A Final Farewell to FearNet
by Alyse Wax
July 28, 2014


You may or may not know this, but as of July 30th, FEARNET will shut its doors forever. In April, Comcast NBCUniversal bought out FEARNET. Because NBCUniversal already has Chiller and Syfy, it was decided that FEARNET was redundant.

Most of the staff was laid off then, with a skeleton crew kept around to help with the transition.





I have worked at FEARNET for the last six years - the last two full-time as associate editor - and it has been the most formative experience of my life. It would drive my husband crazy because I would work non-stop - but when it was all said and done, he told me that he never heard me complain. Not once. I loved this job. I will continue writing about horror.

Currently I am writing for Shock Till You Drop, and I have some stuff in the works for Fangoria. I am currently working on a book about "Friday the 13th: The Series". It is my favorite television show of all time, and am getting brand new interviews with the cast and crew.





All of us at FEARNET did it because we loved it. We love horror, and we were given an amazing outlet to work in. Network president Peter Block is a gregarious man who always had time for a conversation about the newest horror flicks and what I was watching on TV this week (it was usually everything).

Editor-in-chief Lawrence Raffel has ruined me for other job. As a boss, he never said "no" to an idea I pitched, and he was always there to help flesh out ideas. As a friend, he was always there with a sarcastic quip and an open ear.

I believe that I will always remain good friends with our brilliant editorial staff, Rob Galluzzo, Greg Burkart, John Squires, Scott Weinberg and Chris Connors, and with our amazing video staff, Rhianne Paz Bergado, Kyle Van Vonderen, Ben Koppin, and Jaclyn Kabble.





I don't know why Chiller did not decide to bring in the FEARNET team. With the talents of both networks working as one, we could have made an enormous impact on the television landscape. No matter how many horror flicks dominate the box office, and no matter how high the ratings are on genre TV, no one ever wants to take a chance on the horror genre.

I don't know that it will make any difference, but it certainly couldn't hurt to send an email to the good people at Chiller and let them know how much you enjoyed the FEARNET web experience.





Finally, a huge amount of thanks must go out to you, the readers. You were such a great audience to write for. You truly love horror as much as we do, and you showed it with kind, thoughtful, and insightful comments.

We literally could not have done FEARNET without your clicks, your likes, your comments, and your shares.

http://www.fearnet.com/news/news-article/final-farewell-fearnet

Comcast? More like Communicast.

It's too bad. Never really watched movies on there, but I did watch Adam Green's sitcom Holliston.

I've rarely watched Chiller, except reruns of a few TV shows, chopped up horror movies? No thanks.

When we first got HD thru DishNetwork, they had a few excellent HD channels. One was MonstersHD: 24/7 horror movies, uncut and commercial free. And they played lots of lesser known horror films, and ones from all decades. I would print out their monthly schedule and highlight the movies I wanted to DVR.

It is such a shame when a big company buys something up just for the sole purpose of shutting it down. But heartless bastards have to make a living too, I guess.

Chiller and SyFy are just about completely useless now - they used to at least have a couple of good series and the occasional decent movie, but that's gone out the window.

Comcast NBCUniversal should just leave things alone and stop wanting to buy up almost all of the entertainment industry. When they took over Chiller, it went from a decent independent horror channel to another cable clone of featuring terrible movies and reality reruns. The changes at Syfy were even worse. Clearly they don't believe in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."