The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Meanwhile, as part of the run-up to the controversial 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government banned videos containing “strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror”. The crackdown included depictions of “wronged spirits and violent ghosts, monsters, demons and other inhuman portrayals”.

  Although it starred the director’s daughter Asia, her mother Daria Nicolodi, and genre veteran Udo Kier, the much-anticipated final entry in Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy, Mother of Tears (La Terza Madre), was a huge disappointment for fans.

  Reeker 2: No Man’s Land, David Payne’s sequel to his own 2005 film, was this time set around a Death Valley motel menaced by the smelly supernatural serial killer, while the monsters were back to menace a small town in John Gulager’s comedy sequel Feast II: Sloppy Seconds.

  Two years after the events in the first film, C. Thomas Howell’s gloomy hero was back battling the blood-drinking Martian invaders in the no-budget sequel War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave, which the actor also directed.

  Corey Feldman and Corey Haim returned as vampire-hunters in P. J. Pesce’s Lost Boys: The Tribe, a late and unnecessary sequel to Joel Schumacher’s original 1987 cult favourite. Lost Boys: Reign of Frogs was a prequel comic book from DC/Wildstorm that bridged the gap between the two movies.

  We also did not need Creepshow III, an anthology film produced without the participation of either George A. Romero or Stephen King.

  While it seemed equally unlikely that the world was waiting for either Phil Tippet’s South African-shot Starship Troopers 3: Marauder with Casper Van Dien, or Russell Mulcahy’s prequel The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior, one can only wonder what possessed Jeremy Kasten to remake Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1970 cult classic The Wizard of Gore with Crispin Glover, Jeffrey Combs and Brad Dourif.

  Trailer Park of Terror was loosely based on the Imperium Comics series, as Nichole Hiltz’s sexy trailer trash and her redneck zombie companions laid waste to a coach party of troubled teens.

  In the near future, dead soldiers were reanimated to fight America’s increasing number of wars in the comedy Zombie Strippers, featuring adult film star Jenna Jameson. Unfortunately, the virus spread to a pole-dancing club owned by Robert Englund.

  Even with a cast that included Mena Suvari, Ving Rhames and Ian McNeice, genre veteran Steve Milner (House) couldn’t do much with his direct-to-DVD remake of George A. Romero’s 1985 Day of the Dead, set in a mountain town overrun with zombies.

  A mad scientist (Peter Stormare) was turning asylum patients into flesh-eating psychopaths in Jeff Buhler’s cleverly-titled Insanitarium.

  R. Lee Ermey’s redneck cameo was the only reason to see Solstice, a remake of the 2003 Swedish ghost story Midsommer, directed by Daniel Myrick (The Blair Witch Project).

  Reuniting many of the cast members from the TV series, the direct-to-DVD sequel Stargate: Continuum involved the team returning to Earth, only to discover that history had been altered.

  The Boneyard Collection was an anthology compilation directed by Edward L. Plumb. Hosted by the late Forrest J Ackerman as “Dr Acula”, with soap opera actor Ronn Moss as a long-haired Count Dracula, the real mystery was how they managed to get cameo appearances by such industry veterans as Candy Clark, Brad Dourif, Elvira, Ken Foree, Ray Harryhausen, Tippi Hedren, George Kennedy, Robert Loggia, Kevin McCarthy, poet/songwriter Rod McKuen, the late Bobby “Boris” Pickett, William Smith, Barbara Steele, Brinke Stevens and Susan Tyrrell. Writers Peter Atkins, Donald F. Glut, George Clayton Johnson, C. Courtney Joyner and Brad Linaweaver were also involved in the low-budget madness, along with Dark Delicacies bookstore owner Del Howison.

  Larry Blamire’s The Lost Skeleton Returns Again was a sequel to the writer/director’s 2004 spoof on “B” sci-fi horror movies, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

  The DVD boxed set Fox Horror Classics Vol. 2 contained Chandu the Magician (1932), Dragonwyck (1946) and Dr Renault’s Secret (1942), along with audio commentaries, featurettes, still galleries, an isolated Dragonwyck score track and two vintage Dragonwyck radio shows performed by Vincent Price.

  Legend of Hammer: Vampires was a nicely compiled feature-length documentary narrated by actor Edward De Souza that looked at all of Hammer’s vampire movies in chronological order, illustrated with clips, stills, rare behind-the-scenes footage and mostly contemporary interviews with many of those who were involved. Extras included a brief interview with screenwriter Tudor Gates about an unproduced “Karnstein” movie and a candid audio interview with director John Gilling.

