The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  ABC’s Christmas Cupid was yet another rom-com reworking of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

  A super-intelligent family was recruited to a secret scientific project in NBC’s The Jensen Project, and a family inherited a castle in Romania in Nickelodeon’s The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, which starred Brooke Shields as the mysterious “Madame Varcolac”.

  Cartoon Network’s live-action Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster featured guest appearances by Richard Moll, Nichelle Nichols, Marion Ross and genre veteran Michael Berryman.

  In Disney’s New Zealand-shot TV movie Avalon High, based on the novel by Meg Cabot, a young girl (Britt Robertson) discovered that the pupils at her new school were teenage re-incarnations of King Arthur’s court.

  2010 was the year that technology finally caught up with science fiction as 3-D television sets became the Next Big Thing, mostly due to the phenomenal increase in 3-D movies being released by the major studios. At the beginning of October, Britain’s Sky subscription network launched the country’s first 3-D HD channel, however, it remains to be seen if the boom will endure, or whether the public will simply tire of the technology as they have in the past.

  In April, the UK’s Sci-Fi Channel followed its American counterpart and rebranded itself under the less-generic name of “Syfy”.

  With writer Steven Moffat on board as the new show-runner, David Tennant’s manic Doctor Who was quickly forgotten with the introduction of 27-year-old Matt Smith as the latest incarnation of the BBC’s Time Lord.

  Teaming up with enigmatic and feisty sidekick Amy Pond (Karen Gillan), the couple careered through thirteen episodes involving World War II Daleks, vampires (actually fishy aliens) in 16th-century Venice and a tormented Vincent van Gogh (the excellent Tony Curran).

  Alex Kingston’s enigmatic River Song was back for an Aliens-inspired story involving the Weeping Angels (not used to such good effect this time), before returning for the two-part season finale which cleverly connected all the preceding episodes in a convoluted cross-time conundrum that involved many past foes and even incorporated the original UK transmission date! Guest writers included Toby Whithouse, Simon Nye and Richard Curtis.

  As usual, the much-hyped Christmas special was disappointing as the Doctor tried to convince a Scrooge-like tyrant (Michael Gambon) to change his ways to save a crashing space liner in Steven Moffat’s lazy reworking of A Christmas Carol, which co-starred Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins.

  However, despite the popularity of Smith in the role, the average viewing figures for Doctor Who dropped 1.2 million, although more people were watching the show on BBC iPlayer and other on-demand media.

  The fourth season of the BBC’s spin-off series for children, The Sarah Jane Adventures, kicked off with Sarah Jane’s boring alien son Luke (Tommy Knight) being shipped off to university in Oxford with the irritating K-9, freeing the intrepid reporter (Elisabeth Sladen) and her more interesting two teenage companions to continue battling various alien menaces.

  Matt Smith’s new Doctor turned up in a two-part episode written by Russell T. Davies that also featured Jon Pertwee’s 1971–73 companion Jo Grant (Katy Manning), and the trio were sent back in time to the Tower of London in 1554, a haunted house in Victorian times, and the English coast during World War II before Luke returned to save the day in the season finale.

  Also from the BBC at Christmas, Whistle and I’ll Come to You starred John Hurt in director Andy de Emmony’s dull and pointless reworking of M.R. James’ classic ghost story. Writer Neil Cross seemed mistakenly to believe that he could improve upon the original by updating it and introducing his own character motivation, while the production not only shortened the original title, but also banished James’ name to the end credits.

  Frank Darabont’s gruesome six-part limited series for AMC, The Walking Dead, based on the Image Comics series created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore, should have been retitled “The Talking Dead”. Less exposition and more excitement was needed as Texas sheriff Rick Grimes (British actor Andrew Lincoln) woke up from a coma only to discover that the world had been overrun by nasty-looking cannibal zombies and even the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta couldn’t help him or his dwindling band of survivors. Although the series was picked up for a second season, in December Darabont let go of the show’s entire team of writers.

  Loosely based on Stephen King’s 2005 mystery novel The Colorado Kid, Syfy’s thirteen-part Haven involved FBI agent Audrey Parker (the likeable Emily Rose) being sent to the small coastal town of Haven, Maine, where every week somebody exhibited a different supernatural power as we learned more about the mystery of the agent’s own missing past.

