About Shivers

Shivers

Shivers was a British magazine devoted to horror in film, television and literature, published by Visual Imagination between June 1992 and May 2008. It took its name from Shivers, the 1975 horror film by David Cronenberg, and over sixteen years and 138 issues it provided British horror fans with news, interviews, reviews and critical features written by some of the best-known names in British genre journalism. Published from London at a rate of eight issues a year, it belonged to Visual Imagination's stable of fan and film magazines alongside Starburst, TV Zone, Cult Times, XPosé and Film Review, and its closure in 2008 was followed within a year by the end of its publishing company itself.

Shivers is written about here entirely in the past tense, because it is a finished magazine: its last issue, number 138, was published on 14 May 2008. What follows is the verified record of its launch, its editors, its regular features and contributors, and the company that produced it.

Launch in June 1992 and a famous name

The inaugural issue of Shivers appeared in June 1992. The publication took its name from the 1975 film of the same name by David Cronenberg, the Canadian director's early body-horror feature, a choice that signalled both the magazine's subject and its seriousness about horror as a field with a history worth naming titles after. The editorial in that first issue, by Alan Jones, set the magazine on its course.

The timing was favourable. Horror had a large British audience in the early 1990s, sustained by home video, satellite and terrestrial television screenings and a thriving culture of horror fiction publishing. A professionally produced magazine, a prozine in the language of genre publishing, offering paid journalism, interviews and production coverage, could sit between the fanzines produced by enthusiasts and the general film magazines that covered horror only occasionally. Shivers occupied exactly that ground, and it did so for sixteen years.

Visual Imagination, its publisher

Shivers was published by Visual Imagination Ltd, a British company founded in 1985 by Stephen Payne, which originally published only the science fiction magazine Fantasy Image. After Payne bought Starburst from Marvel UK, the company's list expanded into a portfolio of genre titles that, alongside Shivers, included Cult Times, Film Review, Movie Idols, TV Zone, Ultimate DVD and XPosé, with translated editions of some titles published in France and Germany.

That context shaped Shivers. It was one specialist title inside a specialist publishing house, sharing production methods, contributors and readers with sister magazines that covered science fiction television and film. A horror reader could also be a TV Zone or Starburst reader, and Visual Imagination's business was built on serving that overlapping audience month after month with authoritative, fan-literate journalism. The company was disestablished in early 2009, less than a year after Shivers itself ended.

Editors: Jones, Miller and the final issues

The first twelve issues of Shivers were edited by Alan Jones, the British film journalist who also wrote the magazine's news section for much of its run. The next 120 issues were edited by David Miller, whose long tenure covered the great majority of the magazine's life, from the early 1990s through the 2000s.

After David Miller left the company, the final half-dozen issues contained no editor credit at all, an unusual detail that marks the unsettled end of the magazine's run. Jan Vincent-Rudzki is recorded as deputy group editor in the magazine's bibliographic details. The last issue, number 138, was published on 14 May 2008. In total the magazine ran to 138 issues over almost exactly sixteen years, at a frequency of eight issues a year.

Coverage and regular features

Shivers was dedicated to horror movies, literature and, occasionally, video games, with television also within its scope. For much of its run its regular features gave each issue a stable structure on which its film coverage hung. There was a news section written by Alan Jones, keeping readers current with productions and releases in a period before instant online news made such pages obsolete.

Ingrid Pitt, the actress associated with Hammer horror films, contributed a regular item called The Pitt of Horror. David J. Howe wrote the book review section, reflecting the magazine's commitment to horror literature as well as film. Kim Newman, the novelist and critic, wrote an opinion column. At the end of the magazine came a film analysis feature called The Fright of Your Life, originated by Cleaver Patterson and continued by Jonathan Rigby. The critic Alex Wylie was also a contributor. Together those names constitute a significant roll of British horror writing of the period, gathered in one monthly magazine.

