The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  19th-century Canadian police inspector William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) investigated a suspicious death at an apparently cursed and haunted manor in a third season episode of Murdoch Mysteries.

  The third series of the BBC’s The Armstrong & Miller Show featured a series of sketches featuring comedians Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller playing a pair of out-of-touch vampires complaining about the modern world.

  Original stars Meat Loaf and Barry Bostwick briefly guest-starred on a Halloween episode of Fox’s seriously overrated Glee that paid tribute to the The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Unfortunately, the result was a horribly homogenised version of the 1975 cult movie.

  Fans of Granada Television’s never-ending soap opera Coronation Street were a little surprised in early November by the return of Vera Duckworth (Elizabeth Dawn) to the show. The character had been dead for nearly three years and apparently returned to guide her husband Jack (Bill Tarmey) into the hereafter.

  Harlan Ellison voiced himself and Jeffrey Combs was author “H.P. Hatecraft” in an episode of Cartoon Network’s new animated series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated entitled “The Shrieking Madness”.

  In The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXI special on the Fox Network, Bart and Milhouse played a possessed board game, Homer and Marge rescued a potentially homicidal castaway (voiced by Hugh Laurie) and, in a Twilight spoof, Lisa ran away with romantic vampire Edmund (voiced by Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe) to his father’s Dracula-la Land.

  The original Justice Society of America – The Flash, Hourman, Hawkman, Dr, Mid-Nite and Wildcat – teamed up with the Caped Crusader for an episode of the Cartoon Network’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold. In another episode of the show, Batman (Diedrich Bader) travelled back in time and met his father and the Phantom Stranger, voiced by previous Batmans Adam West and Kevin Conroy, respectively.

  And while Aquaman rescued Batman from the Penguin in another episode of the series, over on Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants in February the porous pair were transported “Back to the Past”, where they met superhero duo “Mermaidman” and “Barnacleboy” (voiced by former Batman and Robin, Adam West and Burt Ward). Additionally, McHale’s Navy veterans Ernest Borgnine and Tim Conway voiced the older versions of the same characters.

  Comedy Central revived Futurama in time for the show’s 100th episode (featuring a guest appearance by Devo) and a three-story Christmas special.

  Peter Griffin and his pals attempted to track down the source of the world’s funniest dirty joke in an episode of the Fox Network’s Family Guy, based on a story by Richard Matheson, and the show passed its 150th episode in May.

  Based on the venerable satirical magazine, the Cartoon Network’s Mad featured a segment called “Zombi”, about Bambi’s mother coming back as a you-know-what . . .

  Over on Adult Swim, Zac Efron voiced Anakin Skywalker in Robot Chicken’s Star Wars Episode III, which attempted to tell the entire saga in just an hour. Meanwhile, the third season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars aired on the Cartoon Network.

  Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at the end of September.

  In the BBC’s The History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, the actor-writer took a personal look at the history of the horror film in three one-hour episodes covering the Universal cycle from the silent era to the 1940s; Hammer Films, its rivals and Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe series, and the birth of modern American horror in the 1970s. Gatiss proved to be an enthusiastic host, and highlights included some well-chosen clips and newsreel footage, along with interviews with such uncommon commentators as centenarians Carla Laemmle and Gloria Stuart, Donnie Dunagan, Sara Karloff, Anthony Hinds, Jimmy Sangster, Roy Ward Baker, Barbara Steele, David Warner, Barbara Shelley and Piers Haggard. The series was supported with a film season on BBC 4.

  Author Max Brooks was amongst those interviewed in the National Geographic channel’s hour-long documentary Zombies: The Truth.

  Taking a look at vampires in popular culture, the BBC 3 documentary Vampires: Why They Bite was a pointless rehash hosted by pop “historian” Lisa Hilton and featured contributions from Charlaine Harris, Toby Whithouse and others.

  Scottish crime author Denise Mina hosted the BBC’s Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women, which used dramatisations to look at the life and work of the author through his relationships with three different women.