  King himself had a cameo as a character named “Bachman” (get it?) in the FX biker series Sons of Anarchy.

  The gripping sixth season of Supernatural continued with episodes in which brothers Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) travelled back to 1978 to save their parents from an angel assassin, confronted flesh-eating zombies raised by Death, travelled to Heaven after being shot, and teamed up with a double-dealing demon named Crowley (the excellent Mark A. Sheppard) to avert the coming apocalypse. Unfortunately, after a marvellous build-up over the past two years, the climactic confrontation with Lucifer (Mark Pellegrino), like so many other season finales in 2010, turned out to be a huge disappointment, despite the apparent death of a major character. The show celebrated its 100th episode in April.

  The third season of HBO’s True Blood kicked off with vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) being kidnapped from a restaurant just as he had proposed to Sookie (Anna Paquin). After discovering that his abductors were werewolves working for the Vampire King of Mississippi (Denis O’Hare), Sookie set off in pursuit with a lycanthropic bodyguard (Joe Manganiello). However, when the blood-drenched rescue attempt resulted in Bill uncontrollably biting Sookie, she had a glimpse into her mysterious origin, which involved dancing around a bottomless pool in a diaphanous gown. Stars Paquin and Moyer were married in August.

  The first season of The CW’s wimpy The Vampire Diaries ended in death and destruction as an undead Jonathan Gilbert (David Anders) went on a violent rampage during the Founder’s Day celebrations in the town of Mystic Falls. Season Two opened with the return of evil vampire Katherine (sulky Nina Dobrev), who happened to be the spitting image of Elena (also Dobrev), while Tyler Lockwood (Michael Trevino) learned about his family’s werewolf curse.

  A new police chief (Frank Grillo) discovered that his gated community was home to vampires, werewolves and other supernatural creatures in ABC’s The Gates.

  Robin Dunne’s Dr Will Zimmerman returned from death after convincing Kali to halt her waves of destruction in the opening episode of the third season of Syfy’s Sanctuary. Meanwhile, werewolf Henry (Ryan Robbins) infiltrated a clinic filled with patients just like him, and Amanda Tapping’s Dr Helen Magnus encountered a time-hopping Jekyll and Hyde who agreed to lead the team to a hidden city beneath the Earth.

  When Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) disappeared after learning that he had been abducted from an alternate reality by his scientist father in Fox’s Fringe, Walter Bishop (John Noble) told a drug-fuelled story set in a fictional noir milieu that included several songs! Leonard Nimoy returned as William Bell for the two-part second season finale, as Peter and Walter returned home from the parallel universe with the wrong Olivia (Anna Troy).

  In early May, the nineteenth episode of ABC-TV’s FlashForward scripted by Robert J. Sawyer (who wrote the original novel), pulled in an audience of just 4.75 million, setting a new low for the series. It was no surprise that the show was cancelled after just three more episodes, putting an end to the producers’ proposed five-year story arc despite an apparently desperate attempt to continue the show’s underlying conspiracy theory. In the unresolved ending, the convoluted time-line was re-set, Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes) disappeared during the next blackout, and there was an enigmatic coda set in 2015.

  The much-hyped,
two-and-a-half-hour final episode of ABC’s always-pointless Lost in May jumped confusingly back and forth between the same characters on the island and in Los Angeles, until they finally realised after six seasons that they were all dead. The end. Thank God.

  Another show that will not be missed was NBC’s over-hyped and underwhelming Heroes, whose fourth and final season only averaged 6.5 million viewers (a whopping drop of 8 million since its first season). The season finale managed to attract a measly audience of 4.4 million.

  The dull Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica starred Eric Stoltz and Esai Morales and chronicled the origin of the Cylons. The second half of Season One returned to Syfy in September, but it wasn’t like anybody cared any more.

  Despite its annoying non-linear structure and being yet another attempt to create a “Big Event” TV show with a bewildering cast and and too many plot strands, NBC’s The Event began promisingly enough with its various US government and alien visitor conspiracies. However, average audiences soon dropped to 7.8 million and in November the show was put on a three-month hiatus after just ten episodes.

