We’re devastated to report that Fango contributor and podcast co-host Scott Wampler has died. Details are scarce at present but, from what we understand, he passed suddenly and without any suffering, which is giving us some small measure of comfort right now. The loss is immeasurable, and tonight we mourn with Scott’s family and friends.
Many of you will know Scott as one half of The Kingcast, his podcast with Eric Vespe which, over the course of hundreds of episodes, saw such guests on the mic as Jamie Lee Curtis, Kumail Nanjiani, and Stephen King himself. Scott’s love of all things King fueled a truly epic amount of output, and we’re lucky it exists.
Less flashy was Scott’s gig as Fango daily news reporter, which saw him not only delivering genre updates in his inimitable voice, but overseeing a news team, providing insight and expertise from his years at Collider and Birth.Movies.Death. He loved a good art print, and was the loudest evangelist of Session 9 I’ve ever met.
Perhaps Scott’s most fitting legacy is his social media presence, where he tore it up on Twitter and used that platform to create work opportunities for himself, meet his heroes and become a figure of much adoration. It’s hard to overstate that, simply by being goddamn hilarious on Twitter (he would never call it X), heads of studios, celebrated filmmakers and artists like Trent Reznor waved him in and considered him a friend. (He’s currently trending on that accursed app, and I think that would amuse him greatly.)
I met Scott 11 years ago and we went through a lot together in that time. We saw each other in person maybe one week out of the year, but it was that kind of easy, close friendship where we kept a running chat throughout the day, whether that was on text, Slack or DMs. As I said over on Twitter, we loved and supported each other, had each other’s backs, argued and talked shit on each other — often all of the above at the same time — all day, every day. Because that’s what brothers do.
This isn’t an official obituary. It can’t be. We’re all still processing this news. But we wanted to let our Fango family know tonight that we lost Scott, and that we share your grief right now.
