The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  With its emerging importance as a key release date, some industry insiders pegged Halloween as the new Christmas with the success of Takashi Shimizu’s remake of his overrated 2002 film, The Grudge (Ju-On), and James Wan’s low budget debut Saw. The latter gorefest cost $1 million to make and grossed more than $50 million in the US.

  Shimizu’s original version of Ju-On was heavily influenced by other recent Asian horror movies and received a limited American theatrical release, as did Takashi Miike’s bizarre Gozu.

  Jee-woon Kim’s spooky Korean thriller A Tale of Two Sisters ran rings around the other Asian releases.

  Starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, Jonathan Demme’s unnecessary remake of the cold war thriller The Manchurian Candidate was released in America to tie in with the Democratic Convention.

  After finally reaching the screen after nearly fifteen years, Joel Schumacher’s version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical The Phantom of the Opera actually wasn’t worth the wait.

  Frank Oz’s critically-panned remake of The Stepford Wives starred Nicole Kidman as a robotic male fantasy in an ill-conceived spoof of Ira Levin’s book, and Kidman decided her dead husband had been reincarnated in the body of a 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright) in Jonathan Glazer’s controversial Birth.

  Tobe Hooper’s career dropped another notch with a pointless remake of The Toolbox Murders, while two cousins raped and murdered women in 1970s Los Angeles in the unpleasant thriller The Hillside Strangler.

  In Chris Smith’s derivative Creep, a woman (Franka Potente) fell asleep on a London Underground platform and ended up taking the wrong train into a nightmare world of cannibal mutants.

  From Robert Harmon, director of the much better The Hitcher, revenge-seeking widower Jim Caviezel hunted down a monocular maniac in Highwaymen.

  Two women were menaced by a psychopath with a cut-throat razor and wood saw in Alexandre Aja’s French/Romanian slasher film Switchblade Romance, but Colin Firth and Mena Suvari were as comatose as the audiences who saw Marc Evan’s long-delayed psychological thriller Trauma.

  Despite starring Angelina Jolie as an unlikely FBI profiler and Ethan Hawke as her prime suspect, D.J. Caruso’s Taking Lives was a mundane thriller. An unrated “Director’s Cut” was subsequently issued on DVD. In E. Elias Merhige’s Suspect Zero, a pair of telepathically trained FBI agents (Aaron Eckhart and Carrie-Anne Moss) tracked down Ben Kingsley’s crazy killer.

  A group of holidaymakers on an island off Costa Rica fell victim to a silly serial killer in Jay Chandrasekhar’s dumb comedy Club Dread. The only surprise was Bill Paxton’s involvement.

  The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra was Larry Blamire’s low budget spoof of bad “B” movies, while James Woods and Nick Nolte turned up in Michael Polish’s monochromatic fantasy Northfork.

  Based on a true story, a pair of abandoned scuba divers were menaced by hungry sharks in Chris Kentis’ shaky docudrama Open Water.

  Isabelle Huppert discovered that the world was slowly coming to an end due to a psychic plague in Michael Haneke’s thoughtful Time of the Wolf, while Jan Kounen’s weird Western Blueberry was based on a French comic book and featured Michael Madsen, Juliette Lewis, Geoffrey Lewis, Eddie Izzard and veteran Ernest Borgnine.

  Robin Williams and Mira Sorvino starred in The Final Cut, which was about downloading the memories of dead people.

  Hayao Miyazaki’s animated version of Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro) set records in Japan in November, achieving more than a million admissions in just two days.

  Jim Carrey had fun as the evil Count Olaf, a ham actor out to bump off a trio of orphaned children for their inheritance, in Brad Silberling’s superb-looking Gothic comedy Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

  Jennifer Garner found herself all grown-up in 13 Going on 30, Gary Winick’s take on Big for young girls.

  Frank Coraci’s redundant remake of Around the World in 80 Days was more Jackie Chan than Jules Verne, and comedian Harry Enfield played the evil Fairy Hunter in Edouard Nammour’s disastrous children’s fantasy Tooth.

  Kenneth Branagh starred in John Stephenson’s 5 Children & It, based on E. Nesbit’s 1902 fantasy story for children, while Johnny Depp portrayed Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in Marc Foster’s Oscar-nominated Finding Neverland.