  Following the murder of his wife by another serial killer, Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) teamed up with a crime victim (Julia Stiles) in the fifth series of the Showtime Network’s Dexter. Guest stars included Peter Weller and Johnny Lee Miller.

  After five seasons and more than 100 episodes, Melinda Gordon (Jennifer Love Hewitt) finally confronted the dark forces that had been terrorising her family when CBS-TV’s Ghost Whisperer came to an end with an audience share of 6.65 million at the end of May.

  The seventh season of Medium featured an “arms of Orlac” episode, although CBS cut the number of shows it ordered.

  Brooke Elliott returned as possessed attorney Jane Bingum in a second season of Lifetime’s body-swap drama Drop Dead Diva, while in the second season of Being Erica on SOAPnet the time-travelling heroine (Erin Karpluk) had a new therapist.

  Making up for its disappointing second series, the third and final season of Ashes to Ashes from the BBC was back on form as it concentrated on the relationship between DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) and time-travelling cop Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) in 1983 and the mystery surrounding the death of Sam Tyler (from Life on Mars). Unfortunately, the ridiculous final episode ruined everything that had gone before as Hunt turned out to be some kind of ghostly guardian angel for policemen and the odious DCI Jim Keats (Daniel Mays) was revealed to be the Devil coveting everyone’s souls.

  Definitely shaking off its sitcom roots, the much darker second season of the BBC’s excellent Being Human found house-sharing ghost Annie (Lenora Crichlow), werewolf George (Russell Tovey) and vampire Mitchell (Aidan Turner) being hunted by a crazed scientist (Donald Sumpter) who intended to “cure” them of their supernatural afflictions – at any cost.

  Created by stars Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith (of The League of Gentlemen), the BBC’s Psychoville Halloween Special featured four nasty tales based around the dilapidated ruins of the old Ravenhill psychiatric hospital. Eileen Atkins, Dawn French and Imelda Staunton guest-starred.

  The second series of the BBC’s post-apocalyptic Survivors limped through another six episodes as the dull bunch of characters discovered a secret pharmaceutical laboratory that could have been the cause of the outbreak. Thankfully, a third series looked highly unlikely.

  Based on the two novels by Douglas Adams, the BBC’s hour-long pilot Dirk Gently starred engaging comedian Stephen Mangan as the quirky “holistic” detective who investigated a missing cat and a case of time-travel by studying the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

  Echo (Eliza Dushku) could access all her personalities in the second and final season of the Fox Network’s Dollhouse, which ended with an episode set in a dystopian future where the surviving Dollhouse staff battled murderous mind-wiped zombies while trying to find a safe haven for the remnants of mankind.

  In the third and fourth seasons of NBC’s struggling Chuck, the hapless store clerk-turned-spy (Zachary Levi) learned to control his new-found powers and discovered a family secret from his late father (Scott Bakula). Meanwhile, former James Bond actor Timothy Dalton guest-starred as a MI6 agent looking after Chuck’s secret agent mother (Linda Hamilton), and other high-profile guests included Vinnie Jones, Armand Assante, Angie Harmon, Robert Patrick, Fred Willard, Swoosie Kurtz, Udo Kier, Christopher Lloyd, Harry Dean Stanton, Dolph Lundgren, Lou Ferrigno, Nicole Richie, Morgan Fairchild, Robert Englund and Richard Chamberlain.

  After her terrific turn in Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, Claire Foy had a more thankless role as a disturbed junior doctor in the BBC’s Pulse, a derivative hospital-set pilot featuring sinister surgeons and parasitical research experiments, written by Paul Cornell.

  Even worse was The Deep, a five-part mini-series from the BBC. Without even the saving grace of being so bad that it was funny, Minnie Driver’s overly emotional submarine captain and her intrepid crew of research scientists (including James Nesbitt and Goran Visnijic) found themselves trapped beneath the Arctic ice with a bunch of crazed Russians, an overheating nuclear reactor and a new species of lava-bug.

  In Syfy’s Warehouse 13, agents Pete Lattimer (Eddie McClintock) and Myka Bering (Joanne Kelly) found themselves involved with a new villain, a female H.G. Wells (British actress Jaime Murray), who sent the pair back to 1961 in her time machine. Guest stars included genre TV veterans Lindsay Wagner, Tia Carrere, Rene Auberjonois and Armin Shimerman. The second season finale attracted 2.4 million viewers, the show’s biggest audience to date.

