The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  Following multiple accusations of plagiarism, McFarland & Co. withdrew all copies of D. DeAngelo’s Features from the Black Lagoon: The Film, its Sequels, the Spinoffs and Memorabilia after little more than a month.

  Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties: The 21st Century Edition was the second revised and expanded edition of Bill Warren’s seminal 1982 study, published by McFarland with a Foreword by Howard Waldrop.

  Richard Matheson on Screen: A History of the Filmed Works was an excellent study of the author’s cinematic work from McFarland. Written by Matthew R. Bradley, with a brief Foreword by Matheson himself, the book also featured some nicely selected stills plus an impressive Bibliography and Index.

  In The Literary Monster on Film: Five Nineteenth Century British Novels and Their Cinematic Adaptations, also from McFarland, author Abigail Burnham Bloom explored the various film versions of Frankenstein, Dracula, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, She and The Island of Dr Moreau.

  From Telos Publishing, Silver Scream: 40 Classic Horror Movies Volume Two 1941–1951 featured numerous reviews by Steven Warren Hill, profusely illustrated with fascinating stills.

  Also from Telos, Richard Molesworth’s Wiped! Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes chronicled the story of how the BBC controversially destroyed more than 250 episodes of the TV show and how more than 100 programmes are still missing.

  Eclipse: The Complete Illustrated Movie Companion was a guide to the third film in the Twilight series by Mark Cotta Vaz.

  Also obviously intended to cash in on the release of the latest Twilight movie, the clumsily titled Vampire Lovers: Screen’s Seductive Creatures of the Night: A Book of Undead Pin-Ups from Plexus Publishing was a heavily illustrated trade paperback that looked at memorable vampires from Angel to The Vampire Lovers, with better-than-it-deserved text by Gavin Baddeley.

  From the same publisher, Steven Savile’s Fantastic TV: 50 Years of Cult Fantasy and Science Fiction was an oddly selective guide through various small-screen series which was bulked out with a round robin interview between creators and writers Joe Ahearne, Adrian Hodges, Kenneth Johnson, Stephen Volk, Andrew Cartmel, Keith DeCandido, Paul Cornell and Kevin J. Anderson.

  In Six Cult Films from the Sixties: The Inside Stories by Writer/ Director Ib Melchior from BearManor Media, the ninety-three-year-old screenwriter revealed the histories behind his movies The Angry Red Planet, The Time Travellers, Reptilicus, Journey to the Seventh Planet, Robinson Crusoe on Mars and Planet of the Vampires. Visual effects designer Robert Skotak supplied the Introduction.

  Size Matters: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis was a depreciating autobiography by the diminutive two-foot, eleven-inch British actor from the Star Wars, Leprechaun and Harry Potter film series.

  In a shock announcement in July, Britain’s new coalition government announced that it was abolishing the profit-making UK Film Council as part of its drastic cost-cutting measures. The decision by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who was advised by Stardust and Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn, was greeted with outrage by most UK film-makers and others in the arts.

  That same month, Switzerland’s Justice Ministry denied a request to extradite Roman Polanski to the US for sentencing on child-sex charges dating back thirty-three years. The Rosemary’s Baby director had been under house arrest since being seized by Swiss authorities while on his way from his home in France to a film festival in the country the previous September.

  A survey conducted by Professor Joanne Cantor of Wisconsin University found that watching horror films could lead to life-long fears, such as being frightened to go into the shower after seeing Psycho. This latest piece of “No s**t Sherlock” research found that the five most frightening films were Jaws, Psycho, It (based on the Stephen King novel), A Nightmare on Elm Street and Poltergeist.

  2010 was once again all about sequels, remakes and reboots at the box office.

  Despite its ongoing conflicts between fit-looking vampires and buff werewolves, David Slade’s The Twilight Saga: Eclipse dropped all pretence at being a horror film as vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) and werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner) vied for the limited affections of the expressionless Bella (Kristen Stewart). After taking a record-breaking gross of more than $30 million with its midnight launch at over 4,000 movie theatres (including IMAX) at the end of June, this third film in the series only earned $82.5 million over the four-day Fourth of July weekend, which fell short of industry expectations and was less than the previous film, New Moon, took during its opening in November 2009.