  Weird Tales returned with three new episodes to BBC Radio 4 in January. Hosted by horror hoarder “Lovecraft” (Stephen Hogan), the three stories involved a stalker from beyond the grave, a Celtic goddess with powers over life and death, and the secret of a family’s new home.

  Fantastic Journeys on BBC Radio 7 in May featured half-hour dramatisations of stories by Arthur Machen (“The White People”), H.G. Wells (“The Door in the Wall”), James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers (“Fifty Cents”), Kelly Link (“The Faery Handbag”) and Peter F. Hamilton (“If at First”).

  Written and narrated by Paul Evans, The Ditch was a creepy episode of Radio 4’s Afternoon Play in which a natural history sound recordist discovered something nasty in the aural landscape of a remote fenland area. In the same slot, Sebastian Baczkiewicz’s four-part Pilgrim concerned the exploits of the eponymous character (Paul Hilton), cursed with immortality and doomed to walk between the human world and the world of faerie.

  The fifteen-minute Woman’s Hour Drama slot featured a five-part adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, while Melissa Murray’s ninety-minute play Perpetual Light, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, was set in the near future, when a dead man’s avatar was uploaded into a virtual memorial site.

  Based on the book by Simon Brett, dipsomaniac actor-turned-sleuth Charles Paris (Bill Nighy) landed a role in a low-budget vampire movie whose co-star (Martine McCutcheon) found herself involved in blackmail and murder in Radio 4’s four-part A Charles Paris Mystery: Cast in Order of Disappearance.

  Over five days in late November, the same station’s Book at Bedtime slot presented A Night with a Vampire. For fifteen minutes a night, former Doctor Who David Tennant read extracts from French Benedictine Antoine Calmet’s 1746 anthropological study The Phantom World along with “The Family of the Vourdalak” by Alexei Tolstoy, “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant, “Luella Miller” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and “Clarimonde” by Théophile Gautier.

  Having exhausted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original canon of stories, Clive Merrison and Andrew Sachs teamed up for the seventy-fifth time as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson for a brand new story written by Bert Coules. The two-part The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Marlbourne Point Mystery was set in a disused lighthouse on a remote stretch of the Kent coast. James Laurenson turned up as Sherlock’s older brother Mycroft.

  Paula Wilcox starred in a new two-part adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic The Borrowers on Radio 4, while Radio 7 broadcast a two-part dramatisation of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind featuring Juliet Stevenson and Joss Ackland.

  Over Christmas, Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare on Radio 7 featured Richard E. Grant reading “All Hallows”, Toby Jones reading “Seaton’s Aunt”, Kenneth Cranham reading “Crewe”, Anthony Head reading “A Recluse” and Julian Wadham reading “The Almond Tree”.

  Presenter Rory McGrath looked at Horace Walpole’s seminal 1764 Gothic novel in Radio 4’s A Guided Tour of the Castle of Otranto, while in Grand Guignol, Sheila McClennon revisited the site of the 1890s Parisian horror theatre whose name became synonymous with the gruesome and the gory.

  Radio 4’s Afternoon Play presented Peter Lorre v Peter Lorre in May, Michael Butt’s forty-five-minute dramatisation of the real-life court case about Eugene Weingand, who tried to bill himself as “Peter Lorre, Jr” even though he was not related to the film star. Stephen Greif portrayed Lorre.

  Vincent Price and the Horror of the English Bloodbeast was an episode of The Saturday Play written by Matthew Broughton that looked behind the scenes at
the making of the 1967 British movie Witchfinder General. Nickolas Grace played Price, supported by Kenneth Cranham as producer Tony Tenser and Blake Ritson as maverick director Michael Reeves.

  Ian McKellen portrayed the eponymous villain in a new adaptation of Ian Fleming’s 1959 novel Goldfinger for the same Saturday slot. The star cast included Toby Stephens as James Bond, John Standing as M, Rosamund Pike as Pussy Galore, along with Ian Ogilvy, Alistair McGowan, Hector Elizondo. Tim Pigott-Smith and director Martin Jarvis.

