Inside Fangoria’s Three-Pronged Strategy for Horror Success

By Christiana Sciaudone January 28, 2025
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Abhi Goel had no background in film—nevermind the horror genre—when five years ago he bought Fangoria, a horror film fan magazine launched in 1979, with a continued print presence and digital paywall.

He’d already invested a bit in film locally because of generous tax credits handed out in the state of Georgia when the opportunity to buy Fangoria presented itself. Goel, who spent his career in real estate tech services, discovered that the return on investment for horror films was the highest in the industry thanks to inexpensive production costs and big opportunities for franchising and intellectual property.  

So he figured he would buy Fangoria, launch podcasts and a weekly newsletter, as well as attend conventions and festivals, all with a plan to capitalize and expand upon the dedicated fan base with in-house movies. Goel wants to focus on audience and create a community for fans. 

“What I’m interested in doing is shifting from an advertising-led media company to a subscriber and audience-led subscription… media company,” Goel told AMO. “It’s a 360 play of audience, content and data is what I’m trying to build here with Fangoria, and it doesn’t exist, honestly, in the horror space.”

Goel’s bringing a 46-year-old magazine into the 21st century, and the niche appears to be robust. In 2023, horror movies more than doubled their market share in the U.S. and Canada since 1995, according to Bloomberg. The genre saw more than 75 million tickets sold, 46 films released and $798 million grossed in the U.S. 

Goel likely has in mind Blumhouse Productions, a studio that has grossed more than $5.7 billion at the box office worldwide since its founding in 2000. Its breakout film, Paranormal Activity, cost $15,000 to make and took in over $194 million, Bloomberg reported. Fangoria Studio has 10 projects and expects to start production on its first film this year. 

Awards and Were-Tigers

When Goel bought the brand, it had an audience size of about 600,000. That’s up to 3.5 million now, with a print circulation of about 50,000. He wants to evolve the experience into more of a community and currently operates a privateFacebook group where they bring in filmmakers, authors and others to connect with fans.  

Fangoria also holds an annual awards show, the pre-recorded Chainsaw Awards. When Goel bought the company, the show attracted 10,000 votes for winners. Last year, that reached 1 million votes and allowed data collection across 20 categories from best film to sound, creature effects and more.  

All three of these sort of business lines, you could say, are very complementary to one another.Publishing is really focused on growing the audience and the community. Studios is creating content, and really focused on building enterprise value by way of intellectual property and franchises and movies, and then the Chainsaw Awards is really about data collection.

The data collected through the Chainsaw Awards is intended to provide Fangoria Studios with insights to inform their content creation and production decisions going forward.

To Goel, it makes complete sense to bring the three areas together. After all, the big area in filmmaking where most money outside of actually producing the movie is spent is in marketing and advertising that movie. 

But “if you have access to the audience, you can bypass a lot of that spend internally,” said Goel, who hopes to create a lifestyle brand out of Fangoria, with merchandise like hoodies. “There’s a substantial opportunity for revenue there in terms of merchandising as well as licensing, even as far as collectibles,’ Goel said.

The company is at breakeven, and Goel has invested a significant amount of his own capital in the business. He’s convinced that as the audience grows, so too will advertising and subscriptions/membership. He’s hoping to get a couple of movies out before he seeks financing for more film production. What’s likely to be the first movie by Fangoria is being worked on now in Malaysia about a were-tiger.

“Everyone’s heard of werewolves, no one’s heard of a were-tiger, and in Malaysian mythology, a were-tiger protects a village from outsiders, essentially, and this is a film about the encroachment of urbanization,” he said. “Urban sprawl and IKEA [are] popping up, and this were-tiger comes to try and stop the advancement of urbanization.”

The Southeast Asian location is intentional as Fangoria hopes to expand geographically, produce international content and publish in other regions through licensing partnerships. After all, as Goel said, everyone screams in the same language.