  In the fourth season opener of Syfy’s Eureka (aka A Town Called Eureka), the main cast members were accidentally transported back to 1947. Upon their return, they discovered that their reality had been subtly changed, as James Callis joined the cast as a scientist from the past. Meanwhile, an experiment turned the personnel of Global Dynamics into rage-filled zombies in an unusually dark episode before the series went on hiatus after just nine episodes.

  During the year, both shows also featured fun crossover episodes, when Eureka’s Douglas Fargo (Neil Grayston) ended up being trapped inside Warehouse 13 by a sentient computer program, and Claudia Donovan (Allison Scagliotti) turned up to help investigate a series of mysterious materialisations in the town of Eureka.

  The two-part opener of the third season of the BBC’s Merlin saw sorceress siblings Morgana (Katie McGrath) and Morgause (Emilia Fox) using giant scorpions to try to kill the boy wizard (Colin Morgan) and attacking Camelot with an horde of reanimated skeletons. The superb double-episode finale saw the scheming Morgana finally installed upon the throne of Camelot by an army of immortal warriors.

  In a two-part episode of Smallville that owed more than a nod to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, some of the surviving members of the Golden Age Justice Society of America (including Hawkman, Stargirl and Doctor Fate) came out of retirement to team up with a nascent Justice League to battle a new conspiracy involving Pam Grier’s clandestine Checkmate agent.

  In other episodes of The CW show, Clark (Tom Welling) teamed up again with sexy magician Zantanna (Serinda Swan) to find a cursed comic book, and Martha Kent (Annette O’Toole) made a surprise reappearance before Clark defeated the evil Major Zod (Callum Blue) and his army of super-powered Kandorians. The tenth and final season saw the return of Clark’s dead stepfather Jonathan Kent (John Schneider), Supergirl Kara (Laura Vandervoort), Brainiac 5 (James Marsters), General Sam Lane (Michael Ironside), Lucy Lane (Peyton List), the late Ella Lane (Teri Hatcher), Jor-El (Julian Sands), Lara-El (Helen Slater), Aquaman (Alan Ritchson), an alternate-world Lionel Luthor (John Glover) and the Justice League.

  The second season of Channel 4’s Misfits, about a group of British teen tearaways with superpowers, featured “ghosts”, time-travel and plenty of adolescent angst. A Christmas special/ season finale found the group exchanging their powers in return for a “normal” life.

  ABC-TV’s No Ordinary Family was Heroes for housewives. After surviving a plane crash in
the Amazon, a dysfunctional suburban family discovered that they had each developed a different superpower. Then they didn’t stop whining about it.

  Syfy’s dull reboot of V ended with discord spreading amongst the alien Visitors as the scheming Anna (Morena Baccarin) finally ramped up her secret plans to invade the Earth.

  The first season of the network’s equally dull SGU Stargate Universe concluded with a two-part episode in which the star-ship “Destiny” was invaded by troops of the Lucian Alliance, under the command of the ruthless Commander Kiva (British actress Rhona Mitra). After all that got sorted out, the second season continued the saga of the reluctant space travellers as the show hurtled towards its inevitable cancellation.

  Alex (Selena Gomez) discovered that her new English boyfriend Mason (Gregg Sulkin) was actually a werewolf in the third season of Disney’s popular children’s sitcom Wizards of Waverly Place.

  When the Farley family moved to Eastern Europe, they found themselves surrounded by vampires, werewolves and zombies in Nickelodeon’s British-made teen sitcom Summer in Transylvania.

  Self-obsessed crime author Rick Castle (Nathan Fillion) and homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) found themselves investigating the apparent curse of an Aztec Mummy’s tomb in the second season of ABC’s lightweight mystery series Castle, which could just as well be called Murder He Wrote. Season Three included the prerequisite psychic, possible time-travelling killer and apparent alien abduction episodes.

  Shawn (James Roday) and Gus (Dulé Hill) investigated a murder on a haunted-house ride that appeared to be committed by the ghost of a man killed there thirteen years before in the USA Network’s Psych.