The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books)

by Jones, Stephen

  J. J. Abrams’ $50 million homage to producer Spielberg, Super 8, was a summer movie about a group of school friends who witnessed a spectacular train crash and became involved with an escaped extraterrestrial who just wanted to go home.

  Aaron Eckhart’s military veteran led a platoon of soldiers and some jittery camerawork against an alien invasion in the noisy Battle: Los Angeles, while a group of young people were trapped in a Moscow invaded by aliens through the power supply in The Darkest Hour.

  British sci-fi nerds Simon Pegg and Nick Frost picked up the eponymous alien escapee (voiced by a potty-mouthed Seth Rogen) in Greg Mottola’s likeable comedy Paul, which also featured Jason Bateman, Jane Lynch, Blythe Danner and Sigourney Weaver.

  Nick Frost also turned up as a laid-back drug dealer in Joe Cornish’s inventive Attack the Block, which mixed its laughs with scares as toothy alien balls of fur met their match at the hands of a gang of urban teenagers on a South London estate.

  Shia LaBeouf’s hapless hero Sam Witwicky teamed up with Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley to battle the evil Decepticons in Michael Bay’s 3-D second sequel,Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, John Turturro, John Malkovich, Buzz Aldrin and Leonard Nimoy (as the voice of “Sentinel Prime”) were lost amongst the special effects mayhem.

  Hugh Jackman’s washed-up fighter trained a boxing robot in Shawn Levy’s Real Steel, based on the story by Richard Matheson, and five scantily-clad women used their fantasies to escape from a mental institution in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch.

  In Dominic Sena’s ludicrously entertaining Season of the Witch, a pair of disillusioned fourteenth century Crusaders (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) were forced by Christopher Lee’s plague-ridden Cardinal to escort a suspected witch (Claire Foy) to a remote monastery. After being attacked by wolves and zombie monks, they discovered an even greater evil awaited them at their destination.

  Cage also starred as a vengeful escapee from Hell on the trail of an evil satanic cult leader in Patrick Lussier’s 3-D Drive Angry, which, despite the non-stop action, flopped at the box-office.

  Based on another graphic novel series, Paul Bettany’s futuristic vampire-hunter had to rescue his kidnapped niece in the 3-D Priest, while Anthony Hopkins’ ageing exorcist teamed up with a young priest (Colin O’Donoghue) to banish a demon possessing a pregnant Italian teenager in The Rite.

  Director Guy Ritchie and actors Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law were reunited for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, a sequel to the 2009 film, as the Great Detective tried to prevent a devious Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) from starting the First World War.

  After eleven years, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette returned for Wes Craven’s Scr4am, which updated its scares for a new generation who couldn’t care less. Despite featuring TV heroines Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell and Hayden Panettiere, it became the lowest grossing entry yet in the spoof slasher series.

  Tony Todd returned to the series as a creepy coroner in Final Destination 5, in which the survivors of a bridge collapse met their graphic demises in gore-drenched 3-D.

  Colin Farrell was the vampire that moved-in next door in the surprisingly good 3-D remake of the 1985 comedy-horror film Fright Night, which also featured David Tennant in the original Roddy McDowall role.

  Rebecca De Mornay’s mad matriarch dominated her sadistic sons in Mother’s Day, a remake of the 1980 slasher film of the same name, while Leighton Meester’s crazed stalker put a kitten in a clothes dryer just to make her point in The Roommate, a risible PG-13 rip-off of Single White Female (1992).

  A belated prequel to Tim Burton’s 2001 remake, Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a surprise box-office hit, opening at #1 in America.

  Paul W. S. Anderson directed a silly 3-D steampunk version of The Three Musketeers starring his wife, Milla Jovovich, who criticised Summit Entertainment on Twitter for failing to market the movie properly.

  Mary Elizabeth Winstead was part of a Norwegian team that discovered something under the Antarctic ice in The Thing, a belated and pointless prequel/remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie (which itself was a remake).

  Meanwhile, Carpenter himself directed The Ward, in which Amber Heard’s teenage pyromaniac ended up in a spooky 1960s insane asylum.

