The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Even more bizarre was Lost in Austen, a four-part drama in which twenty-first century bank worker Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper) went through a mysterious door in her bedsit bathroom and found herself in her favourite novel, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. But when the plot started to deviate from the story she knew by heart, Amanda was forced to step in and try to control the action, with disastrous results.

  However, possibly the year’s most bonkers genre show was the six-episode Bonekickers. Starring Julie Graham and Hugh Bonneville (who should have known better), it involved a team of unlikely archaeologists investigating an historical conspiracy linked to the legend of Excalibur. After the show lost more than three million viewers in four weeks, the BBC decided not to commission a second season.

  Still, Julie Graham quickly joined other BBC “regulars”, such as Max Beesley and Freema Agyeman, in Survivors. Focusing on the aftermath of a deadly virus that wiped out most of the world’s population, it was a six-part reimagining of the late Terry Nation’s novelization of an earlier series (1975–77) he created. The 1976 book was reissued with a new cover to tie-in with the remake.

  After being saved from cancellation by a write-in campaign by fans, CBS-TV’s Jericho returned for seven episodes in February with a new federal government taking control of the eponymous post-holocaust town. In the final episode, Skeet Ulrich’s character recovered a nuclear bomb from the corrupt government in Cheyenne, Wyoming. When viewing figures dropped to 7.1 million, the network decided not to commission a third season, although the production shot two alternative endings – just in case.

  Frances Fisher joined the third season of Sci Fi’s Eureka (aka A Town Called Eureka) as a tough corporate boss brought in to sort out the town filled with scientific geniuses.

  Created by J. J. Abrams, Fox’s Fringe was basically X Files-lite as Olivia Dunham’s FBI agent brought together cynical genius Peter Bishop (the likeable Joshua Jackson) and his eccentric scientist father Walter (John Noble) to investigate a “Pattern” of bizarre phenomena. It was one of the year’s consistently watched shows, possibly due to its shorter ad breaks.

  Based on the series of British TV movies created by Stephen Gallagher and starring Patrick Stewart, CBS’ Eleventh Hour featured Rufus Sewell as superscientist Dr Jacob Hood and Rachel Young as his FBI handler investigating scientific mysteries.

  Having dropped the plotlines from Jeff Lindsay’s source novels, the third season of Showtime’s sublime Dexter concentrated on the sympathetic serial killer’s friendship with Miguel Prado (the superb Jimmy Smits), which turned sour when Dexter (Michael C. Hall) discovered that the corrupt Assistant District Attorney was a bigger monster than he was. In the season finale, he finally married his pregnant girlfriend Rita (Julie Benz).

  ABC’s hugely-hyped Lost returned in January for a fourth season with flashbacks and flashforwards revealing which of the “Oceanic 6” got off the island. The dead Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) showed up in the future, a new group of “rescuers” (including a grizzled Jeff Fahey) arrived, and the traitorous Michael (Harold Perrineau) returned before the entire island disappeared. The writers’ strike resulted in the planned sixteen episodes being cut to thirteen. The show returned in April before going on hiatus again at the end of May until early 2009.

  Set after the events in the second film, there was little point to Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles when fans of the movie series already knew the outcome. Still, British actress Lena Headey made a solid action heroine, trying to keep her gloomy fifteen-year-old son John (Thomas Dekker) safe from killer cyborgs with the help of friendly Terminator Cameron (Summer Glau). Following the highest-rated series debut of the January season, viewing figures dropped 53% in the third week, although they eventually recovered slightly.

  The ten-part Season 2 introduced Garbage singer Shirley Manson as a corporate villain and shape-changing “Terminator T-1001”.

  After a car crash left Jaime Sommers (Brit actress Michelle Ryan) near death, her fiancé rebuilt her faster and stronger in a re-imagining of The Bionic Woman. Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff then turned up as an earlier, discarded model with a homicidal grudge against her replacement. Production stopped after eight episodes because of the writers’ strike.

  The Sci Fi Channels’ Battlestar Galactica returned for its fourth and (eventually) final season. The most intelligent and daring science fiction show on TV finally revealed who the hidden human Cylons were, and ended up on a devastated Earth.

