The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  Although actually filmed in 1998, Simon Hunter’s directorial debut Lighthouse received a belated release. It involved a prison ship running aground, and an escaped serial killer (Chris Adamson) slashing his way through the survivors. Marcus Adams was another first-time British director, whose Long Time Dead was based on the hoary old concept of a Ouija board setting loose a murderous djinn from the spirit world.

  Andrew Green’s debut feature Nine Lives involved the release of a murderous Scottish spirit that possessed the bodies of its victims. The amateurish cast included hotel heiress Paris Hilton, who was thankfully dispatched early in the proceedings.

  Marc Evans’s My Little Eye was yet another variation of The Blair Witch Project, as a group of would-be reality-TV contestants were filmed by CCTV cameras while being killed off in a reputedly haunted house. At least Ken Russell’s home-made The Fall of the Louse of Usher showed a spark of originality, as James Johnston’s Roderick Usher was committed to an insane asylum for the murder of his wife.

  Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis was reissued in theatres in an extended version that restored much, although not all, of the missing material. Modern-font dialogue cards were used to fill in the gaps.

  Despite concerns over terrorism, the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony went ahead in Hollywood. DreamWorks’ Shrek beat out Disney’s Monsters, Inc. for Best Animated Film, although the latter picked up Best Original Song for Randy Newman’s “If I Didn’t Have You”. Out of a near-record thirteen nominations, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring collected Oscars for Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects.

  In a poll conducted in Total Film magazine in September, Sir Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter was voted by readers as the Top Serial Killer of All Time. Runners-up were John Doe (from Se7en) and Michael Myers (from the Halloween series). Some of the more surprising entries were Vincent Price’s Dr Anton Phibes (at #19), Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert from M (at #22) and David Cronenberg’s Dr Decker from Nightbreed (at #25).

  It was predicted that, in the next four years, spending on DVDs would triple in Western Europe, with volume sales already outstripping those for videotapes by 2003. With such retail outlets as Blockbuster and Tower Records emptying their warehouses of pre-recorded videos, it was estimated that the videotape was headed for extinction by 2006.

  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone made history when it was released in Britain on video and DVD and sold more than one million copies on the first day. Meanwhile, the two-disc DVD of Shrek included more than eleven hours of extras and became the best-selling DVD to date, shipping twenty-one million copies worldwide on VHS and DVD and generating more than $400 million in sales in just two months.

  The “Special Extended Edition” of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring contained four discs and featured an extra half hour of previously unseen and extended material plus commentaries from Peter Jackson, co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens and various members of the cast, crew and design team, and more than six hours of “appendices”, including behind-the-scenes documentaries and interactive features. A “Special Gift Set” edition came with collectible Argonath Bookends sculpted by the film’s visual effects artists, a National Geographic bonus DVD and Lord of the Rings trading cards.

  H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-animator Millennium Edition from Elite Entertainment, was a double DVD set containing a THX digitally transferred widescreen version of the 1985 movie with commentary by director Stuart Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna, and actors Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbott and Robert Sampson, plus various extended and deleted scenes, theatrical trailers, TV spots, multi-angle storyboards, a behind-the-scenes photo gallery and much more.

  The “Special Edition” DVD of Interview With the Vampire included a director’s commentary and an Introduction by Neil Jordan and Anne Rice.

  From MGM Home Entertainment, the “Special Edition” of Mad Max contained a documentary and audio commentary, and featured Mel Gibson’s original audio track instead of the dubbed American version. On the same label, cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension included a rare prologue sequence starring Jamie Lee Curtis, never-before-seen deleted scenes restored with director W.D. Richter’s commentary, and a “making-of” documentary with stars Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum and Christopher Lloyd. It was also the first MGM release to include NOUN-enhanced interactive technology, allowing access to behind-the-scene facts, and a Gamma Zoom Composer feature, which enabled viewers to pre-select close-up zooms of interesting scene elements.

  Direct-to-video titles released in 2002 included director Morgan J. Freeman’s inventive and enjoyable American Psycho 2, which featured William Shatner as an FBI profiler seduced by victim-turned-killer Mila Kunis.

  Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled was filmed back-to-back with the previous entry by director Chris Angel, while Hellraiser: Hellseeker took Clive Barker’s original concept down yet another notch.

  Seduction Cinema’s Misty Mundae, Darian Caine, Debbie Rochon and Laurie Wallace were among the soft-core starlets groping each other in the DVD releases The Erotic Mirror, Witchbabe: The Erotic Witch Project III, My Vampire Lover, Vampire Obsession, Donald Farmer’s slightly more ambitious The Erotic Vampire in Paris, and the ludicrous Play-Mate of the Apes.

  The Shock-O-Rama Cinema DVD label issued such independent horror productions as Demoness, Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead, Zombie Doom and Rock & Roll Frankenstein.

  Steve Oedekerk’s spoof Frankenthumb was filmed in “Thumbation”.

  Walt Disney Home Video’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame II replaced the dark edge of the 1996 original with syrupy songs and cheap-looking animation. Spookable Pooh and Frankenpooh appeared on the same disc from Disney in time for Hallowe’en, and the studio’s classic villains teamed up to menace the mouse in Mickey’s House of Villains.

  In Elmo Says Boo!, the lovable Muppet encountered both The Count and Julia Roberts, while Casper and Wendy’s Ghostly Adventures contained fourteen classic cartoons from the 1950s.

  Vincent Price: The Sinister Image Collector’s Edition contained an hour-long 1987 interview with the actor by David Del Valle, along with an audio interview with Price, a photo gallery, two half-hour TV shows and a radio drama.

  From Allday Entertainment, All Monsters Attack featured fifty coming-attractions trailers plus a behind-the-scenes documentary on The Land That Time Forgot (1974), the 1954 atomic-bomb short Operation Plumbob, and the 1992 cartoon Mega-Morphosis.

  Licensed by Lugosi Enterprises, The Devil Bat and Bowery at Midnight launched the “Bela Lugosi Presents” DVD series, which also included audio commentaries (by Bela Lugosi Jr and Ted Newsom), rare photos, home movies, radio and film trailers and collectible movie-poster inserts.

  Kino on Video released a four-film set of German silent horror classics containing Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Golem and Waxworks.

  Stephen King’s Rose Red was an original three-part, six-hour miniseries from ABC-TV that trotted out all the usual haunted-house clichés. The author had a silly cameo as a pizza-delivery man.

  NBC-TV’s redundant remake of Carrie featured Angela Bettis as the telekinetic prom queen splattered in pig’s blood, while Firestarter Rekindled was a two-part miniseries sequel to King’s novel and the 1984 movie and was shown on the SciFi Channel. Michael McDowell took over the role of the psychotic John Rainbird.

  Also on SciFi, Saint Sinner was loosely based on a failed comic book created by executive producer Clive Barker. Greg Serano played the monk who travelled through time to stop a pair of sexy succubi whom he had accidentally released.

  David Keith hunted down a genetically created Sabretooth that was eating the members of a camping group, and Brad Johnson found himself transported to Riverworld in the impressive pilot movie based on Philip José Farmer’s series of books.

  Harry Hamlin and Susan Dey found themselves trapped in a de
sert town that wasn’t on the map in the TBS movie Disappearance, while Lance Henriksen and Robin Givens found themselves trapped in a microscopic submarine inside the body of a wounded terrorist in Antibody.

  Richard Roxburgh and Ian Hart made a bad-tempered Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson respectively in yet another unnecessary TV movie of The Hound of the Baskervilles from the BBC. At least Richard E. Grant turned in a fine performance as the scheming Stapleton. Matt Frewer wore the deerstalker and investigated The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire in the original Hallmark Entertainment production. Meanwhile, a wild young Sherlock Holmes (James D’Arcy) encountered his arch-nemesis Dr Moriarty (Vincent D’Onofrio) in the revisionist USA Networks movie Case of Evil.

  Phil Davis and Anna Friel investigated a series of mysterious deaths in a small farming community in the BBC’s confusing two-part SF thriller Fields of Gold. Based on a story by Ian McEwan, advertising executive Ewan McGregor discovered a secret gateway to another dimension in Channel 4’s half-hour film Solid Geometry.

