Fangoria Lives: Cinestate Acquires Starlog, Fangoria, and Gorezone!
Fangoria lives!
Yes, it looks like Cinestate will be resurrecting Fangoria as a print publication again start this Halloween.
The Texas-based company now controls over 300 issues of Fangoria Magazine spanning the past 39 years, and Fango legends Tony Timpone and Michael Gingold will return to the magazine with their own columns and to consult for the company.
Other contributors include S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99), Ashlee Blackwell (Graveyard Shift Sisters), Samuel Zimmerman (Curator, Shudder), Grady Hendrix (Paperbacks from Hell), Meredith Borders, Rebekah McKendry, and Preston Fassel.
Zack Parker joins Fangoria as the Director of Brand Management, along with Jessica Safavimehr as Associate Publisher and Ashley Detmering as Art Director.
Cinestate CEO Dallas Sonnier’s first move as the new publisher was to hire Phil Nobile, Jr., as the Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Fangoria Magazine.
“There needs to be a Fangoria,” says Nobile. “The magazine was a constant presence in the genre since 1979 – and then one day it was gone. That felt, to us, tragically incorrect. Fango was, for multiple generations, a privileged window into the world of horror. It gave us access to filmmakers’ processes and secrets, opened our eyes to movies we might have otherwise missed, and nurtured a wave of talent that’s out there driving the genre today. I’m proud and excited to be part of the team that’s bringing this institution back.”
“We are fully committed to restoring faith in Fangoria with the horror fan community, so many of whom bought subscriptions, but never received their magazines. We have also been reaching out to previous Fangoria contributors to introduce ourselves and invite them back into the tent for future collaborations. This is a process, but we are confident in our ability to earn back trust and be good partners in a brand that personally means so much to so many awesome people,” states Sonnier.
“When I read Fangoria as a kid, it was a special ritual. I had to save up for it, and then I had to find it. And bringing it home ten times a year became a kind of sacrament, poring over every photograph on every page, reading that whole thing front to back, then doing it again,” Nobile says. “We want to restore that analog thrill to readers. We want to duplicate the excitement that I remember bubbling up around a new issue of Fango, put that excitement in an envelope and mail it to our subscribers. Fangoria is not something that competes with online blogs. Fangoria is not an algorithm. Fangoria is something you hold in your hands, something you spend a bit of time with in the real world. That’s what it was for decades, and that’s what we’re going to make it again.”
On top of all that, Cinestate plans to develop Fangoria into a brand for producing movies, podcasts, and horror novels. Cinestate VP Amanda Presmyk will head up production on a slate of Fangoria-presented horror movies.
As part of the deal, Cinestate also acquired the assets and trademarks to out-of-print publications Starlog and Gorezone.
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