  An open letter to Universal from a Twilight fan accused the studio of ripping off Stephenie Meyer’s 2006 novel New Moon for its version of The Wolfman, which of course was a remake of the 1941 movie of (nearly) the same name. Bless.

  With its release date repeatedly pushed back for re-edits since 2009, The Wolfman actually turned out to be much better than expected. Benicio Del Toro did a commendable job channelling the spirit of Lon Chaney, Jr’s Lawrence Talbot, while director Joe Johnston created a sumptuous background to a refreshingly faithful homage to the classic monster movies. Despite that, the film dropped nearly 69 per cent at the US box office in its second week.

  The unrated DVD of The Wolfman featured a “director’s cut” containing an extra sixteen minutes of footage plus five extended and deleted scenes, including a sequence with an uncredited Max von Sydow, which explained how Talbot acquired his wolf-head cane.

  Audiences for John Favreau’s bombastic sequel Iron Man 2 reportedly dropped 30 per cent over its opening weekend, although the film still managed a three-day gross of $133.6 million and surpassed the original’s worldwide earnings. This time Robert Downey, Jr’s millionaire superhero battled Russian villain “Whiplash” (Mickey Rourke).

  In October, the Walt Disney Company confirmed that the studio would be taking control of a number of Marvel Studios’ upcoming movie releases after buying the company in 2009.

  Jackie Earle Haley was given the thankless task of taking over the role of “Freddy Krueger” in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Samuel Bayer’s pointless reboot of the 1984 Wes Craven original. After debuting at #1 with $32.9 million, the film had one of the year’s biggest second-week falls at the US box office.

  Matt Reeves’ Let Me In marked the welcome return of Hammer Films with a surprisingly successful re-imagining of the 2008 Swedish film, Let the Right One In, based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. This time the ageless vampire girl was played by the superb Chloë Grace Moretz, while Richard Jenkins gave a creepily sympathetic performance as her ageing guardian.

  In June the teaser trailer for Tod Williams’ Paranormal Activity 2 was pulled from a number of cinemas in Texas after complaints that it was too scary. The $3 million sequel used a family’s home video surveillance system to show how the sister of the girl from the first film was targeted by a demon. The film enjoyed the horror genre’s biggest opening weekend ever in the US, grossing $40.7 million.

  Edward Furlong and Linnea Quigley were in Night of the Demons, a remake of the 1987 Halloween horror movie.

  The always-excellent Timothy Olyphant starred in Breck Eisner’s The Crazies, an impressive remake of the 1973 George A. Romero thriller in which the inhabitants of a small Iowa town went homicidal as a result of toxic exposure.

  Based on a 1994 screenplay by producer Robert Rodriguez, Predators was another unnecessary sequel starring an unlikely Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne and Danny Trejo battling the dreadlocked aliens on a jungle planet.

  Nanny McPhee & The Big Bang (aka Nanny McPhee Returns) was to Bedknobs and Broomsticks what the original Nanny McPhee (2005) was to Mary Poppins, as Emma Thompson’s slightly creepy child-minder helped a 1940s family keep their farm. The sequel’s impressive supporting cast included Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans, Maggie Smith, Ralph Fiennes and a blink-and-you’d-miss-him Ewan McGregor.

  Loosely based on Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel, even Jack Black and a cast of British
character players couldn’t save yet another remake of Gulliver’s Travels from flopping at the box office.

  Perhaps the year’s most unlikely remake was I Spit on Your Grave, based on Meir Zarchi’s 1978 cult classic about a woman (Sarah Butler) taking gruesome revenge on the men who gang-raped her.

  After the success of James Cameron’s Avatar, the other big movie story of the year was 3-D.

  Despite suffering from some hastily converted 3-D, Warner Bros.’ big-budget remake of the 1981 Clash of the Titans starring Sam Worthington went straight to #1 in the US with a gross of $63.9 million. Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes played Olympian gods.

  Alexandree Aja’s Piranha 3D was the second remake of Joe Dante’s clever and entertaining 1978 movie about carnivorous fish attacking a group of kids on spring break. A solid cast that included Richard Dreyfuss, Ving Rhames, Elisabeth Shue, Christopher Lloyd, Eli Roth, Jerry O’Connell, Kelly Brook and porn star Riley Steele tried their best not to end up as fish-food.