  Stargate SG-1’s Teal’c (Christopher Judge) made a guest appearance on Sci Fi’s Stargate Atlantis, while actress Rachel Luttrell’s pregnancy as warrior woman Teyla was written into the storyline. The fourth season ended with John Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) arriving back on Atlantis, but 40,000 years in the future.

  In The CW’s Smallville, Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) discovered the connection behind a secret society called “Veritas” created by his father, Lionel (John Glover), before apparently meeting his end when the Fortress of Solitude imploded. Back in Metropolis for the eighth season, after the Justice League showed up to rescue Clark (Tom Welling) from the Arctic, Justin Hartley’s Oliver Queen joined the regular cast, and Sam Witwer showed up as monstrous villain Doomsday. Meanwhile, series creators Al Gough and Miles Millar decided it was time to move on.

  Natalie Morales’ struggling artist became a superhero after being saved by The Middleman (Matt Keeslar) in the ABC Family show based on the graphic novel series. Despite a guest appearance by Kevin Sorbo as a 1960s Middleman and an army of trout-eating zombies, it was cancelled after just twelve episodes.

  At least NBC gave Zachary Levi’s reluctant sci-spy another chance, after renewing Chuck for a second season when it managed to survive its difficult time slots. Guest stars included Nicole Richie, John Larroquette and Michael Clarke Duncan.

  The increasingly convoluted and ludicrous third season of NBC’s Heroes (“Villains”) kicked off with a two-hour premiere in which it was revealed who shot politician Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar) moments before he was going to confirm his superpowers. With ratings plummeting 22% in early November, the show’s co-executive producers Jesse Alexander and Jeph Loeb were fired after reportedly refusing to return to the character-driven stories of the popular first season.

  Writer Bryan Fuller rejoined Lost after ABC cancelled his screwball series Pushing Daises. In the second season, pie-maker Ned (Lee Pace) and his resurrected dead girlfriend Chuck (Anna Friel) encountered killer bees, circus clowns, and Fred Willard as a murdered magician.

  Brit actor Jonny Lee Miller starred as a lawyer-turned-divine prophet suffering from a brain aneurysm in two seasons of ABC-TV’s quirky fantasy, Eli Stone. Singer George Michael turned up as God and himself, and other guest stars included Katie Holmes and Sigourney Weaver. After a rocky first season cut short by the writer’s strike, the show was abruptly cancelled in November.

  Put under a spell by a Native American maiden, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s 400-year-old detective John Amsterdam was looking for a love worth dying for in Fox’s New Amsterdam, which was cancelled after just eight episodes.

  Also cancelled in 2008 were The 4400, Cavemen, The Dead Zone, Flash Gordon and Journeyman.

  Filmed on location in France, the BBC’s thirteen-part family drama Merlin featured younger versions of the legendary characters, as the trainee wizard (Colin Morgan) was forced to keep his powers secret from his friends Arthur (Bradley James), Morgana (Katie McGrath) and Gwen (Angel Coulby). The adult cast included Anthony Head as the inflexible Uther Pendragon, Richard Wilson as the kindly apothecary Gaius, John Hurt as the voice of an impressive CGI dragon, plus Michelle Ryan as recurring villain Nimueh.

  Executive producers Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert attempted to recreate the success of their Hercules and Xena series with the syndicated Legend of the Seeker, based on the fantasy novels by Terry Goodkind.

  Jonathan Pryce’s Dr Victor Blenkinsop’s attempts to produce a prototype soldier resulted in the scien
tist and his naive creation (Stuart McLoughlin) taking refuge in a country village to escape Mark Gatiss’ homicidal army colonel in the old-fashioned BBC comedy Clone, which ran for six episodes.

  Also from the BBC, the one-off drama A Number was based on the 2002 stage play by Caryl Churchill, in which a father (Tom Wilkinson) created multiple identical clones of his supposedly dead son (Rhys Ifans).

  After an extended hiatus, Kyle (Matt Dallas) finally revealed his bio-engineered origin to his adopted family and tracked down his real mother (1980s actress Ally Sheedy) in Season 2’s final ten episodes of Kyle XY from ABC Family.

  Steven R. McQueen, the nineteen-year-old grandson of the famous movie actor, starred in Minutemen, a teen time-travel comedy on the Disney Channel.