  Millionaire industrialist Matthew Modine realised that he didn’t know the truth behind the fairy tale in Jim Henson’s Jack and The Beanstalk: The Real Story, an inventive Hallmark Entertainment production that also featured Vanessa Redgrave, Daryl Hannah, Richard Attenborough and Honor Blackman. Also from Hallmark, Bridget Fonda portrayed the frigid Snow Queen in David Wu’s adaptation of the classic fairy story.

  Disney’s The Scream Team featured Kathy Najimy, Tommy Davidson and Eric Idle as a trio of friendly ghosts helping a pair of children to enable their dead grandfather to rest in peace.

  Jeff Fine’s A Haunting in Georgia was a spot-on spoof documentary about the supernatural. Inspired by The Blair Witch Project, it was shown on the Discovery Channel. Sightings: Heartland Ghosts was a Showtime movie in which a team of paranormal investigators travelled to a small Kansas town to explore a house that may have been haunted.

  Despite making the cover of the Hallowe’en edition of the Los Angeles Times TV supplement, one of the biggest disappointments of 2002 was the Turner Classic Movies reconstruction in stills of Tod Browning’s lost 1927 film London After Midnight, starring Lon Chaney, Sr.

  Unavailable for more than thirty years, the 1962 film Hand of Death starring John Agar and Paula Raymond unexpectedly turned up on the Fox Movie Channel in July.

  MTV’s Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters was an hour-long cut-down of the 1968 Mexican movie dubbed by an eclectic group of singers and minor celebrities, including Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Snoop Dog, Paul Daniels, Shaggy and Uri Geller.

  As part of its Hallowe’en celebrations, the increasingly controversial AMC film channel launched “Monsterfest 24/7”, a round-the-clock festival of movies ranging from the Halloween sequels and Predator 2 to all the Universal classics.

  On Hallowe’en night, John Carpenter hosted AMC’s half-hour “Short Screamers”, which featured fifteen new short horror films by up-and-coming film-makers. The favourite of New York Post television critic Linda Stasi was Jay Holben’s Hunger: “To tell a story in less than a minute is tough enough,” explained the journalist, “but making it scary to boot is a real accomplishment. And Holben manages to do both.”

  In The WB’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while her personal life collapsed around her Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) was also menaced by a trio of nerdy “supervillains” (Adam Busch, Tom Lenk and Danny Strong), which resulted in a fateful showdown. The seventh season saw the show jumping networks to UPN and, after the unrelenting misery of the previous year, Buffy had anxieties about accepting a counselling position at the reopened Sunnydale High School and vampire Spike (James Marsters) regained his soul. In a surprise cameo scene, Buffy was confronted by many of her most infamous enemies from previous episodes.

  The University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, hosted an international academic conference in October entitled “Blood, Text and Fears” which was devoted to Buffy and at which more than sixty papers were presented from around the world.

  In the increasingly grim Angel, the undead hero’s (David Boreanaz) desire for human blood prompted Wesley (Alexis Denisof) to betray his friends and kidnap Angel’s infant son Conner. This resulted in obsessed vampire-hunter Holtz (Keith Szarabajka) taking the child with him into a Hell dimension before the show’s six-week hiatus. The fifth season opened with Angel returning from the deep-sea tomb which his vengeful offspring (Vincent Kartheiser) had banished him to, and discovering the root of his recovery lay with the ostracized Wesley. Meanwhile, Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) was forced to adjust to her new role as an angelic “higher being”. The new season also introduced paranormal thief Gwen (Alexa Davalos).

  The latest project from Buffy and Angel creator Joss Whedon was the dull science fiction Western Firefly. Set aboard a ramshackle transport starship, the show was abruptly cancelled by the Fox Network with three unaired episodes to go.

  Originally conceived as a heart-warming coming-home drama, Kevin Williams’s new show Glory Days did not fare much better on The WB. Eddie Cahill played the one-book novelist who returned to his native Pacific Northwest island where he investigated unusual mysteries until the series was cancelled.

  The eponymous hero of the new Fox series John Doe (played by Dominic Purcell) became a suspect in a thirty-year-old murder case, which led to him wondering if he was a time traveller.

