Comcast has bought out its partners, Lionsgate and Sony, in the joint venture known as FEARnet. Soon, Comcast will fold the network’s brand neatly away into its NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment division, its assets likely divvied up between Chiller and Syfy, and that will be that. FEARnet, as it was known to the 7 million or so households who received it in linear form (and the 27 million more who used its VOD movie service), will cease to be.

RIP FEARnet. Its demise was probably inevitable – there’s only so much viewer bandwidth available for 24-hour horror, suspense and thriller programming and just one network is probably enough to cover it – but it’s also a shame, because creatively speaking the network was just starting, after eight years in existence, to come into its own. Under the guidance of Faye Walker, its SVP of marketing, FEARnet had released a sharp new rebrand in January, and was building off of it in increasingly clever and dynamic ways.

“We were just getting started,” Walker said, “and where we would have been in two years would have been spectacular. It was really powerful, really good work.”

Like the many, many zombies that haunted FEARnet’s airwaves (among other creepy entities), let’s take a minute to give some of that creative second life, so that it may rise again and walk amongst us. It begins with the network’s versatile logo.

“I love our logo,” Walker said. “That blood splat. I’ve walked into a lot of [companies] and never really loved a logo. This was a great logo. It really had a personality. It’s a face for gods sake.”

“We wanted to bring it to life.,” Walker continued, “so we utilized the logo in such a way that it was a window to our world. In a lot of the on-air elements, you actually fly in through the logo. The logo sort of comes at you and then we either roll content or a variety of elements within it. In some ways, we deconstructed it a little bit but had a great time leveraging it.”

“At the same time we opened it up to our fans, a lot of whom are graphic designers or who come from the print industry: comic book illustrators, street artists, etc. We said, ‘let’s open this up and have them come up with their own interpretations.’ We had a bunch of designer create beautiful executions of the logo. It was very modern, very playful, but still scary.”

The versatility of the logo perhaps reached its apex in the above 2011 FEARnet rebrand with design by Buster. The network would freshen up the brand again three years later, but this earlier work still plays as a stunning showcase of what the little blood splat could do, obliterating outward, ropy trails of blood extending everywhere to burst through walls, form words, twist through scary woods, and otherwise leave its red imprint on every kind of iconic horror imagery imaginable.

FEARnet rebranded one more time in January, for the last time.

“We wanted to make the branding more accessible to a wide range of people and also make it a real TV brand,” Walker said. “The old package I inherited was not very versatile and friendly for television and was difficult to translate across platforms. The packaging [of the 2014 rebrand] was very clean and yet still allowed for the campy Corman movies or the campy Vincent Price movies, or even the more hardcore “Saw” type films. It had a range that allowed for a variety of different movies. That’s what you need and want from your brand: a full range that allows the content to be front and center yet allows the brand to illuminate that for the viewers.”

“We had always talked with Buster about this concept of scary rules,” Walker said, “which manifested in ‘Fear 101,’ which was going to be a whole on-air campaign and maybe even a toolkit. There’s all these things when you’re watching a horror movie that make you go, “don’t go in the basement!” and so on. So we thought it’d be really fun to bring all those elements to life and show we not only know our brand and genre, but we love it too, and it’s fun.”

FEARnet’s small but fearsome creative team:

Faye Walker, SVP of Marketing
Judy Korin & Jeanne LeBlanc, Outside Brand Consultants
George Malanche, Creative Director
JxTWO (Jeanne LeBlanc & Jeremy Alcock), ID Animators & Designers
Taj Payne, Sr. Web & Print Designer
Brea Jacobs, Jr. Designer
Eric Cookson, Sr. Preditor

Buster, Image Spot Producers

Tags:


  Save as PDF