of them would do that magazine proud by chronicling its many issues. Now it looks like Don Guarisco is doing just that over at Schlockmania. Guarisco writes a comprehensive and entertaining profile of each issue, putting it in perspective for its time and describing the articles; he's not afraid to call the magazine on the carpet when he thinks they underperformed (or just weirdly performed -- anyone really want Disney's The Black Hole covered in Fango?). He's on issue #4 at the time of this writing, so it's still early days. If you're a reader of Fangoria or were in the past, now's a great time to climb aboard this nostalgia train.

I'm glad to see someone's taken on the Fangoria project.

So that's one thing I can cross off my to-do list ...

From WEIMAR WORLD SERVICE

Theofantastique and Fangoria: Together at Last

Well, this is why the internet is so addictive. While checking a link to my previous story, I came across an item on Cinefantastique's web site point to an interview on Fangoria's web site. It's an interview with John W. Morehead of Theofantastique, a web site that explores the intersection of spirituality and the fantastic.

I had never before heard of Theofantastique, but I was intrigued. Almost two decades ago, I had pitched an article to a Christian magazine that would have explored the role of faith in the modern horror genre. Unlike the science-fiction genre (of which I was and am more a part than the horror genre), horror seems to be not only less antagonistic to religion but even to rely on various spiritual traditions to tell many of its stories. The magazine passed on the idea.

So, 17 or 18 years later: I told you so.

Rumors about Fangoria's Fate

Blogger JadedViewer provides a roundup of rumors and questions concerning longtime horror film magazine Fangoria (and its related online operations and other media).

As I've noted recently (here and here), the web sites for Fango and science fiction sister brand Starlog have been down for weeks. Starlog's web site has been restored to life, or at least existence; but the Fangoria site has not. If you do some hunting on Twitter and Facebook, you can piece together a bit of the story. It sounds like the online staff walked off the job a in January. I haven't found out the reasons why, but generally when you have a mass defection from a company, either it's not paying its staff or there are terrible management problems.

Fango/Starlog have been through hell and back in the past decade. After original owners Starlog Group fell on rough times in 2001 and had to close most of their dozen-or-so titles, the rump company continued under that management for a few years before being sold to Creative Group. A couple years later, Creative Group went bust, and Tom DeFeo -- one of the Creative leaders -- bought the two brands and continued as The Brooklyn Company. Earlier this year, Starlog ceased publication as a print magazine, continuing as an online-only property; in December, longtime editor David McDonnell resigned -- again, no further info, but there's probably an interesting story there.

It's interesting to read the online comments from readers. There's the usual claptrap about "print is dying anyway," which simply isn't true. Magazine readership is actually up over the past decade. What there is right now is an advertising depression, and there's a near impossibility even for successful small businesses to get the financing they need to stay afloat. You can thank the global financial collapse for that. Companies generally need a steady supply of credit, because there is always a lag between the expenditure of money (salaries, printing costs, office rent, insurance, etc.) and the receipt of revenue (advertising, newsstand sales, etc.). I have no inside knowledge whatsoever about The Brooklyn Company's situation; I'm just suggesting that tight credit is hobbling a lot of companies these days and could well be a factor if there are money problems there. (The credit issue is the reason President Obama is planning to pump $30 billion into small banks for loans to small businesses. There's only so long a business can stretch and delay paying its suppliers before it runs into hard money problems.)

So how does this all relate to Starlog and Fangoria? As I noted, nothing conclusive. I suspect the two titles aren't dead (and magazines are kind of like Spock: even death isn't the end of life). Whether The Brooklyn Company knows how to make the titles flourish again as print magazines is an open question. Personally, I now believe the field is wide open for a smart publisher to create a new title and take over Starlog's old science fiction media magazine territory -- and I write that as a longtime Starlog supporter. It's sad, but I think it's true. And I'm working on something in that space. We'll see.

As for Fangoria, the magazine is still alive and lively. Inveterate readers of magazine staff boxes, like I am,  will probably glean some info from the next issue due to come out later this month. But by then, we might already have heard more about the future of the longest-running horror film magazine in this country.

UPDATE: Inside the turmoil.

Famous Monsters Given New Publishing Lease on Life by IDW

Famous Monsters of Filmland, the pioneering horror movie magazine, is coming back to publishing life thanks to IDW Publishing. It will relaunch as a quarterly magazine in the summer of 2010. 

FM, the brainchild of Forrest J. Ackerman and publisher James Warren, began life in 1958 as a one-shot magazine that proved so popular that it became a staple of the genre publishing world -- and the foundation of Warren's stable of magazines -- for decades, until Warren's company went bankrupt in the early 1980s. The magazine was revived in the 1990s in a rather odd fashion that ended in acrimony and lawsuits.

