The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

The half-hour BBC anthology show Spine Chillers included episodes about a pair of would-be Goth vampires and a 2,000-year-old succubus who preyed upon her lovers.

  In the 5 August episode of the daytime soap Passions, Timmy died from injuries sustained during a demon-created earthquake. In a strange case of synchronicity, Josh Ryan Evans, the actor who played the diminutive doll-turned-living-boy, died the same day of a congenital heart condition. The show also included a zombie named Charity.

  “Naked Eyes” was the ninth “book” in the ever more bizarre soap set in Port Charles, where the inhabitants had to put up with angels, demons, magic candles and the coming Judgement Day.

  Still desperately unfunny, The League of Gentlemen returned to the BBC with a variation on “The Hands of Orlac”. Just as dull, Ed Stone is Dead was a half-hour BBC sitcom in which the eponymous character (MTV’s Richard Blackwood) was revived from the dead as an ageless, unfeeling zombie.

  The Thanksgiving episode of the Fox sitcom Bernie Mac included a Claymation nightmare and a parody of a classic Richard Matheson episode of Twilight Zone set at 20,000 feet.

  In an attempt to appeal to more young-adult viewers, Sabrina The Teenage Witch saw its supporting cast disappearing faster than viewers, while the titular witch (Melissa Joan Hart) became a writer for a music magazine.

  The two schoolboy heroes of Channel 5’s Harry & Cosh were regressed through hypnotism and took refuge in a manor where the mistress was reputed to be a vampire.

  From Kids WB, Phantom Investigators mixed puppets and live action as a group of pre-teens investigated the kind of mysteries all young children experience and came up with supernatural explanations.

  When a family inherited the house of an Ancient Egyptian-loving aunt, they discovered the living mummy of an ancient boy-prince (Elyes Gabel) in the Canadian/UK children’s series I ? Mummy. While searching the world for magical artefacts, Alex O’Connell and his family were once again pitted against Imhotep, Weasler and the revived Ancient Egyptian sorceress Anck-su-namun in the cartoon sequel series The Mummy: Secrets of the Medjai.

  The ever-nervous Chuckie dressed up as a “werewuff” in the special Hallowe’en episode of Nickelodeon’s popular Rugrats, and A Scooby-Doo Christmas was a holiday special on The WB, in which the gang investigated the legend of a headless snowman.

  Those darned kids were also investigating new cartoon mysteries in What’s New, Scooby-Doo?, and in the Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, the 1960s animated superhero defended Scooby-Doo and Shaggy on “possession” charges and also settled the Jonny Quest custody case.

  Stargate Infinity was a Fox cartoon spin-off of the Stargate SG-1 franchise, while the cancelled Futurama aired a backlog of sixteen episodes.

  When the Cartoon Network asked viewers to select a cartoon from a list of ten to become a regular series, Grim & Evil received the most votes. In the first part, two children tricked the Grim Reaper into being their best friend, while the brain of a former playboy was transplanted into a bear in the second half.

  The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror 13 included “Send in the Clones”, where a magic hammock created multiple copies of Homer; zombie versions of Billy the Kid, Frank and Jesse James, the Sundance Kid and Kaiser Wilhelm rose from the grave to terrorize Springfield in “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms”; and “The Island of Dr Hibbert” was inspired by the H.G. Wells story.

  Ann Rice: Interview With the Vampire was a tedious twenty-minute documentary in the BBC series Cover Stories. It featured interviews with the author and her family, including sister Alice Borchardt.

  From Showtime, Masters of Horror was an entertaining and stylish feature-length documentary about horror films that included interviews with John Carpenter, Wes Craven, George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, John Landis, Rick Baker, Guillermo del Toro and Stuart Gordon. It was hosted by an irreverent Bruce Campbell.

  From American Movie Classics, The Alien Saga was narrated by John Hurt, while Backstory: Halloween was an hour-long look behind the scenes at John Carpenter’s classic “slasher” film.

  ABC-TV invited viewers to experience 13 Nights of Halloween and the Scariest Places on Earth, the latter hosted by Linda Blair.

  The ennui that is Reality TV continued with Nickelodeon’s Scaredy Camp, a five-part series in which two teams of boy and girl campers had to solve the mysterious disappearance of a man named Dennis Williams ten years earlier.

  Closing after just seven weeks and fifty-six performances, Jim Steinman’s $7.5 million musical Dance of the Vampires (loosely based on Roman Polanski’s 1967 movie) became one of the biggest flops on Broadway after being savaged by the critics, with The New York Times calling 61-year-old star Michael Crawford a “long-in-the-tooth neck-nibbler”.

  Meanwhile, Dominic Symonds’s Dragula was a musical retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel set to 1980s pop hits.

  F. Brook Warren’s classic 1897 chiller The Face at the Window was revived in its full version at The Gatehouse pub theatre in London’s Highgate by the Resurrectionist Drama Company.

  Richard O’Brien was perfectly cast as the evil Child Catcher in the London stage musical of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, that came complete with flying car. The role was subsequently played by Paul O’Grady (better known as drag comedian Lily Savage).