  Veterans Bruce Dern and Dick Miller turned up in Dante’s own “family-friendly” 3-D horror movie, The Hole, in which three children discovered a gateway to Hell.

  Despite outrage from cinema chains that Disney was planning to cut the release time from movie screen to DVD for Tim Burton’s marvellous version of Alice in Wonderland, the 3-D fantasy opened in America with a record-breaking weekend gross of $116.3 million, making it the highest-grossing March release of all time, the biggest non-sequel release, the biggest IMAX opening, and also the biggest 3-D opening – beating out Avatar, which had previously held the record. Horror veterans, and Burton favourites, Christopher Lee and Michael Gough both contributed voice performances.

  Meanwhile, a partially restored version of the first known film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland was shown before the Tim Burton version at London’s IMAX theatre. Made in 1903 by cinema pioneers Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth at studios in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, at the time it was the most expensive and longest (twelve minutes) British film ever made.

  Contestants on VH1’s Scream Queens 2 competed for a chance to appear in Saw 3D, the seventh and supposedly final instalment in the franchise, which was about a writer (Sean Patrick Flanery) selling a fake book about his experience as one of Jigsaw’s victims. Tobin Bell and Cary Elwes returned to the series and, even though the movie wasn’t screened for critics on either side of the Atlantic, it topped the US charts over Halloween with an opening gross of $24.2 million.

  Despite having a new distributor and being released in digital 3-D, Michael Apted’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third in the series based on the books by C.S. Lewis, failed to find an audience. This time, Pevensie siblings Lucy (Georgia Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes) sailed in search of the Seven Lost Lords with their obnoxious cousin Eustace (Will Poulter).

  Star Milla Jovovich’s husband Paul W.S. Anderson returned to direct the 3-D sequel Resident Evil: Afterlife, the disappointing fourth entry in the zombie franchise based on the popular video game series.

  Wes Craven’s My Soul to Take also did not open well, despite being released in 3-D.

  Tron: Legacy was a belated sequel to the 1982 Disney movie. Sam (Garrett Hedlund) entered a 3-D digital world to find his lost father Flynn (a CGI-enhanced Jeff Bridges, the star of the original).

  Despite terrible reviews, M. Night Shyamalan’s fantasy The Last Airbender, based on the Nickelodeon cartoon series and released in last-minute 3-D, did much better than predicted. 12-year-old Noah Ringer played a young boy who could control the elements.

  Disney/Pixar’s superior 3-D sequel Toy Story 3 took $110.3 million during its opening weekend in June, and went on to break numerous records, including becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time just two months later.

  Although it took a huge amount of money and stayed at #1 for three weeks, the 3-D Shrek Forever After, the fourth and supposedly last in the franchise, was the weakest performer in the series to date as it recycled the plot from It’s a Wonderful Life.

  Will Ferrell voiced the big blue-headed alien supervillain who had a change of heart in DreamWorks’ 3-D Megamind, which also featured the voice talents of Brad Pitt and Tina Fey, while Steve Carell was the voice of the master villain planning to steal the moon in the 3-D Despicable Me, who also had a change of heart after he adopted three cute siblings. Julie Andrews voiced the protagonist’s pushy mother.

  Based on Kathryn Lasky’s novels, a pair of owlets became embroiled in an epic war between good and evil in Zack Snyder’s 3-D Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, featuring the voices of Helen Mirren and Geoffrey Rush.

  During the mid-1950s and early 1980s 3-D booms, the process lasted for just a couple of years before the novelty wore off. With many more films due to be released in the process in 2011, and 3-D TV being hailed as the Next Big Thing in home entertainment, it will be interesting to see if the fad will last longer this time.

  Warner Bros. decided not to release Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, the seventh and penultimate entry in the mega-franchise, in 3-D. However, this was only because the studio apparently could not convert to the process in time for the film’s release in November.

