By ROB FREESE
I’m sure that for most modern horror fans, zines seem like charming relics of the past, especially in our world of high-speed internet and instant information. I’ll go further and say a lot of people have heard of zines, but don’t have a tight grasp on the concept. (Blogs printed on paper?)
For more than a century, zines have been the unsung backbone of popular culture. Published in small runs, zines are fueled by the passion of the writers and artists collected within their covers. Short for “fanzine” (which itself means “fan-published magazine”), some of the earliest zines focused on science fiction, fantasy and horror. Zines were either typed or painstakingly written in longhand, the lines never quite staying straight or the same size. (Many handwritten zines looked like the ravings of a crazy person, until you read all that cursive and realize, this person really knows their John Carradine movies.) Copies were mimeographed and eventually, “printed” with copy machines (aka “Xeroxing,” taken from “Xerox,” the name of the most popular copier brand).
Usually raw and unedited, zinesters can pick apart something with honesty you would never find in a mainstream publication or heap praise on something the mainstream critics failed to notice. Many genre luminaries dabbled in zines when they were still young fans, and others used the medium to break into the business.
Teen zinester John Carpenter’s homemade mag, circa 1965.
It is well known that John Carpenter wrote and illustrated PHANTASM Terror Thrills of the Film as a teenager. (He cites Forry Ackerman contacting him for 50 copies as a highlight of his career!) In the 1960s, KISS bassist Gene Simmons, then a young Gene Klein, published the comic fanzine Faun as well as titles like Cosmos, Adventure and Mantis. (He has said reading and writing zines helped him learn English after he and his mother moved to America from Israel. He eventually traded his secondhand mimeograph machine for a guitar amp.)
Legendary artist Bernie Wrightson worked for numerous comic zines, building a fanbase and honing his craft. In fact, when the final issue of Web of Terror was completed but never published, most of the stories that were returned to the artists, including Wrightson’s, found their way into horror comic zines. (Zines saved this work from being lost to time, and it is all collected today in what would have been Web of Terror #4 in Fantagraphics’ 2024 deluxe release of Web of Horror’s entire four-issue run.)
Young Robert Bloch at work.
Psycho author Robert Bloch wrote nearly as frequently for zines as he did for paying markets. Nearly two dozen stories and articles were collected in Out of My Head, a tribute limited run hardback showcasing his love for science fiction and its fandom, published to commemorate his appearance as Boskone XXIII Guest of Honor.
My involvement with fanzines came in the late 1990s, when I started picking up horror movie zines and later began contributing to them. One of my favorites has always been Bill Van Ryn’s DRIVE-IN ASYLUM. Each issue is packed with writing by contributors who know what they like in their drive-in horror flicks and express that passion in a fun, conversational manner. The articles are accompanied by pages of vintage drive-in horror movie newspaper ads. It is all delivered in a very satisfying “xeroxed,” folded down the center and stapled in the middle package that never fails to take me back a couple of decades.
Having wrapped his new Drive-in Asylum 1980 Yearbook, Bill Van Ryn was kind enough to sit down and chat with me about horror zines and the origins of DRIVE-IN ASYLUM.
Did you read zines as a kid?
I had almost no contact with zines up until I decided to start mine. I was a ’70s Monster Kid and isolated for the most part in my affection for scary movies. When I was ten years old, I started reading Famous Monsters of Filmland, and in October 1980, I bought Fangoria #8 with Zombie on the cover. There was no going back.
What drove you to launch DRIVE-IN ASYLUM?
“DRIVE-IN ASYLUM” creator Bill Van Ryn.
I had an extensive collection of movie ads I’d clipped from newspaper archives, and I needed something to do with them. I’d been sharing them on my Facebook page, Groovy Doom, and I learned that there’s something about seeing newsprint images on paper that is satisfying for people who grew up looking at them. It’s now mostly a thing of the past.
In 2015, a friend of mine gave me something that showed me the way. It was a fanzine called Snackbar Confidential, published by an artist named Lance Laurie. It was nothing but vintage newsprint ads of all types, and some of the ads were for movies. I immediately knew I would have to create something similar that focused exclusively on ads for theaters and drive-ins. I created the first issue of DRIVE-IN ASYLUM in October 2015; We’re coming up on our tenth anniversary this year!
How did you get the word out about DRIVE-IN ASYLUM?
It was almost exclusively through social media. I had already been sharing movie ads on the Groovy Doom Facebook page, so I had a following to communicate with. The mag started small but grew rapidly, and more and more people started coming to me asking if they could contribute. There was way more interest in it than I had ever realized.
Are you surprised at how your readership has grown over the years?
I was at first, yes! Eventually, you learn that you’re never the only one who has a certain interest, no matter how obscure it may be, and there’s something gratifying about discovering that you’re not alone in your obsessions. Some people have been reading it since the very first issue. A trend I love to see is when a new reader takes a chance and buys an issue, then returns to buy every available issue. That’s how I know we’re doing something right. We also have several distributors, the largest of which are Forbidden Planet NYC and Strange Vice UK. Matt D at Forbidden Planet has been great; He really understands what DRIVE-IN ASYLUM is and has helped us immensely in expanding our readership. People continue to reach out, too. We just picked up a new distributor, a T-shirt dealer called Silk Screams.
What do you enjoy most about putting the zine together?
It’s a joy from beginning to end. I have a fine group of contributors who all bring their unique perspectives to the writing, but I am solely responsible for the visual aspect of DRIVE-IN ASYLUM. I collect all the newsprint images and create the layouts piece by piece. I use digital programs to do this, but it’s not an automated process; I create each page from scratch. The text formatting is created and laid in manually. It’s a painstaking process, but it’s also addictive because there’s nothing like the moment when you have the finished product in your hands way down the road.
DRIVE-IN ASYLUM is my fantasy magazine, the kind of thing that I would eagerly buy if I were not the one making it. I wanted to buy a magazine where actors like Linda Gillen, Toni Lawrence and Zooey Hall were on the cover, and the films they appeared in were the focus. The best you could hope for in a mainstream publication is that someone would do an article once in a while on some obscure movie that the public has just started to catch on to. I wanted a mag where that’s all it was, just wall-to-wall vintage movies, with an emphasis on the obscure or offbeat.
What are you most proud of since you started publishing DRIVE-IN ASYLUM?
It’s the sense of community that has grown around this project that makes me most proud. Fanzines have traditionally been “cultish,” and they aren’t typically a commercial thing. Mine is no exception; It’s a break-even venture, and it’s priced accordingly. The only reason it exists is because of our shared affection for these types of films, and that’s what it’s really all about: movie fandom. It’s also exciting when someone recognizable reads the mag – William Lustig, Rob Zombie, Bob Murawski and David Szulkin from Grindhouse Releasing, Joseph Ziemba, Joe Bob Briggs. It’s a great feeling to know that creators you respect are also the same kind of fans of this material as you are. For certain people who miss that experience of browsing newspaper ads or holding something in their hands instead of seeing it on a screen, the zine is a way to connect with this part of our lives that keeps getting smaller and smaller. Any type of physical media is important.
For further reading on zine culture, there is no finer collection of interviews with zinesters than John Szpunar’s Xeroxferox (Headpress). Also, Preston Fassel’s Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street (Encyclopocalypse Publications) delves into the life of Bill Landis, publisher of the beloved Sleazoid Express. ZineWiki is also a great resource for everything zine.
