As an introduction we have a potted history of British horror magazines and specifically The Dark Side, by the editor Allan Bryce. I grew up eagerly devouring every issue of Famous Monsters I could find, and it frustrated me greatly that there was never really a British counterpart to this. A short lived publication called Supernatural received national distribution in 1969 but lasted only two issues, and it was only with the arrival on the scene of The House Of Hammer magazine in the late 1970’s that a British horror publication achieved any level of continuity. Ironically I sold my very first freelance feature to them - a piece on collecting horror films on 8mm. But, before they could publish the sequel feature they had commissioned, they went out of business.
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on called Skeleton Crew. "It’s a horror magazine", they told me, "Do you
know anything about this subject". Skeleton Crew was quite an interesting
read, but it suffered from the same cheapskate production values that were
already sinking Video X. Frankly it looked like a fanzine. But leafing through
it, I realised that I’d missed the boat again. I had helped Newsfield Publications
set up a mag called Fear a couple of years earlier, and contributed some
articles under a pseudonym. In fact following the swift departure of Skeleton
Crew's editor David Hughes, I was offered the position of editing the mag,
but I declined as I didn’t want to take on somebody else’s concept - though
I did contribute some articles under the 
name
of Mark Lewis. In the end, Skeleton Crew only lasted for half a dozen issues
before going the way of Supernatural and House Of Hammer. Fear was also
on it’s last legs, though I always felt the problem with this mag was that
it majored too heavily on horror fiction - which the fans prefer to read
in books. At this point, Chris Adam-Smith had moved to the newly formed
Maxwell Specialist Publications and was looking around for new ideas. It
was he who suggested a horror mag, and he who suggested that it should be
called The Dark Side. In fact I had reservations about the name at first
because it sounded to me too much like the crappy old George Romero TV series,
Tales From The Darkside. Now I’m pretty glad that we stuck with it because
it seems that referring to "The Dark Side" of human nature has become part
of everyday conversation. The most difficult thing was settling down to
write the first editorial, the crucial one setting down where the magazine
was coming from. Having been presented with the chance to do a full colour,
expensively produced horror publication, I’d have loved to fill it with
features on my favourite genre flicks and lots of really gory pictures.
But I also had a duty to the publishers, who wanted articles on heavy metal
music, computer games, comics and books - anything to sell more advertising.
The first half dozen issues were slightly compromised by this, and it was
only when I bought the magazine from them with issue 14 that I could really
set about transforming The Dark Side into Britain’s ultimate horror mag.
It was always my intention from the start to use the top genre writers,
and we’ve had particular luck recruiting people like Maitland McDonagh,
John Martin, Martin Coxhead, Alan Jones, Alan Frank, Stan Nicholls, Kim
Newman, Tom Weaver and many others. I’ve also personally interviewed many
actors and filmmakers who have never been covered elsewhere - notably Lindsay
Shonteef and Harry Alan Towers. 
f
folk producing glossy semi-prozines nowadays started advertising in The
Dark Side. We have one other competitor in the newsstand market with Shivers,
though this tends to go for the X-Files audience. The Dark Side remains
the top selling title in the UK, and the only one that’s truly independent
in attitude. Unlike our American counterpart Fangoria, we don’t spend whole
issues talking about the latest installment in the Hellraiser series or
the flavour-of-the-month big budget Hollywood scare epic that turns out
to be rubbish when finally released. Though you’ll find up-to-date video
and DVD reviews, the rest of the mag tends to look back rather than forward,
and some of our special themed issues on Scream Queens, The Exorcist, Alien,
Jack The Ripper and Serial Killers have come to be regarded as classics.
Okay, we’ve also covered the X-Files and Doctor Who with special issues,
but in both cases our coverage had that special Dark Side spin to it. We
certainly don’t just serve up warmed up press releases. Very few newsstand
mags devote entire issues to Jess Franco or Lucio Fulci, and our refusal
to compromise on the adult nature of both text and picture content hasn’t
always been appreciated by mainstream newsagents - that’s why you won’t
find us in every branch of Smiths or Menzies. Recently, The Dark Side has
had to move to a temporary bimonthly schedule, prompted by my business,
and that I’m reluctant to hand over the title for anyone else to edit. But
we hope to be returning to a regular monthly basis soon, and in the meantime
there are plenty of treats in store for genre fans, with our up and coming
issues on Sexy Horrors, The History Of Hammer and our long awaited Horror
Stars special. We've also launched The Dark Side web site, which will be
regularly updated from
now on. Finally and perhaps most importantly, we’re urgently looking for
reliable, business minded people to handle distribution of The Dark Side
in other countries. At present fairly small quantities go out via our main
distributor, but we’re looking for reputable foreign companies that can
take thousands of copies and put them in the kind of specialist shops where
they’re going to be appreciated. We’d even be happy to customize it for
individual countries, and if you think that you’re able to help, then just
e-mail us. In this new millenium we intend to take The Dark Side to new
levels of world popularity, and the only way for us to do this is to tap
into the vast number of horror fans out there who are as yet un-aware of
our existence. And now you’re no longer one of them, you don’t have any
excuse for not joining in the gory fun.Allan Bryce.