  Despite only being released “flat”, the Potter sequel took $125 million during its opening weekend in America, and the film broke records in the UK, where its £18.3 million opening was the biggest ever weekend total, beating the James Bond film Quantum of Solace. It also set individual records in Britain for receipts on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with Saturday’s £6.6 million being the highest for a single day. David Yates’ dark and doom-laden penultimate episode set the tone for the final showdown between Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and the evil Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), and featured David Legeno as the Dark Lord’s werewolf agent, Fenrir Greyback.

  Michael J. Bassett’s “origin” story of Solomon Kane was the best cinema adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s work to date. James Purefoy gave a terrific performance as the grim Puritan swashbuckler battling the supernatural, and he was ably supported by a cast that included Max von Sydow, Pete Postlethwaite, Alice Krige, Mackenzie Crook and Jason Flemying.

  Delayed from the previous October, Martin Scorsese’s over-long and painfully obvious Shutter Island played like a Monogram “B” movie as Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled US marshal investigated a missing inmate at Ben Kingsley’s creepy Gothic island asylum.

  Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Inception, in which DiCaprio could enter people’s dreams and steal their secrets, took $62.8 million over its opening weekend in the US. In the UK the film opened with a £5.9 million take, making it the actor’s best ever opening in that country – even ahead of Titanic.

  Adrien Brody’s second genre film of the year was Vincenzo Natali’s superior Splice, in which a pair of genetic-engineering scientists (Brody and Sarah Polley, whose characters are named after those in Bride of Frankenstein) created a monstrously beautiful hybrid creature (Delphine Chanéac).

  A mix of The Red Shoes and a Dario Argento giallo movie, Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller Black Swan was a surprise hit. It starred Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis as rival ballerinas in a new version of Swan Lake.

  John Landis’ Burke & Hare, starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as the bumbling 19th-century bodysnatchers, was an unfortunate attempt to recreate an Ealing comedy. With an impressive British supporting cast that included Tom Wilkinson, Tim Curry, Jessica Hynes, a wasted Christopher Lee, Ronnie Corbett, Paul Whitehouse, Hugh Bonneville, Jenny Agutter and John Woodvine, it should have been much better than it was.

  Sean Bean’s grim 14th-century knight led a band of mercenaries into a village supernaturally spared from the plague in Christopher Smith’s low-budget but atmospheric Black Death.

  Ethan Hawke’s vampire haematologist tried to save a future world dominated by the undead in Michael and Peter Spierig’s Daybreakers. Originally shot in 2007, it also featured Sam Neill as the head of a ruthless corp
oration that harvested humans, and Willem Dafoe as the leader of a band of human rebels.

  Vampires Suck from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer was a lame send-up of the equally lame Twilight movies, while a group of horny college kids found themselves evading Romanian vampires in another spoof, Transylmania, which was filmed back in 2007.

  Renée Zellweger and Bradley Cooper starred in Christian Alvart’s long-delayed Case 39, which was also filmed in 2007. It finally received a US release in October after opening overseas first.

  Starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Bosworth and Jang Dong Gun, the long-delayed The Warrior’s Way was a 1900s-set martial arts fantasy in which the inhabitants of a decaying ghost town rebelled against Danny Huston’s tyrannical Colonel. After the studio decided not to preview it, the movie registered one of the year’s worst openings at the US box office before going on to lose just over 69 per cent of its audience in its second week.

  In Shelter, Julianne Moore’s forensic psychiatrist discovered that all the multiple personalities inside her new patient (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) were murder victims, including her own husband.

  Produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Devil had a group of five strangers trapped in an elevator, one of them being Satan himself.

  Produced by Eli Roth, The Last Exorcism was another “found footage” pseudo-documentary. Made for $1.8 million, it grossed $20.4 million in its first week at the US box office.

  The Collector was originally developed as a prequel to the Saw franchise before it was reworked into the first in a new torture porn franchise, and a group of college bullies found themselves on the receiving end of their victims’ brutal revenge in The Final.

  Three young snowboarders were trapped overnight on a ski lift surrounded by a pack of wolves in Adam Green’s Frozen, while deformed serial killer “Hatchetface” was back in the same writer-director’s Hatchet II, which received a limited theatrical release.

  Zac Efron’s cemetery caretaker played baseball with his dead younger brother in The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, and Matt Damon starred as a reluctant psychic in director Clint Eastwood’s serious supernatural drama Hereafter.