He was the publisher of the great fanzine Dark Palace and has done an awful lot for the genre in Germany. He is now writing books and novels about TV series and has even started to write screenplays for television. Attached you will find a quite interesting and complex interview which was recorded in 2003 by Harald Dolezal.

Harald Dolezal (HD): How did it all begin for you? How did you become interested in the phantastic genre?

Torsten Dewi (TD): I think you have to inherit it because I have always been fascinated by this genre. I even cycled all the way to the city centre of Düsseldorf in my summer holidays to watch Yog: Monster from Space, Batman: The Movie (1966) and other «classics» like them. However I have to admit I have always been a coward, so whenever the ZDF showed Der Phantastische Film I had to change channels for the duration of the psychedelic opening of the film. I even held the cross I was given for my holy communion tight when I saw Bela Lugosi in Dracula.

HD: Was Dark Palace your first fanzine? How did this happen?

TD: Before I knew Dark Palace I knew the guys of Evil Ed (some of them even come from Düsseldorf). Well and at some point I wrote a few articles for Doc Cyclops, who mostly liked splatter without paying any attention for the actual quality of each film. So I could not help myself but explode after listening to things like «Sorry, can't recommend the film because it is missing gore» several times and I started my own magazine together with Markus Metzler - the Dark Palace. It surely wasn't any «soft» thing for all horror fans but we just wanted to improve and become more and more professional. I think we managed to do this with each of the published magazines. By the way, it was printed by Mr. Lethen who was responsible for our school books and had no idea that Markus and I had already left the school years ago! This is how we managed to get hundred professionally printed magazines for just DM 100, which was great.

HD: Please tell us about Dark Palace - about your experience with authors, readers and the composition of your articles.

TD: I could write whole books about that. We met many interesting people and I still speak to some of them. Yes, there are readers who like it a bit more extreme - if this was the case I usually referred those to Evil Ed. We started our first festivals due to the Palace and got the first press videos due to it etc. Really good times. But it became more and more difficult because a few hardcore people tend to become abusive when it came to conflicts between us. We were badly insulted, threatened and boycotted. So the fandom sooner or later ended in a battlefield where everyone was against everybody. So it was no surprise that the real fanzines became rare in the early nineties and were more or less taken over by semi-professional and professional magazines such as Splatting Image. Well, now you can find everything on the web anyway. I would create a website because the effort involved in printed magazines is disproportionate to the great number of people you can reach via the internet. Well, regarding style I am afraid there is no such gene that helps: When reading the Palace you would recognise my voice already back then. May be a bit less refined, but none the less definitely me. With hindsight I can now reveal that the evil commentator Black Jack, was no other than I myself.