IDW will probably fare better than the previous owner. Whether it will fare well in the competitive marketplace remains to be seen; that is an iffier guess. The horror publishing field in the United States is pretty well dominated by Fangoria these days, and Fango seems intent upon spreading its market coverage to include the family friendly Monster Times and the more-extreme Fangoria Gorezone. But anything's possible. Fan tastes and company capitalization will win out in the end!

Stephen King Writes "Scary" Article for Fangoria

Writer Stephen King has contributed a massive 7,500-word article on "What's Scary" for the December and January issues of Fangoria magazine, reports -- well, Fangoria magazine.

According to the notice on Fango's web site, King says "I’ve wanted to be a Fango contributor ever since I purchased my first issue,” King says. “For me, this is a nightmare come true.” Hopefully, he'll be able to leverage this article into bigger things. This kid's got talent. Trust me. He'll be big some day.

Of course, another way of looking at that is to note that Fango readers have wanted King to be a Fango contributor ever since the first issue. So, a lotta dreams are coming true.

In the essay, King looks at what works and what doesn't in the making of horror tales. Presumably, the cover of the December issue won't look like this:

BBC Says Zombies vs. Humans: We Win!!!

I know, I know: Who's "we"?

Well, I continue to assume the readers of this blog are consistently human, so I was pleased to read a BBC report on a Canadian scientific study (I'm not making this up) that concluded that a zombie attack on humans could be defeated, if it was dealt with quickly and effectively. That means decapitate them.

The scientists modeled their zombies on classic film versions of the undead. That puts them squarely in the George Romero school of slow zombies; no fast, intelligent zombies here.

Reports the BBC:

[T]heir analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable. In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".

They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."

So that's what Canadian scientists are doing. I'm sorry to hear that the Swedish study on how to turn back a massive Abominable Snowman attack has been indefinitely shelved, due to global warming.

More Ridley, More Alien

Starlog.com passes along word that Ridley Scott, the director of the staggeringly good science fiction/horror movie Alien, is going to direct a prequel to that movie.

With all due respect to James Cameron, who really established the series' popularity with his Aliens sequel, the Scott original remains one of the few movies to successfully get across real alien-ness. So I've got high expectations for his prequel.

Magazine Memories: Fangoria in the Provinces

When I was a youngling (to cite Yoda) growing up in the metropolis of Manitowoc, Wisconsin (population 35,000), I was intrigued in my very early teen years by a freaky little magazine I'd see on the newsstands of the local Copps grocery/department store (you hadda be there) called Fangoria. I had also seen it on the stands at my favorite bookstore/newsstand/Hallmark-cards store downtown (again, only 35,000 peeps) where I pretty much spent all of the money I made every two weeks delivering the Herald-Times-Reporter. (I was very good at newspaper delivery, BTW, and may have peaked there, professionally.)

Anywho, as a geeky Starlog-reading, science fiction aficionado, I knew about Fango, its sister publication, but I was kinda scared to buy a copy. It had photos on its cover of people covered with (fake) blood and wielding chainsaws. You know, nice boys didn't buy such magazines. And there at the Copps magazine rack was Fangoria number 8 with a decomposed corpse's skull on the cover. I wanted to buy that magazine, because I knew it must contain stuff I shouldn't know about. But I didn't (mostly limited by my small weekly allowance, which -- once you have bought your requisite allotment of weekly candy -- really didn't stretch too far in those days of trickle-down economics and the Reagan recession).

I did start reading Fango the next year, with #15, which featured a slightly safer Halloween 2 cover. (Which I bought at the Hallmark store, making sure it was carefully covered in the shopping bag and feeling like someone who'd just bought Playgirl or Inches.) But I still mentally back-date my Fango allegiance to that gross Zombie cover of #8, and, to be perfectly frank, I have silently graded every single cover of Fango since then against that cover. Probably the best horror film magazine cover ever, though the Motel Hell cover the very next issue comes close, and I still hadn't worked up enough courage to buy it.

These thoughts all came back to me as a result of reading "Fangoria: The Scarlet Years" on the Horrorphile blog. If you share any of that 1980s' experience with trend-setting horror magazines, I heartily recommend that blog posting. It's a great reminder of the power that a thin little magazine that is head-over-heels devoted to covering a subject well can have on its audience, especially if its audience is made up of young people looking for something that shows them something just a bit out of the ordinary.

Fangoria Shows How It's Done

Roger Corman!

It's not often that a magazine really impresses me with big name after big name in its pages. I think you'd have to go back to the old Playboys of the late 1960s, early 1970s when sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices would write articles in the same issues where you'd find also find contributions from the biggest authors, entertainers, U.S. senators, and even philosophers and clergy in the country. So let me put forth the latest magazine that really impressed me: The 30th anniversary issue of horror film bible Fangoria.