  Narrated by Toby Jones, Tom, Michael and George looked at the making of Michael Powell’s controversial movie Peeping Tom and “glamour” photographer/film-maker George Harrison Marks’ involvement in the 1960 production. Among the contributors were Shirley Anne Field and Michael Winner.

  The ever-busy Mark Gatiss re-teamed with Reece Shearsmith, Jeremy Dyson and Steve Pemberton for the first time in five years for Radio 4’s pre-Halloween special The League of Gentlemen’s Ghost Chase, in which they investigated the reputedly supernatural history of a 12th-century Gloucestershire inn, built on top of a pagan burial ground.

  Despite most of the UK media doing little more than pay lip-service to Halloween, BBC Radio 7 went to town with a full day of genre-related material. This included various episodes of Weird Tales and Fear on Four, readings of Charles Dickens’ The SignalMan (by Emlyn Williams) and Robert Forrest’s The Voyage of the Demeter, dramatisations of Faust (with the ubiquitous Gatiss again), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (with Ian McDiarmid), Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (with Rosemary Leach), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (with John Wood), Loren D. Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes v Dracula and Richard Matheson’s The Twilight Zone: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, along with Alan Dein’s half-hour documentary You’re Entering the Twilight Zone, a profile of the show’s creator Rod Serling.

  The station repeated its commitment to the genre on Christmas Day, with dramatisations of C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Stephen Sheridan’s M.R. James parody The Teeth of Abbot Thomas, four five-minute episodes of The Scarifyers, the ten-minute drama The Curse of the Cult of Thoth, Ian McDiarmid reading J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Schalken the Painter”, a Twilight Zone adaptation of Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” and a repeat of Alan Dein’s Twilight Zone documentary from Halloween.

  From the UK’s Big Finish Productions, the audio drama Dark Shadows: The Night Whispers marked the return of Jonathan Frid to the role of Barnabas Collins, with John Karlan reprising his role as the former vampire’s reluctant servant Willie Loomis from the 1966–71 TV soap opera. As an added bonus for fans, the CD also featured Barbara Steele as a new character to the series.

  Online audio site Cast Macabre featured a free podcast of Barbara Roden’s story “Out and Back”, included in the previous volume of this anthology.

  Established in 2006, Pseudopod.org broadcast readings of new and previously published horror stories on a weekly basis to an audience of around 8,000 listeners.

  Although credited to Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Ben Elton, the original plot of the follow-up to the £6 million stage musical of The Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, which opened at London’s Adelphi Theatre in March, was actually created by best-selling author Frederick Forsyth almost a decade earlier. In late November, the show was closed down for four days while it was completely overhauled due to negative criticism and plummeting box-office figures ahead of the production’s premiere in Australia.

  Meanwhile, the original UK production of The Phantom passed 10,000 performances at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London.

  With music composed by Bono and the Edge of U2 and featuring more than forty cast members, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark was the most expensive show ever staged on Broadway. However, after a stuntman playing Spider-Man fell thirty feet during a preview performance in December, the $65 million musical had its official opening night pushed back a month to February, and then March 2011. It was the latest in a string of problems that had plagued the “jinxed” show, which was critically lambasted by some reviewers, including The New York Times, who described it as “beyond repair”.

  Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth were perfectly cast as Gomez and Morticia in the Broadway musical The Addams Family, based on the cartoons by Charles Addams.

  Three decades after he first played the character, Paul Reubens revived his most endearing creation on the Broadway stage in The Pee-wee Herman Show.

  The 2008 Will Ferrell movie Elf was turned into a Broadway musical for Christmas. Sebastian Arcelus was the naïve human raised as one of Santa’s not-so-little helpers.

  An unusual campaign to promote the December revival of Jeff Wayne’s musical version of War of the Worlds, featuring Jason Donovan, Atomic Kitten’s Liz McClarnon and The X Factor’s Rhydian, involved the residents of London’s Primrose Hill area waking up one morning in September to a number of crushed cars in the street, alien “footprints”, and a mocked-up police sign directing them to the show’s website. In H.G. Wells’ original novel, Primrose Hill served as the base for the Martian invasion.