  Husband and wife stars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz refused to promote the final cut of Jim Sheridan’s Dream House, which gave away all its surprises in the trailer and quickly sank without trace on both sides of the Atlantic.

  In America, Hammer’s psychological thriller The Resident went directly to DVD, despite starring Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Christopher Lee. At least it received a negligible cinema release in the UK, as did the pagan thriller Wake Wood, another Hammer production that had been sitting on the shelf for a few years.

  Co-scripted by Stephen Volk and director Nick Murphy, The Awakening was an atmospheric low-budget period ghost film set in a haunted boarding school.

  Given its slightly more than $1 million budget, James Wan’s Insidious turned out to be one of the most profitable films of the year, taking more than $53 million at the US box-office. Produced by the team behind the terrible Paranormal Activity franchise and written and directed by the creators of the Saw series, it was an intentionally old-fashioned ghost story about parents fighting for the soul of their son.

  Two sisters discovered footage of themselves from 1988 that proved they had always been a magnet for the supernatural in Paranormal Activity 3. Made for just $5 million, the prequel opened in the US at #1 with a gross of $52.6 million – the biggest horror film and best October opening ever.

  Shark Night 3D served up college co-eds as chum, while a group of foxhunters became the hunted in Blooded. Apollo 18 was another “found footage” flick, this time set on the Moon.

  A brother and sister wandered around a forest investigating the paranormal in the Spanish-made Atrocious, while the Norwegian Troll Hunter was like The Blair Witch Project with giant furry trolls.

  Guillermo Del Toro produced Julia’s Eyes, Guillem Morales’ Spanish supernatural thriller in which Belén Rueda’s Hitchcockian heroine investigated the death of her blind twin sister. Del Toro also produced and co-scripted Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a loose remake of a 1973 TV movie, about an old manor house haunted by little evil critters.

  Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In starred Antonio Banderas as an obsessed plastic surgeon in an art house homage to Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (aka Eyes Without a Face).

  Gustavo Hernández’s Spanish thriller The Silent House played out in real time and was based on a true murder mystery that happened in 1940s Uruguay.

  Louise Bourgoin was the female Indiana Jones battling mad scientists, dinosaurs and reanimated Egyptian mummies in Luc Besson’s comic book-inspired The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec.

  Kirsten Dunst and Alexander Skarsgård were unlucky enough to schedule their nuptials for the same day as a rogue planet was about to crash into the Earth in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which debuted in America on video-on-demand.

  Mike Cahill’s Another Earth was another indie feature, in which a woman (Brit Marling) won a trip to an identical planet orbiting her own world.

  The Dead was a low budget zombie film shot in Africa, and the bargain budget zombie apocalypse continued in the British-made The World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries.

  The horror comedy Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, which starred Brandon Routh as a paranormal investigator, took under $1 million during its opening week in the US.

  A pair of assassins discovered that there was more to their latest job than they expected in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. Tucker & Dale vs. Evil was a low budget spoof on backwoods slasher films, while Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds swapped bodies in the comedy The Change-Up.

  More tragedy than Greek, Theseus (future “Superman” Henry Cavill) led his Olympian chums against Mickey Rourke’s evil King Hyperion in Tarsem
Singh’s overblown Immortals, released in “epic 3-D”.

  Your Highness was a witless fantasy spoof that somehow managed to feature James Franco, Natalie Portman and Charles Dance in its cast.

  Despite Jason Momoa’s solid Hyborian warrior, and Ron Perlman as his father, the 3-D Conan the Barbarian was a disappointing origin story of Robert E. Howard’s sword-wielding hero.

  Audiences were colour-blind to the 3-D The Green Hornet, in which Seth Rogen’s mugging millionaire became a crime-fighter with the aid of Jay Chou’s far more intelligent Kato, and Ryan Reynolds made a lightweight Green Lantern in Martin Campbell’s disappointing origin story of the DC Comics superhero.

  James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender played the younger incarnations of Professor X and Magneto, respectively, in Matthew Vaughn’s better-than-expected “preboot” of the Marvel Comics franchise, X-Men: First Class.