  Bill Murray voiced the fat cat star of the animated Garfield the Movie, and the title characters from Boo, Zino & the Snurks were snatched from their TV world by a mad inventor in the German-made CGI adventure.

  An uncredited Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc.) was apparently brought in by Working Title to “beef up” the dialogue for Lady Penelope (Sophia Myles) in Jonathan Frakes’ misguided $70 million live-action version of Thunderbirds, based on the 1960s puppet TV series. Despite taking a respectable £4.41 million in the UK, with a worldwide box office total of just $26 million, the film was one of the biggest flops of the summer.

  Based on the children’s picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express took more than $155 million and pushed the envelope for computer “performance capture” animation. The film was also released in a special polarized 3-D IMAX version.

  Shown at various conventions around the world, Robert Pratten’s low budget London Voodoo was about an American family moving into a cursed terrace house with a psychotic nanny. It featured a soundtrack by Steven Severin of Siouxsie & The Banshees.

  To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the original 1954 version of Godzilla was released theatrically in America for the first time with forty minutes of previously cut footage restored. At the end of November, Godzilla also received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King made a record-breaking clean sweep at the seventy-sixth Academy Awards, held in Hollywood at the very end of February, when it won all eleven categories it was nominated in. The final part of the trilogy collected Oscars for Art Direction, Costume Design, Visual Effects, Make-up, Sound Mixing, Film Editing, Original Song, Original Score, Adapted Screenplay, Director and the coveted Best Picture (the first time a fantasy film had done so). South African actress Charlize Theron won Best Actress for her role in the serial killer film Monster, and Finding Nemo picked up the award for Best Animated Film.

  Over November and December, London’s National Film Theatre programmed “A History of the Horror Film”, an eclectic selection of titles that included Universal and Hammer classics along with several silents, some low budget schlock, Asian horrors and even a few titles projected in 3-D. Co-curator Mark Kermode also interviewed director Ken Russell about his controversial 1971 film, The Devils.

  “Lady in Red” singer Chris De Burgh paid £30,000 for the “chestburster” from Alien (1979) at an auction in London in mid-July. The sixteen-inch latex model came complete with controls.

  Neil Gaiman’s A Short Film About John Bolton was released on DVD containing more than two hours of bonus material. Along with the short vampire film of the title (which included Judith Clute, Michel Parry, Stephen Jones and the real John Bolton among the extras), there was a commentary track, a feature-length benefit performance, an audio recording and an interview with writer/director Gaiman. A John Bolton photo gallery and various biographies rounded out the package.

  Christopher Lee’s missing scenes were finally restored to the special extended DVD edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which was issued in a four-disc set loaded with extra features. The gift set featured a collectable Minas Tirith keepsake box and a bonus DVD.

  Giorgio Ferroni’s 1960 film Mill of the Stone Women (Il Mulino delle donne di pietra) was released for the first time on DVD in its full-length uncut version by Mondo Macabro.

  Released on the back of the dire Van Helsing, Universal yet again repackaged its classic horror movies in “The Monster Legacy” DVD gift sets devoted to Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy and T
he Invisible Man.

  Michael Gross starred in Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, a prequel to the giant worm series set in the Old West.

  From Guerrilla Productions, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath limited edition DVD was signed by director Edward Martin III and comics artist Jason Thompson, on whose work the animated feature was based. The numbered DVD also included two bonus short features: The Call of Cthulhu and The Testament of Tom Jacoby.

  EI Independent Cinema relaunched its Shock-O-Rama Cinema label with six new horror films, all produced in-house. Beginning in March with the release of Brett Piper’s Screaming Dead starring the ubiquitous Misty Mundae, they continued with Piper’s Bite Me!, also featuring Mundae and an army of mutant killer bugs, and Jon Keeyes’ Suburban Nightmare, about a psychotic couple portrayed by Trent Haaga and Brandy Little. Mundae also wrote, directed and starred in the six-minute short Voodoun Blues, which came with numerous extras in an edition limited to 5,000 copies.

  Under the EI Seduction Cinema logo, Darian Caine, Misty Mundae and Julian Wells starred in Lust for Dracula, Anthony Marsiglia’s modern reworking of the classic vampire story, while Caine also turned up as Countess Dracula in “Max Von Diesel’s” less-than-subtle comedy The Sexy Adventures of Van Helsing, also featuring A.J. Khan, Tina Krause, Chelsea Mundae and Debbie Rochon.