  Stingray – The Reunion Party was a new half-hour episode of the 1960s puppet series edited together from clips and recently discovered linking material under the supervision of co-creator Gerry Anderson.

  Following the success of the 2007 live-action film, Transformers: Animated was an update of the original 1980s TV show on Cartoon Network.

  Hollywood veteran Lauren Bacall, Hayden Panetiere and Jay Leno were guest voices in Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King, the latest Halloween movie featuring the Scooby Gang.

  The Cartoon Network’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold teamed a retro Caped Crusader up with other heroes, including Green Arrow, Aquaman, Atom, the original Blue Beetle and Plastic Man.

  The irritating Jar Jar Binks from 1999’s Episode I: The Phantom Menace returned for an episode of the Cartoon Network’s juvenile Star Wars: The Clone Wars, in which he helped C-3PO rescue Senator Padmé Amidala. Much more entertaining was the spoof Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II, which included Billy Dee Williams voicing his “Lando Calrissian” character.

  The Simpsons nineteenth Treehouse of Horror on Fox Network opened with a timely gag about the Presidential election and then went on to spoof Transformers: The Movie, the TV show Mad Men and the Halloween classic, It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown (and included the original 1966 music score by Vince Guaraldi).

  In an October episode of Fox’s Family Guy, Stewie and Brian travelled back in a time machine to Nazi Germany to rescue Jewish pharmacist Mort from numerous movie spoofs.

  To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of ABC’s daytime soap opera One Life to Live, Viki (Erika Slezak) had A Matter of Life and Death moment in which she encountered past characters in Heaven, while Bo (Robert S. Woods) and Rex (John-Paul Lavoisier) were hit by lightning and transported back to 1968 – the year the show made its debut.

  Before NBC’s supernatural soap Passions ended its nine-year run in August, it featured daytime TV’s first legal gay wedding between Norma (Marianne Muellerleile) and Edna (Kathleen Noone), while local Lothario Julian Crane (Ben Masters) was castrated by a crazy teenager and then had his penis reattached upside down by a drunken doctor – with potentially fatal results.

  Katherine Heigl’s Izzie had sex with the ghost of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Denny in a ludicrous November episode of ABC’s morose medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, while the residents of the small North Carolina town had to deal with Torrey DeVitto’s psychotic nanny Carrie in The CW’s One Tree Hill.

  Hallmarks’ Psych ended its second season with fake psychic detective Shawn Spencer (James Roday) and his reluctant assistant Gus (Dulé Hill) investigating a 3,000-year-old mummy that apparently walked out of a museum. The third season opened with an episode involving a supposedly haunted house.

  BBC4’s The Worlds of Fantasy consisted of three hour-long documentaries exploring fantasy literature from The Water Babies to Harry Potter. Among those taking part were Philip Pullman, Alan Garner, Lyra Belacqua and Amanda Craig.

  Martin Scorsese narrated the original TCM documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows. Kent Jones’ feature-length look at the legendary “B” movie producer was subsequently included in a reissue of the DVD boxed set The Val Lewton Horror Collection.

  H. P. Lovecraft’s early story of madness and obsession, The Tomb, was read by Ryan McCluskey in a half-hour radio adaptation on BBC7 at the end of March.

  BBC Radio 4’s The Saturday Play: The Voyage of the Demeter was an original hour-long reworking by Robert Forrest of the Dracula story, set aboard the eponymous schooner in 1897.

  From the same station in July, Mike Walker’s Afternoon Play: It’s Better with Animals emulated the old Amicus portmanteau films, in which a mysterious New York furrier (Russell Horton) set in motion three macabre stories.

  Written by Sebastian Baczkiewicz, Pilgrim was a four-part series on Radio 4 about the eponymous book-dealer (Paul Hilton) cursed with immortality in 1185 and compelled to walk between the worlds of faerie and man.

  Dramatized by Robin Brooks, Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch was broadcast on Radio 4 over February and March as five half-hour episodes featuring the voice of Philip Jackson as the time-travelling Commander Sam Vimes of the City Watch.

  A two-part, two-hour adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Classic Serial: The Hunchback of Notre Dame was produced as a collaboration between BBC Radio Drama and the disabled-led theatre company Graeae. Deaf actor David Bower played Quasimodo, who fell in love with Candis Nergaard’s gypsy girl, Esmeralda.

