Fangoria, The Magazine Of Horror, Basks In This Golden Age Of Gore

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A one-year Fangoria subscription of 10 issues costs $34.47. Send check or money order to Starlog Press, 475 Park Ave. S., New York, N.Y. 10016.

These days, cinematic horror is going upscale. Last week it was "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," directed by Shakespearean wunderkind Kenneth Branagh and starring Robert De Niro as the crazy-quilt creature. Tomorrow "Interview with the Vampire," starring Tom Cruise and directed by Neil Jordan of "The Crying Game," opens.

Those major-studio big-budget horror releases follow on Jack Nicholson's furry heels in "Wolf" earlier this year and precede "Mary Reilly," a new version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring Julia Roberts and John Malkovich - due next year. Even "Godzilla" is slated for a remake.

It's a new golden age for Hollywood horror - and for the horror magazine Fangoria, which at 16 years old seems to be shedding some of its adolescent obsession with gross-out gore to match its genre's new-found respectability.

Not that Fango is ever going to be confused with The Nation.

"If we have some really tame, boring picture and some really gruesome, disgusting photo, we're going to run the gruesome, disgusting one every time," says managing editor Michael Gingold.

"If you're covering this genre, you don't want to illustrate it with head shots. Of course you want to get to the meat of the matter."

A photo of naked women in "an alien slime pit" from a flick called "Breeders" got Fango (as a quarter-million subscribers lovingly call it) tossed from some newsstands in 1985. Afterward, editor Anthony Timpone says, the magazine imposed a strict new standard: "You can have a naked monster, but you can't have naked people."

Published by Starlog Press, which also puts out magazines on science fiction and comic books, Fangoria is actually short for phantasmagorical. The magazine originally was seen as an outlet for fantasy material. But after running a shot of an exploding head from "Dawn of the Dead" early on, "They started getting reactions from readers, `More exploding heads!' " says Timpone, and the magazine quickly segued into hard-core horror.

But that's changing. In its November issue, for example, are in-depth interviews with Branagh, Jordan and even Tim Burton, director of "Ed Wood," the recent release about a bizarre Z-grade horror director of the '50s.

As with, say, Playboy, Fango's writing is not what you would think, given its pictures.

Letter-page debates still rage over whether more blood is visible in the new video version of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" than in the original release. And ads for theatrical makeup schools continue to fill back pages. But Fangoria has been branching out into psychological thrillers and the less explicit.

In part, that increasing sophistication reflects the rising age of its readers. While still getting its share of teen-age boys, reader surveys find the average Fango fan is now almost 23, and it's rising.

The magazine also reflects Timpone, 31, and Gingold, 27, two guys out of New York University who grew up on monster movies and who bought Fangoria's first issue (featuring Godzilla) as teen-agers.

Gingold is glad to see the genre maturing. "I think the days when you could just throw a lot of blood and guts on the screen and make it work are past," he says.

That's partly because younger audiences are becoming jaded, he concedes, especially after routine exposure to horror in its video format.

After almost 10 years as Fangoria's editor, Timpone is probably the guy sitting calm and laid back as a movie theater jumps and screams all around him.

"I've always looked at it as entertainment, and it's never disturbed me on a psychological level," he says.