  Brad Watson’s incompetent and amateurish blend of vampires, psychos and comic policeman, Asylum Night was a shot-on-video disaster that was released directly to Britain’s The Horror Channel before receiving a DVD release in the UK.

  Hell Breeder was about a woman who suffered from nightmares and featured Darren Day.

  Artisan’s Kindred: The Embraced two-disc set collected all eight original episodes of the 1996 TV series based on the role-playing game.

  The Kolchak: The Night Stalker double feature disc from MGM Home Entertainment contained the 1970s pilot TV movies The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, both scripted by Richard Matheson and starring Darren McGavin as the seersucker-suited investigative reporter.

  For Halloween, Universal offered the complete first seasons of Rod Serling’s underrated Night Gallery and the classic comedy series The Munsters (including the unaired pilot) on DVD.

  MPI Home Video’s two-volume The Sherlock Holmes Collection contained “digitally restored” prints of Universal’s 1940s series of low budget adventures starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Meanwhile, BBC DVD’s The Sherlock Holmes Collection collected five classic TV episodes from the 1960s starring Peter Cushing as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective. A Study in Scarlet, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Sign of Four, The Blue Carbuncle and The Hound of the Baskervilles were available on three DVDs or as a boxed set.

  A&E Home Video’s four-disc set of The New Avengers collected all thirteen episodes from the series’ second season.

  You may not be able to watch them on television any more due to complaints from ethnic pressure groups, but MGM Home Entertainment’s “Chanthology” three-disc DVD set collected six of Monogram’s 1940s Charlie Chan features starring Sidney Toler.

  Although the promise of “three alternative endings” was not strictly true, the much-anticipated DVD release of Tod Browning’s seminal Freaks also featured a new documentary entitled Freaks: Sideshow Cinema.

  October saw the premier of two new TV versions of Frankenstein. William Hurt, Donald Sutherland and Julie Delpy starred in a miniseries version of Mary Shelley’s classic on the Hallmark Channel with Luke Goss as the Monster, while Dean Koontz’s modern-day adaptation on the USA Network had the evolved 200-year-old Monster (Vincent Perez) teaming up with New Orleans detectives Parker Posey and Adam Goldberg for a silly series pilot involving a mad scientist (Thomas Kretschmann) creating a race of super-beings from harvested organs. Koontz took his name off the project and subsequently developed it as a series of novels in collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson.

  TNT’s two-part, $12 million adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot was a pointless remake of the superior 1979 version. It starred a bland Rob Lowe, Donald Sutherland, and Rutger Hauer as Barlow the vampire, while the ending was left open for a possible series.

  The Sci Fi channel churned out a raft of made-for-TV “B” movies in 2004: John Savage played a crazy scientist who mutated an alien reptile in Alien Lockdown; Bruce Boxleitner hunted mutated killer fish in Snakehead Terror; Costas Mandylor saved a small town from a prehistoric crocodile in Dinocroc; David Hewlett’s geneticist witnessed the battle between a mutant Boa vs. Python; Eric Lutes had to prevent an Alaskan town being overrun by ravenous soldier ants in Marabunta: Terror in Burline Pines; Tim Abell’s scientist investigated mutant Komodo dragons in Curse of the Komodo; cave explorers Trevor Murphy and Larry Casey encountered carnivorous creepy-crawlies in Centipede!; Navy SEAL Lorenzo Lamas battled dinosaurs on Raptor Island, and mutated fish fed on humans in the wittily titled Frankenfish.

  Also on Sci Fi, Cameron Bancroft played a shape-shifting commando in Code Name: Eternity; Nicole Eggert investigated a series of bizarre killings by alien babes in Decoys; Shiri Appleby portrayed a remorseful demon in Darklight, and Sunny Mabrey was Eve’s alien spawn in the series pilot Species III.

  From the same channel, Kevin Dillon’s depressed cop was bitten by an acid-bleeding vampire in Out for Blood; the offbeat Anonymous Rex co-starred Sam Trammell and Daniel Baldwin as a pair of dinosaur private eyes working for Faye Dunaway, and Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys featured Corey Feldman in the ultimate doll smackdown.