  John Gordon Sinclair was the actor under the bandages in a revival of Ken Hill’s 1991 “music hall” adaptation of Wells’ The Invisible Man at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. Objects moved around the stage apparently of their own accord thanks to illusionist Paul Kleve.

  Written and directed by Andy Nyman and The League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson, Ghost Stories was a portmanteau of three tales linked by Nyman’s professor of parapsychology. The play enjoyed a limited engagement at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End following a successful run at the Lyric Hammersmith.

  Terror 2010, which ran at London’s Southwark Playhouse (a vault under London Bridge station) in October, featured four short plays about “Death and Resurrection”. It included three world premiers by Mark Ravenhill, Neil LaBute and April de Angelis, plus an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West: Re-animator” by William Ewart. Despite the inclusion of a zombie belly dancer, the reviewers were not kind.

  Better received was Grand Guignol, which played to sell-out audiences towards the end of the year at London’s Etcetera Theatre. A three-part performance from Tom Richards and Stewart Pringle’s company Theatre of the Damned, the show was inspired by the 19th-century Parisian original and reportedly caused one audience member to faint in the first act.

  Originally starring Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke in the late 1980s, Jeremy Paul’s psychological stage play The Secret of Sherlock Holmes was revived at London’s Duchess Theatre in July. This time Peter Egan played the great detective and Robert Daws was Dr Watson.

  Room on the Broom was a new London stage production based on the best-selling children’s book by Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler (creators of The Gruffalo).

  Celebrating its subject’s ninetieth birthday in June, “Ray Harryhausen: Myths & Legends: The Exhibition” showcased many of the special-effects wizard’s original stop-motion models at the London Film Museum. Meanwhile, John Landis hosted a BFI/Bafta tribute to the animator at BfiSouthbank that included video tributes from Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Nick Park.

  That same month, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park opened at the Universal Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida. The twenty-acre attraction cost $200 million and was launched by actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Michael Gambon, along with author J.K. Rowling. For $79.00 (adults)/$69.00 (children) admission, fans could buy everything Hogwarts – from a magic wand for $28.95 to a Firebolt broomstick for $300.00.

  In July, a digital poster advertising the “Bloody Mary: Killer Queen” exhibit at the London Dungeon tourist attraction was banned from the city’s Underground stations by the Advertising Standards Authority after complaints from four passengers who claimed that the animated ads could frighten or distress children.

  Two years after the first event was held, the second Doctor Who Prom took place at a Tardis-themed Albert Hall in Londo
n at the end of July. Series stars Karen Gillan and Matt Smith hosted the evening, with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales performing Murray Gold’s musical compositions while various Cybermen, Silurians, Judoons and Daleks paraded across the stage.

  All these and many other of the Time Lord’s nemeses were also featured in Doctor Who Live: The Monsters Are Coming!, the first-ever Doctor Who touring stage show, developed with executive producer Steve Moffat. The event visited nine cities in the UK, starting at London’s Wembley Arena in early October and finishing in Belfast a month later. Along with flashy special effects, the show starred Nigel Planer as an inter-galactic showman and included new videos scenes featuring Matt Smith as the Doctor projected on a fifty-foot screen.

  Strawberry Hill, the baroque West London home of Gothic novelist Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), was reopened to the public in October following a £9 million restoration.

  The hand-written first draft of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus was part of an exhibition entitled “Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family”, which opened in early December at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. The exhibition also included other manuscripts, memorabilia, rare books and a previously unseen portrait of the author. The collection was set to transfer to the New York Public Library in 2011.

  Microsoft’s Kinect device, launched in November, used cameras, sensors and microphones to track a person’s movements, thus allowing them to play games hands-free. The system was designed to work with existing Xbox consoles.

  In Capcom’s video game Dead Rising 2 players were contestants in a TV game show battling zombies in a Las Vegas-like city. Meanwhile, Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout: New Vegas was a post-apocalyptic game set in the Nevada resort with characters voiced by Ron Perlman, Kris Kristofferson, Danny Trejo and Matthew Perry.

  Dead Nation was a budget-priced zombie shooter available for download-only.