  To coincide with the £5 billion Large Hadron Collider experiment near Geneva, Switzerland, where scientists attempted to recreate conditions moments after the “Big Bang” by smashing protons together at almost the speed of light, Radio 4 presented a special radio edition of the TV series Torchwood on September 10. Written by Joseph Lidster, “Lost Souls” featured the voices of series regulars John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd and Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones.

  Unfortunately, the experiment itself was shut down after less than ten days when a faulty electrical connection resulted in a helium leak.

  Based on a short story by Nikolai Gogol, Christmas Eve on Radio 4 was about a local witch in league with the Devil who tried to steal the moon and the stars.

  In January, Amazon.com reportedly paid $300 million to acquire New Jersey-based website Audible.com, which provides digital downloads of spoken-word material.

  From the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, Dark Adventure Radio Theatre Presents H. P. Lovecraft’s Dunwich Horror was a seventy-five minute audio drama with music by Troy Sterling Nies. The CD package included a clipping from a 1917 copy of the Arkham Advertiser, a vintage map of Dunwich and the surrounding region, a page from Wilbur Whateley’s diary, and a replica of a key page from Whateley’s copy of John Dee’s Necronomicon.

  A Message from The Twilight Zone CD featured George Clayton Johnson reading “All of Us Are Dying” and the script for his story “Nothing in the Dark”, adapted by Rod Serling for the classic TV show.

  Demon Lovers and Other Eroticisms contained seven erotic poems written and recited by Sam Stone, with music composed and performed by Penny Nicholls.

  George Langelaan’s 1957 Playboy story “The Fly” was turned into an opera directed by David Cronenberg (who also directed the 1986 film version). With music composed by Howard Shore and a libretto by David Henry Hwang, the production premiered in Paris, France, in July and opened in Los Angeles in September. Tenor Plácido Domingo conducted the orchestra.

  David Lynch’s 1997 movie Lost Highway also got the opera treatment at London’s Young Vic, thanks to the English National Opera company and Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s score.

  With Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray, the London-born choreographer updated Oscar Wilde’s story as a modern-day dance-drama. Richard Winsor played eternally young waiter Dorian, whose aftershave poster aged instead of him.

  In February, Chicago’s WildClaw Theatre company opened its production of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan at the Athenaeum Theatre. It was followed in November by WildClaw’s stage production of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House.

  Ten imaginative stories by Edwardian author “Saki” (H. H. Munro) were re-imagined by writer Toby Davies for Thomas
Hescott’s stage production Wolves at the Window at London’s Arcola Studio.

  The Love&Madness ensemble’s touring stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein starred Nathan Brine as Victor and Craig Tonks as his sympathetic Creature.

  A victim of falling ticket sales, it was announced that Mel Brooks’ Broadway stage musical Young Frankenstein would close early in 2009, after fourteen months and 484 performances.

  In July, former companions Catherine Tate and Freema Agyeman co-hosted the Doctor Who Prom performed by the BBC Phiharmonic Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall. David Tennant appeared on-screen via an interactive clip, and various monsters (including Davros and his Daleks) invaded the stage.

  Probably the hottest survival horror game of the year was Dead Space, a gory and genuinely creepy adventure set aboard the remote mining spacecraft USG Ishimura, where the crew had been transformed into monstrous creatures (“necromorphs”). The player took on the role of communications engineer “Isaac Clarke” (a nice homage), who had to battle his way through zero gravity to rescue his girlfriend and escape.

  In development from EA Games for three years, there was also a tie-in Dead Space comic book, while an animated movie was also in the works.

  Almost as impressive was Left 4 Dead, in which the player was one of four survivors of a global infection that had turned the rest of the population into fast-moving zombies. Not only could you also play as the living dead, but the game also monitored the player’s skill and adapted accordingly.

  In Dracula: Origin, players took on the identity of “Professor Van Helsing”, who attempted to track down Dracula and destroy him in a fairly faithful reworking of Bram Stoker’s original novel.

  Devil May Cry 4 introduced demi-demon Nero, who teamed up with regular gunslinger hero Dante to travel through the underworld.