The Pitt of Horror and the Hammer connection

The presence of Ingrid Pitt among the regulars deserves separate notice, because it tied Shivers directly to the classic British horror cinema its readers admired. Pitt was a star of Hammer films, and her column, The Pitt of Horror, gave the magazine a voice from inside the era of British horror that its retrospective coverage celebrated.

That blend was characteristic of the magazine's editorial identity. Shivers covered new horror releases as news, but it treated horror as a continuing tradition, in which a Hammer star's column, a critical re-examination of an older film in The Fright of Your Life and a review of a new horror novel all belonged naturally between the same covers.

Horror literature in the magazine

Although film was its largest subject, Shivers consistently covered horror literature, with a book review section by David J. Howe running for much of its life. Howe is a noted historian of British television and horror publishing, and his presence underlines the magazine's refusal to treat horror as only a screen phenomenon.

For readers in the 1990s and 2000s, that mattered. Horror fiction had its own publishers, small presses and award culture, largely invisible to general books coverage. A newsstand magazine that reviewed horror books alongside horror films gave the literature a visibility it rarely received elsewhere, and gave film-led readers a route into contemporary horror writing.

The 1997 April Fool

One incident from the magazine's middle years is specifically documented. In 1997 an April Fools' prank was conducted on behalf of then-editor David Miller and The League of Gentlemen, the comedy troupe, in which a news article published in Shivers reported on a fictional monster rally film supposedly made by Val Lewton, the producer of classic 1940s horror films, and featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Men and Cat People.

The joke only worked because of the magazine's character. Its readers were knowledgeable enough to recognise the names and the impossibility, or near-impossibility, of the claim, and its news pages were trusted enough for the invention to land. The episode is a small but telling piece of evidence about the relationship between Shivers and its audience of committed horror enthusiasts.

Place among British horror magazines

Shivers appeared a year after The Dark Side, the rival British horror magazine founded in 1990, and the two titles defined the British horror newsstand for the following decade and a half. Where they differed in emphasis, they shared a publishing model: commercially produced magazines, written by paid specialist journalists and enthusiasts, carrying news, interviews and colour coverage of current productions supported by publicists and studios.

That model had a history. British and American prozines had developed from the 1970s onwards, and by the 1990s film-reference works treated Shivers, Starburst and The Dark Side as the British examples of the form. Shivers lasted longer than most: titles such as Fear, published from 1988 to 1991, had already come and gone before Shivers reached its stride, while Shivers continued to 2008.

Final issues and closure in 2008

The end, when it came, was untidy in the way documented above: the editor departed, and the final half-dozen issues went out with no editor credit. Issue 138, the last, was published on 14 May 2008, closing the magazine just short of its sixteenth birthday.

The wider business followed it. Visual Imagination, the publisher of Shivers, Starburst, TV Zone, Cult Times and the rest of its genre list, was disestablished in early 2009. Starburst, its most famous title, ceased print publication with its issue 365 in 2009 when the company folded, although it was later revived by new owners. No such revival came for Shivers, and its 138 issues remain a complete, closed run.

Bibliographic record and legacy

For the directory record: Shivers was published in the United Kingdom by Visual Imagination, in English, at eight issues a year, from June 1992 to 14 May 2008, ending with issue 138. Its ISSN was 0965-8238. It was edited first by Alan Jones for twelve issues and then by David Miller for 120, and its regular contributors included Ingrid Pitt, David J. Howe, Kim Newman, Cleaver Patterson, Jonathan Rigby and Alex Wylie.

Its legacy is that of a bridge. Shivers connected the Hammer era, present in its own pages through Ingrid Pitt, to the horror cinema and fiction of the 1990s and 2000s, and it connected fandom to professional journalism at a time when genre coverage was moving, irreversibly, from print to the internet. For collectors and historians of British horror, a run of Shivers is a contemporary record of what the genre looked like, sixteen years of it, written as it happened by people who knew it deeply.