  Marvel continued to build towards its multi-hero Avengers epic in 2012 with the release of Kenneth Branagh’s mighty 3-D Thor, which introduced the planet Asgard’s God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth), exiled to Earth by his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins). Meanwhile, Chris Evans’ wartime weakling became Captain America: The First Avenger in Joe Johnston’s nicely old-fashioned 3-D adventure, which pitted the all-American hero against Nazi villain the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving).

  Comedian Rainn Wilson became low-rent hero “The Crimson Bolt” in Super, which also featured Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon and Nathan Fillion.

  Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel about teenage cloning, Never Let Me Go starred Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, while Alex Pettyfer’s stranded alien might just as well have been another Twilight vampire in the teen romance I Am Number Four, produced by Michael Bay.

  The less said about Bill Condon’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 the better, as Bella and Edward got married, moped around and had a vampire baby.

  Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who was responsible for the first Twilight movie, Red Riding Hood put a werewolf spin on the same basic premise.

  A young Parisian orphan (Asa Butterfield) befriended forgotten cinema pioneer Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) in Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3-D paean to the movies, which also featured Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Richard Griffiths and Christopher Lee.

  Maybe because it was released in “4-D Aroma-scope”, but Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids: All the Time in the World was a box-office stinker.

  Despite being directed by Steven Spielberg, the 3-D motion-capture used in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn just made the comic strip characters look creepy.

  One of the biggest box-office bombs of the year was Walt Disney’s Mars Needs Moms. Estimated to have cost around $150 million, the 3-D motion-capture comedy took just $6.9 million in the US during its opening weekend. However, Hoodwinked Too!: Hood vs. Evil actually had the worst opening ever for a 3-D movie, grossing just $4.1 million at 1,500 movie theatres.

  At the Orange British Academy Film Awards on 13 February, director Tim Burton presented eighty-eight-year-old Sir Christopher Lee with the Academy Fellowship – the highest accolade given out by BAFTA for contribution to film. Previous recipients included Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth Taylor and Sean Connery.

  The 83rd Annual Academy Awards were announced in Hollywood on 27 February. Natalie Portman won the Best Actress award for her portrayal of a crazed ballet dancer in Black Swan, and Toy Story 3 picked up the awards for Best Animated Feature Film and Original Song (“We Belong Together”). Inception scooped up a quartet of technical awards for Cinematography, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Visual Effects. The Art Direction and Costume Design awards went to Alice in Wonderland, and The Wolfman was the winner of Best Makeup. Co-directed by Australian genre artist Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing won for Best Short Film, Animated.

  The highlight of the evening was when ninety-four-year-old Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas presented the award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

  On 12 November, Honorary Academy Awards for lifetime achievement were presented to actor James Earl Jones (the voice of “Darth Vader” in the Star Wars movies) and veteran make-up artist Dick Smith (The Exorcist).

  Before Warner Bros. began pulling all eight Potter DVDs from retail shelves at the end of December in preparation for future upgrades, the Blu-ray release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 included an in-depth conversation between J. K. Rowling and Daniel Radcliffe, along with an interactive option. The Potter franchise has already generated around $51 billion for the studio’s Home Entertainment division – on top of the $7 billion earned during the films’ theatrical release.

  Following complaints in the press by Dutch director Tom Six, in October, the British Board of Film Classification lifted its ban on The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), giving the controversial body-horror movie an “18” certificate on DVD after two-and-a-half minutes were cut from the original running time.

  Scott Spiegel’s Hostel: Part III found its natural home after being released directly to DVD, as did Victor Garcia’s Mexican-set Hellraiser: Revelation, the ninth film in the franchise and the first not to feature Doug Bradley as “Pinhead”.

  Danny Trejo, Ving Rhames and the busy Sean Bean starred in Death Race 2, a DVD prequel to the 2008 remake.

  A couple were trapped in their island home by a washed-up soldier in Carl Tibbetts’ debut Retreat which, despite starring Thandie Newton, Cillian Murphy and Jamie Bell, also went straight to DVD.

  Released on DVD as an “After Dark Original”, The Task was about a reality TV show recorded on a haunted prison ship.

  Skin Eating Jungle Vampires from Chemical Burn Entertainment had all the quality of a bad home video. The same was true of The Stone: No Soul Unturned and the terrifically titled (but ultimately disappointing) Fast Zombies with Guns, from the same distributor.