  Produced by Renegade Arts Entertainment, Doug Bradley’s Spine Chillers: The Outsider was the first in a proposed new series of collector’s DVDs. It featured the Hellraiser actor (who also produced and directed) presenting a dramatic reading of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story. Disappointingly, neither the film’s graphics nor the packaging matched the standard of Bradley’s bravura performance.

  The Sci Fi Channel continued to churn out numerous shot-on-a-shoestring movies for TV. Soap opera actress Kristen Renton discovered that her family was descended from Ghouls, while Antonio Sabato, Jr was among a group of disparate characters who found themselves on a mysterious ship bound for Hell in Ghost Voyage.

  Jeremy London’s archaeologist had to stop fellow scientist Scott Hylands from reviving the titular Sumarian storm god in Paul Ziller’s ludicrous Ba’al: The Storm God, which also featured a wasted Lexa Doig as a radical meteorologist.

  Meanwhile, a group of archaeological students in Iraq uncovered Noah’s other Ark and the darkness it contained in Declan O’Brien’s Monster Ark, and backpacking college student Chad Collins pulled a sword from a stone, unleashing the titular Rock Monster, also directed by O’Brien.

  Bruce Boxleitner, Gil Gerard, Veronica Hamel, William Katt and Walter Koenig were among the veteran TV cast battling a giant Native American skeleton monster in Jim Wynorski’s silly Bone Eater.

  During the final days of World War II, a band of women fliers on a top-secret mission found themselves stranded on a remote island full of flying dinosaurs in Warbirds.

  Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Aztec Rex was about a small band of seventeeth-century conquistadors that encountered a pair of surviving Tyrannosaurus Rex in a lost valley in Mexico.

  John Schneider and Daryl Hannah confronted hundreds of mutated sharks in Shark Swarm, and Schneider was back as a town magistrate who sacrificed strangers in return for immortality in Ogre.

  Bio-engineered snakes escaped and started attacking a cast that included Tara Reid, Corbin Bernsen and the late Don S. Davis in Vipers, Brad Johnson saved a Western town from poisonous snakes in the surprisingly fun Copperhead, and David Hasselhoff and John Rhys-Davies went looking for a giant snake in Anaconda III: The Offspring.

  Rhys-Davies also played a mysterious survivor rescued by two couples sailing to Fiji in the supernatural thriller The Ferryman, filmed in New Zealand.

  Grizzled veteran Bruce Dern tracked down a were-tree in the Vermont woods in David Winning’s enjoyable Swamp Devil, while six teens found themselves trapped in a remote campground in Flu Bird Horror.

  Aliens were behind global warming in Heatstroke starring D. B. Sweeney and former model Danica McKellar.

  Purporting to relate a missing chapter from Homer’s The Odyssey, the Sci Fi Channel’s Odysseus and the Isle of the Mists set its shipwrecked Greek hero (Arnold Vosloo) against the first vampires.

  Noah Wyle returned for the third time as Flynn Carson in Jonathan Frakes’ The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice from TNT. This time the naive globe-trotting adventurer had to track down the eponymous artefact that had the power to resurrect vampire king Vlad Dracul.

  Scottish actor Dougray Scott was the latest actor to portray the kindly doctor and his psychotic alter-ego in a contemporary reworking of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for ION Televison.

  Peter Fonda and Rick Schroder starred in yet another version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth,
also on ION.

  Adapted by Andrew Davies from the novel by Sarah Walters, Affinity was a ghost story set in and around a notorious women’s prison in London during the 1870s. Amanda Plummer portrayed a prison warder with an unconvincing British accent.

  Sara Rue’s writer-turned-teacher encountered a student who seemed to be the reincarnation of a dead classmate in Nightmare at the End of the Hall on the Lifetime Movie Network. Also from LMN, Secrets of the Summer House starred Lindsay Price as a woman whose family were endangered by a curse, while Amy Acker began seeing ghosts following A Near Death Experience.

  Small town newcomer Catherine Bell wondered if she had the power to conjure up spells in the Hallmark Channel’s original movie, The Good Witch.