As I paged through the 100-page special issue, I kept getting surprised by each new name I saw, either someone interviewed or even the authors of articles. There's director Joe Dante writing a tribute to Italian film master Mario Bava. John Landis (John Landis!) writing an appreciation of Jamie Lee Curtis. Director Mick Garris does the honors for Stephen King, Roger Corman does Vincent Price, Virginia Madsen does Christopher Walken, and on and on and on. And then there are the people who were either interviewed about themselves or who wrote about themselves for the magazine: Bill Paxton, Udo Kier, Tobe Hooper, Peter Jackson, David Cronenberg, Bruce Campbell, and of course on and on. There are also personal anecdotes by or about the people who have built the magazine over the years, including former publisher Kerry O'Quinn, former editor Ed Naha (also a former editor of the long-defunct Future Life from the same publishing house), former editors Bob Martin and David McDonnell (who's also the longtime editor of Starlog), and others. Oh, heck, there's even an original cover painting by Clive Barker.

When I've written on this blog before about my impatience with magazines that don't appear to even be trying, this is the antidote. Fangoria ("Fango" to the faithful) has really flexed its muscles with this issue, showing why horror fans need to pay attention to it. That's a successful effort. Congrats -- on the anniversary issue and on the three decades.

Starlog and Fangoria: Still Growing in One Area

Horror seems to be the lively side of the science-fiction/horror duo that is Starlog Group. What I mean by that is that while Starlog gives ground unnecessarily (see my long post describing Starlog's challenges and suggesting remedies), Fangoria is growing and innovating.
First, there's the announcement that the company is relaunching its late-80s, early-90s horror movie magazine Gorezone. Gorezone concentrated (and reportedly will concentrate) on harder-core horror than Fangoria.
Second, the company announced the release of digital versions of the entire run of the newspaper-format horror publication The Monster Times, which was published by a different company from 1972 to 1976. Apparently a complete rights purchase has been made, because the announcement also promises new Monster Times content (whether in print, online, or both is not specified), focused in a more "family friendly" direction.
These two moves (in addition to the beginnings of the digitization of the Fangoria magazine archives, an ongoing weekly radio program, a lively web site, original videos, and comics) demonstrate that the company believes money is to be made from this magazine franchise.
All the power to them.
I just reiterate my belief that there's a lot of money and opportunity to be mined on the science-fiction side of the company. Magazines are only as dead or as weak as they make themselves.

Forrest J Ackerman, RIP

Back to the topic of magazines. A real path-breaker passed away this past week, Forrest J Ackerman. The founding editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, the creator of Vampirella, the literary agent who brought us Ray Bradbury and others, the man who (with his wife Wendayne) brought us the U.S. versions of the German Perry Rhodan science fiction novels, passed away at the age of 92.

There are obviously lots of fans of his in the filmmaking world -- Steven Spielberg, Steven King, etc. But there are also lots of fans of his in the magazine world, or at least in the science fiction and horror magazine world. That's because Famous Monsters was a groundbreaking magazine devoted to horror films, their stars, and not much else. It was presented in an unabashedly enthusiastic way, and I think people of a generation or two before me loved the magazine for that.

It's not an appreciation I can claim to share. When I got into reading science fiction books and magazines, there was a magazine called Starlog that captured my attention, love, imagination, and weekly allowance. Starlog also produced a sister publication, Fangoria, to cover horror movies and related topics. Starlog and Fangoria are still being published, though Famous Monsters died along with the rest of the Warren magazine publishing empire in the early 1980s.

I didn't pay attention to Famous Monsters much at the time, because whenever I took a look, I found it to be lacking in substance, intelligence, and quality. I've occasionally bought an issue (thanks, eBay) in recent years to test my original reactions, and if anything, my views then were overly charitable.

But Ackerman himself (in an interview in Fangoria after he was ousted from his Famous Monsters position just a couple issues before the magazine's death) has lamented the chains with which his publisher, James Warren, shackled him with the magazine, and he apparently couldn't produce the magazine he would have liked. That's a shame. Warren, after all, produced some incredibly fun and exciting magazines like Creepy and Eerie during the 1960s and 1970s. If Famous Monsters had been allowed more freedom, then perhaps Ackerman would be remembered not only as a groundbreaking editor but as a great one.

But Ackerman's triumph is most likely his ability to transmit his enthusiasm to young science fiction and horror fans, through his magazines, books, and personal appearances (for many years, he allowed fans to tour his legendary collection of science fiction memorabilia in his homes, on Saturdays). I never had the opportunity to meet him, but if I had, it wouldn't have been magazines of which we would have spoken, it would have been Rhodan, movie monsters, film directors, and deep space shows. I would have liked that a great deal, and I feel bad that we've lost such a personality and talent.

RIP