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Cinefantastique

Entry updated 19 February 2024. Tagged: Publication.

US film magazine, slick Bedsheet format. Published and edited by Frederick S Clarke from Illinois until 2000; edited by Dan Persons to 2002; edited by Jeff Bond to 2006. Fall 1970-2006. The magazine reached Vol 38, no 3, dated May/June 2006, at which point the print edition ceased (but see below). Production schedule varied from four to six numbers a year, and was latterly bimonthly.

Cinefantastique specialized in sf, fantasy and Horror Cinema, and occasionally Television; it was well illustrated in both colour and black-and-white. This was by far the most useful US fantastic-cinema magazine, being less juvenile in orientation and (apparently) less dependent on the studios for pictorial material, and thus more independent in its judgments, than magazines like Starlog. Critical standards ranged from merely eccentric to excellent. Coverage was good on films with wide theatrical release, but patchy on films that went straight to video release and on television programmes, with good coverage of television Star Trek programmes, rather weak coverage of most other television shows. Features range from Interviews through articles on production problems and on how special effects are worked to occasional retrospectives (usually good) on famous genre movies of the past. Reviews became briefer and weaker in the 1990s, with many films and television shows omitted altogether (and many credits misspelled or simply not given), so that Cinefantastique's usefulness as a comprehensive magazine of record was becoming dubious.

Following Frederick S Clarke's Suicide in October 2000, there was an interregnum during which Cinefantastique was edited by established contributor Dan Persons. The magazine was acquired in 2002 by Mark A Altman's Mindfire Entertainment, which renamed it CFQ – though with the former title retained in small print on the cover – from Vol 35, no 1 (September 2002). In November 2006 the current editor Jeff Bond announced that CFQ was now "on hiatus". Subscriptions and much of the review coverage were transferred to the new, less specialized magazine Geek Monthly edited by Bond, which appeared to have replaced Cinefantastique. The original magazine was however relaunched as the Webzine Cinefantastique Online in August 2007, and continues thus. [PN/DRL]

see also: Imagi-Movies; Media Magazines.

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