Go(re) Go(re) Girls: Reassessing the presumed readership of Fangoria Magazine within the 1980s

Despite increasing attention being rightfully being paid to the fact that girls and women have always been ardent fans of the genre – there is a persistent assumption that some “types” of horror – in particular the special effects driven splatter film – remain coded as inherently masculine. This type of graphic and gore-centered horror was vehemently championed by the fan magazine Fangoria in the 1980s, and this may be why a reader’s letter to the magazine in 1989 frames its statement that ‘Fango’s loyal readership is mainly male’ (#87: 7) as an obvious truism. This erroneous view has been underlined in subsequent scholarship, with the argument being that the magazine was ‘aimed at a young male readership with an attendant emphasis on gore, sex, and trivial facts (2002: 48). The underlying assumption of this being that these things are of little to no interest to young female readers.

This paper seeks to challenge this perspective by examining the intersection of horror, youth, gender and fandom as it played out within the pages of Fangoria in the 1980s. While accepting Lexi Webster’s claim that issues of the magazine within the decade were rife with examples of ‘sexualization, infantilization, and hyper femininity’ (2022: 224), I seek to highlight moments of resistance to this, through a close inspection of reader’s letters and features on young women within Fangoria from 1980 to 1989. Overarchingly, this paper will contend that not only did young female fans of gore films exist and continue to exist – despite scholarly claims to the contrary (see Austin, 2003; Cherry, 2007 among others) – but that they are a significant and understudied fan presence, however small, within the pages of Fangoria within the ‘splatter decade’ of the 1980s.