  Supposedly disowned by its subject, Nathaniel Kahn’s The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan on the Sci Fi Channel in July was a much too long Blair Witch-style spoof documentary about the director of The Village that shouldn’t have fooled anybody.

  Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic fantasy Earthsea premiered on the Sci Fi channel as a miniseries starring Shawn Ashmore as sorcerer-in-training Ged and Danny Glover as his legendary mentor, the wizard Ogion. The author really did disown it.

  MTV’s original made-for-cable movie Monster Island was a tongue-in-cheek spoof of classic 1950s creature features. A group of high school competition winners found themselves trapped on a Pacific island with Carmen Electra in a fur bikini, Adam West’s Dr Harryhausen and various stop-motion giant insects.

  Noah Wyle went searching for a lost artifact in TNT’s The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, while New Orleans lawyer Anne Heche was given an antique engagement ring by her fiancé and started seeing dead people in CBS’ The Dead Will Tell, inspired by the readings of real-life medium James Van Praagh.

  Nicolette Sheridan starred in yet another version of the old “eyes of Orlac” scenario for the Lifetime movie Deadly Visions, in which a woman’s eyesight was restored by a transplant that had the unpleasant side effect of visions of the donor’s demise.

  Shelved since 2003, Doctor Sleep from BBC Films starred Goran Visnjic as a telepathic American psychologist investigating a series of occult murders linked to a 500-year-old French heretic seeking immortality. It was released theatrically in America under the pointless title Close Your Eyes.

  John Nettles returned as unflappable DCI Tom Barnaby with John Hopkins as his loyal sergeant to investigate a series of spontaneous combustion deaths in the typically bizarre and convoluted Midsomer Murders film The Straw Woman, while in Things That Go Bump in the Night the duo investigated a number of murders linked to a local séance group.

  A combination of extreme weather conditions wiped out Chicago in the CBS movie Category 6: Day of Destruction starring Thomas Gibson, Randy Quaid, Dianne Wiest and Brian Dennehy, and NBC’s 10.5 trotted out all the usual clichés as a series of earthquakes led to the destruction of Los Angeles and the breaking away of the California coastline.

  The Hollow was an updating of the Washington Irving story about the headless horseman, starring Kaley Cuoco, Nick Carter and Stacy Keach. It was shown as part of ABC-TV’s “13 Nights of Halloween”.

  The Disney Channel’s Halloweentown High was the third in
the series featuring young witch Marnie (Kimberly J. Brown) and her eccentric grandmother (veteran Debbie Reynolds), while ABC-TV’s long-shelved A Wrinkle in Time was based on Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 classic children’s novel and shown on “The Wonderful World of Disney”.

  Kelsey Grammer starred as Scrooge in NBC-TV’s version of the New York stage musical of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which also featured Jason Alexander as Jacob Marley along with Jesse L. Martin, Jane Krakowski, Geraldine Chaplin and Jennifer Love Hewitt. Peter Falk reprised his role as Max the angel for the third time in the CBS Christmas movie When Angels Come to Town, and a grumpy Santa (Tom Cavanagh) lost his reindeer in the ABC Family channel movie Snow.

  Scooby-Doo and the Loch Ness Monster premiered on the Cartoon Network.

  Benjamin Britten’s opera Turn of the Screw, based on the novella by Henry James, was broadcast in the summer by BBC-TV with music performed by the City of London Sinfonia.

  ABC’s US network television premiere in May of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone contained never-before-seen footage and an exclusive ten-minute sneak preview of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

  The Horror Channel launched in May on Britain’s BSkyB satellite platform as a limited movie channel showing old and obscure (i.e. cheap or out-of-copyright) films. Original programming consisted of talking head interviews with British film stars and directors of the 1960s and 1970s.

  Although Smallville’s lead-in helped Angel with viewing figures, and the show reached its 100th epsiode (without the hoped-for cameo from Buffy’s Sarah Michelle Gellar, although Charisma Carpenter returned for one last time as Cordelia), it was still cancelled after five seasons by The WB due to poor ratings. A write-in campaign and online petitions failed to save the series.

  The fifth and final season included the irritating Fred (Amy Acker) being “killed” by resurrected demon god Illyria, while Angel (David Boreanaz) travelled back in time to 1943 and was turned into a puppet on a demonic TV show.