  Survivors of a terrorist bomb attack had to also escape the walking dead in Zombie Undead.

  The Blu-ray of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) featured more than fifty minutes of “newly discovered” scenes never included in the finished film.

  The Complete 50th Anniversary Collection of the 1960s TV series The Avengers was issued by Optimum as a limited edition thirty-nine disc set that featured every episode digitally restored and more than thirty hours of bonus material.

  The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection was a five-disc Blu-ray set containing all fourteen of Basil Rathbone’s Holmes films, dating from 1939–46.

  Guillermo del Toro, John Landis and Roger Corman were among those who were commenting on the horrors of the past on the DVD compilation Trailers from Hell! Volume 2.

  1980s stars Kristy Swanson, D. B. Sweeney and Robert Davi turned up in the entertaining Syfy channel movie Swamp Shark, John Schneider was slumming in Super Shark, and Robert Picardo had a cameo in Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus.

  Syfy also revived the careers of 1980s pop rivals Deborah (Debbie) Gibson and Tiffany, who teamed up for Mary Lambert’s Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, which also featured former Monkee Micky Dolenz as himself.

  Brian Krause and C. Thomas Howell battled arachnids from Afghanistan in Jim Wynorski’s dire Camel Spiders; Robert Patrick was involved in a civil war on Mars in the videogame-based Red Faction: Origins, and Lance Henriksen made a brief appearance in Scream of the Banshee.

  A giant monster nearly destroyed the entire planet in Behemoth, a mutated root system threatened to tear apart the Earth in The Terror Beneath (aka Seeds of Destruction), and a proofreader and an archaeologist teamed up to prevent the end of the world in Doomsday Prophecy.

  A volcano under Yellowstone Park exploded in a Super Eruption, while Stacy Keach’s mad meteorologist used a weather weapon to destroy his enemies in Storm War.

  Danny Glover’s obsessed Captain Ahab wanted revenge on a Great White . . . er, Dragon, in the Syfy “original” movie Age of the Dragons, a medieval reworking of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.<
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  H. G. Wells was no doubt spinning in his grave as mutated monsters travelled back in time in Morlocks, and Ray Harryhausen would have been equally disappointed by the bargain-basement Sinbad and the Minotaur.

  Meanwhile, an unrecognisable Richard Grieco played the evil Loki in Almighty Thor, another cheap knock-off from The Asylum, who would also have you believe that its low budget alien invasion movie Battle of Los Angeles was in no way similar to the bigger budget Battle: Los Angeles.

  Alien bacteria animated an eighteen-foot golem in Iron Invader (aka Metal Shifters), and alien technology created a terrorist weapon in Cold Fusion.

  The Syfy’s channel’s two-part Neverland was yet another version of the Peter Pan story, with Rhys Ifans as the future Captain Hook, Anna Friel as his pirate lover, and Keira Knightley as the voice of a CGI Tinkerbell.

  A modern-day Dorothy Gale (Paulie Rojas) discovered that the best-selling books she had written were based on her suppressed childhood memories in Syfy’s two-part The Witches of Oz. The supporting cast included Billy Boyd, Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, Mia Sara, Sean Astin and Christopher Lloyd.

  Pierce Brosnan’s best-selling novelist investigated the death of his wife (Annabeth Gish) in Mick Garris’ two-part, four-hour supernatural mini-series of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones on A&E, which also featured genre veteran William Schallert.

  Based on a comic book, the unfortunately titled Steve Niles’ Remains was yet another reworking of Night of the Living Dead and was the first original movie produced by the Chiller cable TV channel.

  Housewife Halloween movies included Lifetime’s Possessing Piper Rose starring Rebecca Romijin, and Hallmark’s The Good Witch’s Family starring Catherine Bell. Martin Mull’s titular phantom attempted to scare away a family who moved into his house in Oliver’s Ghost for the same network.

  Eddie Izzard portrayed a mysterious stranger who turned up on Christmas Eve in the BBC-TV movie Lost Christmas, while The Borrowers was yet another version of Mary Norton’s classic children’s books. It featured Christopher Eccleston, Victoria Wood and Stephen Fry, and was also broadcast by the BBC at Christmas.