  Soap opera star Justin Bruening portrayed the son of Michael Knight (a returning David Hasselhoff) in NBC’s updated Knight Rider pilot, which featured an upgraded KITT (voiced by Will Arnett) that was powered by nanotechnology. In the subsequent TV series, an uncredited Val Kilmer took over as the voice of the car.

  Benjamin Pratt and Eric McCormach discovered that the biological plague which had wiped out a small town in Utah was a warning from the future in Mikael Salomon’s unnecessary remake of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, shown in two parts on A&E Networks.

  Christopher Lee replaced the late Ian Richardson as the voice of Death in Sky’s four-hour miniseries Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, based on the author’s first two “Discworld” novels. David Jason starred as hapless wizard Rincewind, with Tim Curry as the villainous Trymon, who attempted to kill off his fellow wizards.

  The BBC’s feature-length Clay was an adaptation of David Almond’s children’s novel, about a boy (Ben-Ryan Davies) who created a golem.

  Broadcast by the BBC over Christmas, Aardman Animations’ half-hour A Matter of Loaf and Death involved claymation duo Wallace and Gromit on the trail of a “cereal killer” who was preying on the town’s bakers.

  Comedian Catherine Tate’s “Donna Noble” (from the 2006 Christmas special “The Runaway Bride”) joined the BBC’s Doctor Who as the time-traveller’s new companion for thirteen episodes.

  Together they encountered the Doctor’s possible future wife (Alex Kingston) and his rebellious daughter (Georgia Moffett), and they teamed up with Agatha Christie (Fenella Woolgar) to solve a murder. In the blockbuster two-part season finale, the Doctor and Donna were joined by previous companions Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) to prevent Davros and his Daleks from stealing the Earth. The poignant final episode, “Journey’s End”, achieved the highest viewing figures for the series with an average 9.4 million/45.9% share of the audience.

  For the Christmas special, “The Next Doctor”, the Doctor (David Tennant) travelled to Victorian London, where he encountered another man (David Morrissey) claiming to be him. Between them, they stopped the cybermen from controlling a giant CyberKing.

  In May, Russell T. Davis announced that, after reviving the show in 2005, he would be standing down as the lead writer and executive producer of Doctor Who. He handed over to writer Steven Moffat (“Blink”), who would assume control of the show for the fifth season, to be shown in 2010.

  That was followed by a shock announcement live on TV in October, when David Tennant announced that he would also be leaving the show after the next series of specials.

  Season two of the BBC’s Torchwood kicked off with the introduction of villain Captain John Hart (Buffy’s James Masters), a rogue bisexual Time Agent who used to be Captain Jack’s (John Barrowman) lover. However, the show slowly improved as Freema Agyeman joined the cast for three episodes as Martha Jones (from Doctor Who), Owen (Burn Gorman) was killed and resurrected without a soul, and the team found themselves battling a personification of Death. In the season finale, “Exit Wounds”, the real villain behind Captain John was revealed and two major characters were surprisingly killed off.

  For some inexplicable reason, the BBC moved the show from Wednesday to Friday nights towards the end of its thirteen-episode run.

  In the second season of the other Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures, the Doctor’s earlier companion (Elisabeth Sladen) and her “son” Luke (Thomas Knight) once again teamed up with teenager Clyde Langer (Daniel Anthony) and new character Rani (Anjili Mohindra) to investigate alien incursions. Guest stars included comedian Russ Abbot, Samantha Bond, and Nicholas Courtney recreating his character “Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart”.

  The much-improved second seven-part season of ITV’s enjoyable Primeval found Douglas Henshall’s dour Professor Nick Cutter returning through a time “anomaly” into a subtly-changed world where Claudia Brown (actress Lucy Brown, who turned up in another role) never existed. What had not changed was that prehistoric utahraptors, giant worms, sabre-tooth tigers, Silurian scorpions and other CGI-created creatures were continuing to cause chaos, while Cutter’s duplicitous wife Helen (the wonderful Juliet Aubrey) could still not be trusted. Although the multi-monster finale failed to quite live up to expectations, despite the apparent death of he-man Stephen (James Murray), the conspiracy subplot and time-space paradoxes kept the series moving along nicely.

  It was certainly livelier than Joe Ahearne’s devilishly dull Apparitions. Martin Shaw (who was also executive producer) played Catholic exorcist Father Jacob battling demons, Vatican conspiracies, and his own faith. Originally intended to be a two-part special, the BBC inexplicably extended the run to six mind-numbing episodes.

