Dumb Bitches: Why Has Fangoria Gone to Hell?

Each of us got into independent cinema through a different route. For some of us, the gateway drug took the form of American auteurs like Soderberg, Tarantino, and Anderson, while others got their feet wet with outrageous European cinema from the likes of Fellini, Bergman, and Antonioni. For some, it was the bizarre stylings of John Waters, while others grooved to the freakish insanity of Ed Wood. For me, the big, gaping doorway was Fangoria magazine.

In the late 1980's, the horror genre was a wasteland, a cinematic red-light district, frequented by adrenaline junkies, moral reprobates, and the occasional social satirist with a strong stomach and a hearty streak of nihilism. While the video stores in my area had a thin selection of "genre" films, the local record store kept a nice stock of bargain-priced low-budget gore flicks in stock. As I pored through them, trying to decide between a badly dubbed version of Tenebrae and the lurid promise of Mother's Day, I soon realized that I needed someone or something to guide me through the maze of genius and dreck.

In time, Fangoria became my guidebook, my advisor, and my shopping list. In well-written, thoughtful articles, it introduced me to artists like Rick Baker and Tom Savini, auteurs like George Romero and Sam Raimi, and great fans like Forrest Ackerman. I learned about the personalities that put together these films and I learned to view movies through the eyes of the director, the scriptwriter, and the actor. In short, I learned to be a critical moviegoer, not merely a passive consumer.

In late high school and college, my tastes began to wander away from horror and into other esoteric cinema. I started working my way through the "great directors" and "best films," learning about the many paths that independent cinema used to present messages that were fresh and new, relatively unscathed by the corrupting influence of test screenings and rewrites. Although I stopped reading Fangoria, I often found myself wishing for a similarly well-written guide to the broader world of independent cinema.

Recently, I was feeling a little nostalgic, so I picked up the latest copy of Fangoria. To say the least, I was not amused. Over the last couple of decades, the independent, honest voice of my childhood had become transformed. Sure, it still had the same lurid covers and many of the section titles sported the same names, but the cover price was a whopping $9, placing it out of the range of many customers. Worse yet, the extortionate cost yielded "reviews" that were little more than puff pieces, a few retrospectives, and a lot of advertisements. Gone was the analysis, the interviews, and the prickly journalistic voice that had made Fangoria such a useful resource when I was a kid. The new version was clearly a thinly-disguised license to print money, an income generator that had traded honesty for ad revenue and sincerity for cynical greed. In short, Fangoria had well and truly been de-fanged!