  After The Lone Gunmen was abruptly cancelled, the show was finally wrapped up in The X Files episode “Jump the Shark”, in which the investigative trio sacrificed their lives. They returned as ghosts in the disappointing final episode of The X Files, “The Truth”, when missing FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) was put on trial for the supposed murder of a “super-soldier”. Fans who had stuck with the show for nine seasons deserved better than this half-hearted attempt to tie up neatly all the loose ends and explain what had been going on for almost a decade.

  Based on characters from the Stephen King novel, the USA Network’s The Dead Zone turned out to be a surprisingly intelligent series, with former teen actor Anthony Michael Hall making the role of psychic Johnny Smith his own. Another child star, Sean Patrick Flanery, guest-starred as apocalyptic politician Greg Stillman.

  Former detective Frank Taylor (Matthew Fox) could see ghosts in Fox’s disappointing Haunted, while Richard Coyle played former priest turned occult investigator John Strange in the BBC pilot Strange, which also featured Samantha Janus and Ian Richardson.

  Despite becoming involved with a vampire queen, a fairy-tale world and an old dark house murder mystery, in the US Charmed was moved to The WB’s Sunday-night graveyard slot.

  At the end of the first season of Witchblade, most of the characters ended up dead. The second series kicked off in June with a two-hour premiere in which New York cop Sara Pezzini (Yancy Butler) turned back time and the story began again, but this time was set in a subtly different reality. Once again, megalomaniac millionaire Kenneth Irons (Anthony Cistaro) attempted to steal the titular magic weapon.

  In a surprise announcement in October, TNT pulled the plug on Witchblade, its only original series, and the SciFi Channel cancelled Farscape, despite both shows receiving critical praise. Two months later, ABC-TV shelved its Dinotopia series.

  Based on a series of books by Mark Sumner, the final season of The Chronicle: News from the Edge included an episode where World News reporters Tucker (Chad Willett), Wes (Reno Wilson) and Grace (Rena Sofer) went undercover at a convention full of vampire Elvis impersonators.

  Creator James Cameron directed the feature-length second-season finale of Fox’s Dark Angel.

  Judith Reeves-Stevens and Garfield Reeves-Stevens joined the third season of the increasingly goofy Australian series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as executive creative consultants. With the adventurers still stuck on the plateau, they were joined by a young woman (Lara Cox) from the year 2033. In the daft season-finale cliff-hanger, a time-shift phenomenon stranded the various characters among Spanish conquistadors, sacrificial Druids and
the machine rulers of a far-future Earth, while the prehistoric world collapsed in upon itself.

  CBS-TV’s flagging Touched by an Angel kicked off its ninth season with an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and was reduced to using plot ideas sent in by viewers when Gloria (Valarie Bertinelli) was kidnapped by the Devil and Monica (Roma Downey) once again confronted her evil alter-ego.

  The young Clark Kent (Tom Welling) had a character-changing encounter with Red Kryptonite in Smallville, which became The WB’s second-highest rated show during its first season. Following a stormy season cliffhanger, Clark gained a new superpower and one of his friends discovered his secret. He also fell in love with a Native American werewolf, encountered a man revived from the dead by the green meteorite stone, and discovered that a high-school cheerleader was actually a centuries-old crone who lived off the youth of her fellow students to remain eternally young.

  From the same producers as Smallville, Dina Meyer, Ashley Scott and Rachel Skarsten starred in the stylized Birds of Prey. In a much darker superhero series, the crippled Oracle/Barbara Gordon (formerly Batgirl), moody Huntress/Helena Kyle (the offspring of Batman and Catwoman) and timid telepathic teen Dinah teamed up to battle devilish doctor Harley Quinn and other villains in New Gotham. Due to falling ratings, The WB decided to pull the plug on the show after just thirteen episodes.

  When Vivendi Universal acquired full control of parent company USA Networks in March for $10.3 billion, the deal included The SciFi Channel. Premiering at the end of the year, Taken was a SciFi original miniseries about alien abduction, created by Leslie Bohem for Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks LLC.

  Forest Whitaker hosted yet another revival of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone for UPN, with guest stars including Jason Alexander, Greg Germann and Elizabeth Berkley.