Fangoria

In February 2018 Cinestate, a Dallas film and publishing company run by producer Dallas Sonnier, bought the assets and trademarks of Fangoria, the horror magazine founded in 1979, from The Brooklyn Company and former publisher Thomas DeFeo. The deal also covered the Starlog and Gorezone trademarks. The announcement said Sonnier had raised more than $5 million in investment for Cinestate. Fangoria's last print issue had come out in October 2015, Central Track reported, and the Dallas Observer said its print operations ended in February 2017 for lack of advertising revenue, leaving paid subscriptions unfulfilled.

Sonnier hired Phil Nobile Jr., editor-at-large of Birth.Movies.Death., as editor-in-chief and creative director. Nobile worked from New Jersey; the rest of the staff worked out of Cinestate's Dallas offices. The announced team included Zack Parker as director of brand management, Jessica Safavimehr as associate publisher and Ashley Detmering as art director, with former editors Tony Timpone and Michael Gingold returning as columnists and consultants. Sonnier told the Observer the title would be "exclusively a print magazine," and the new owners offered a free year to subscribers who had not received what they paid for.

Volume 2, Issue 1 came out in October 2018. Meredith Borders became managing editor, and Joe Bob Briggs wrote a column. Cinestate also used the name as a film label: in June 2018 it bought Grady Hendrix's script Satanic Panic, which RLJE Films released in September 2019, and the label backed Joe Begos's VFW, starring Stephen Lang.

On April 27, 2020, Dallas police arrested Adam Donaghey, a producer who had worked on Cinestate's Dallas shoots, and charged him with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old; he denied the allegation, The Daily Beast reported. On June 6, 2020, The Daily Beast published a report by Marlow Stern in which more than a dozen people said Sonnier and producing partner Amanda Presmyk had been told about Donaghey's behavior. Both denied knowing of an audio recording at the center of the report. On June 8, the editors of Fangoria and Birth.Movies.Death., which Cinestate had bought from the Alamo Drafthouse that May, said they would do no work for Cinestate until it met demands including harassment training. On June 10, they said the titles could not continue under Cinestate and that new buyers were being sought. Briggs resigned his columns.

On August 27, 2020, producer Tara Ansley and entrepreneur Abhi Goel announced they had bought Fangoria, Starlog and Gorezone from Sonnier, in a release datelined Los Angeles. Nobile and Borders stayed on to publish the quarterly.