  Written by critic Charlie Brooker and obviously made on a shoestring budget, Channel 4’s surprisingly effective three-hour limited series Dead Set was situated in and around the British Big Brother house besieged by flesh-eating zombie hordes (including regular presenter Davina McCall). In the UK it ran over five nights the week before Hallowe’en.

  The third season of The CW’s Supernatural ended with Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) fulfilling the deal he had done to save his brother Sam (Jared Padalecki) and going to Hell. The fourth season kicked up a gear (and substantially increased its viewing figures) when it was revealed that Dean had been saved from eternal damnation by a warrior angel named Castiel (Misha Collins). With the Apocalypse fast approaching, the brothers found themselves caught up in the ultimate battle between the forces of Good and Evil, even if they were not sure which side they were on.

  In a fun black and white Halloween episode, Dean and Sam found themselves hunting a shape-shifter that took the form of old horror film monsters, including a barely-glimpsed werewolf, an impressive mummy and Count Dracula himself (Todd Stashwick).

  With episodes adapted from stories by Del Howison, Peter Crowther and Paul Kane, NBC-TV broadcast just eight of the thirteen episodes of Mick Garris’ anthology series Fear Itself over the summer.

  Originally shown by the BBC in three half-hour episodes in the run-up to Christmas, the derivative Crooked House owed far too much to the fiction of R. Chetwynd-Hayes and the old Amicus anthology movies. Writer/producer Mark Gattis played the enigmatic museum curator who revealed three stories centred round a haunted mansion.

  In the first season finale of HBO’s True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’ series of “Southern Vampire” novels, Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) – with a little help from her 175-year-old vampire boyfriend (Stephen Moyer) – discovered the identity of the serial killer who was bumping off her neighbours.

  The show was promoted with an innovative mailing campaign in which letters written in dead languages led their recipients to a website that explained the background to the series and why vampires no longer needed to feed on humans.

  No sooner had Alex O’Loughlin’s undead Mick St. John temporarily regained his mortality on CBS’ Moonlight, than the lacklustre vampire detective show was cancelled after just one series.

  From the BBC, Being Human was an hour-long pilot about a rebellious vampire (Guy Flanagan), an intelligent werewolf (Russe
ll Tovey) and a tea-making ghost (Andrea Riseborough) sharing a house. Thanks to the three leads, the offbeat drama deserved to go to series.

  With a complicated back story that involved vampires and a group of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-type immortals, a Mary Poppins-voiced Amanda Tapping played the sexy Dr Helen Magnus, whose team of helpers took care of the misunderstood monsters in the Sci Fi Channel’s enjoyable thirteen-part Sanctuary.

  Slacker Sam (Bret Harrison) dated the mysterious Candy (Jessica Stroup), who might just have been the daughter of Ray Wise’s dapper Devil in The CW’s Reaper.

  Melinda (Jennifer Love Hewitt) discovered that Grandview was built over a cursed underground city that had become a repository for all the evil spirits in CBS-TV’s Ghost Whisperer. Jamie Kennedy joined the cast in Season 4 as a psychiatrist who could hear ghosts, and Melinda’s supportive husband Jim (David Conrad) was shot to death.

  Following the revelations that turned life upside down for psychic sleuth Allison DuBois (Patricia Arquette) in NBC’s Medium, the star’s sister, Rosanna Arquette, guest-starred as a woman who seduced and killed her partners, while younger brother David directed an episode. Recurring guest star Anjelica Huston joined the fourth season for six episodes as a mysterious private investigator whose daughter had disappeared.

  After the departure of producer David E. Kelley and the pilot being almost completely recast and reshot, ABC-TV’s remake of the BBC’s hit Life on Mars eventually debuted in October. Jason O’Mara played modern-day NYPD detective Sam Tyler, who was hit by a car and mysteriously transported back to the Big Apple, circa 1973. Veteran actor Harvey Keitel turned up as craggy ex-marine Lt Gene Hunt.

  Back in the UK, Ashes to Ashes was the BBC’s follow up to Life on Mars. Detective Inspector Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) was thrown back in time to 1981 London, where she had to deal with Chief Inspector Gene Hunt (the wonderful Philip Glenister) and his sexist cronies. Although the show featured a clever connection between DI Drake and the earlier series’ Sam Tyler, Alex’s increasingly bizarre attempts to save her parents from a car bomb simply did not ring true.