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  The latest “Lara Croft” video game was not ready in time for the important Christmas market. When it was announced that Lara Croft – Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness would benefit from “refinement”, shares in the troubled software group Eidos fell by nearly 9 per cent. However, they quickly bounced back after it was realized that the game would not have to compete with Electronic Arts’ Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the James Bond game Die Another Day, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game.

  The new Harry Potter was available for the big three games consoles – GameCube, PS2 and Xbox – as players guided Harry through the Whomping Willow, the Duelling Club and an enhanced game of Quidditch before the climactic showdown.

  Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was a first-person survival game based around H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos, from Britain’s Headfirst Productions.

  The classic zombie shoot-up Resident Evil was revamped for Nintendo’s GameCube, while Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem featured Alexandra Roivas investigating a family mystery spanning the centuries. Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2 was set in the same universe as Soul Reaver 2 and followed the adventures of a super-human evil vampire.

  Based on the disappointing film, the game version of Reign of Fire allowed players to control either the well-armed hero or the marauding dragons, while The Terminator: Dawn of Fate was set before the first movie in the series.

  An alien prison ship crashed on Earth in Men in Black 2: Alien Escape, and John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing finally got the game treatment. GameCube’s Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters pitted its jolly green hero against some of his greatest foes.

  The Buffy the Vampire Slayer game from EA for Xbox featured impressive graphics, and only the faithful Scooby could save his kidnapped friends in Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights.

  In Luigi’s Mansion, launched on GameCube in May, Mario was kidnapped in a haunted mansion and it took a mad professor and some household implements to rescue him from the ghosts.

  Boris Karloff’s Son of Frankenstein character was released as a twelve-inch high black-and-white “Silver Screen” figure, limited to 5,000 units. The surgically enhanced Gill Man from The Creature Walks Among Us, one of The Mole Men and Henry Hull’s lycanthropic WereWolf of London were issued as Universal Monster twelve-ince figures, complete with accessories.

  The long-delayed Universal Studios Wolf Man twenty-four-inch poser also finally made its appearance, with twelve points of articulation.

  A twelve-inch poseable figure of Vincent Price from The Raven had more than twenty points of articulation. Each figure was packaged with an individually numbered hologram and the edition was limited to 5,000.
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br />   An eight-inch-high Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth was cast in a blue translucent plastic edition, limited to 1,500 figures, while Gort the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still was recreated as a five-inch-tall metal cast figure. Gort was also available as a tin wind-up with a visor that opened.

  Twelve-inch figures of Bruce Campbell as Ash and Evil Ash from the film Army of Darkness came equipped with weapons, while the Ash bobbing head stood with chainsaw at the ready.

  Figures of Mathayus, Cassandra and Balthazar from The Scorpion King each featured detailed likenesses of the actors who played them, while a series of seven-inch characters and a twelve-inch likeness of Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China were also available.

  For fans of the 1960s Outer Limits TV show, twelve-inch figures of The Ebonite Guard from the episode “Nightmare” and Gwyllm from “The Sixth Finger” were available, along with a two-figure set from “Keeper of the Purple Twilight” and a set of poseable life-size Zanti Misfits from the episode of the same title. The latter was issued in a limited edition of 5,000.

  Moore Creations produced a series of bust ornaments of the characters Darla, Host and Wesley from TV’s Angel.

  The Munsters Coach, designed by George Harris, was released as a one-eighth-scale die-cast replica.

  Stan Winston’s “She Creature, Queen of the Lair” resin statue was based on the scaly monster from the 2001 made-for-TV movie.

  The series from Japan of eight-inch vinyl figures of creatures originally created as stop-motion models by Ray Harryhausen continued with recreations of the Cyclops, Centaur, Griffin and Minaton from the various Sinbad films. There were also twelve-inch poseable action figures of the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth and Kali from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, along with a seven-piece set of bronzed skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts.

  A set of seven four-inch Harryhausen statues contained characters from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts and First Men in the Moon. Five skeleton warriors from Jason were also available in the same size, painted and ready for display.

  From the Japanese creators of the Harryhausen figures also came the “Godzilla Collection” of four-inch hand-painted resin figurines featuring the 1954, 1968 and 1995 Godzillas, Rodan and Hedorah the Smog Monster.

  Mezco’s “Cinema of Fear” featured Jason, Leatherface and Freddy figures from New Line Cinema’s Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street respectively, and all three characters also turned up as Bobbing Head caricatures.

  For Hallowe’en, there were string-light sets of Jason, Leatherface and Freddy heads, or four “head knockers” featuring a mummy, witch, skeleton and pumpkin-headed scarecrow.

  Even more unusual were the Army of Darkness, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hellraiser shooter-glass sets, and the latter four titles were also available as illustrated lunch-boxes.

  The Dracula and Mummy Tin Lunch-Box sets included a drink container depicting colour artwork from the Universal classics, while The Bride of Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi as Dracula wall clocks sported reproductions of the films’ original poster designs.

  The Nightmare Before Christmas continued to exploit its growing cult status with a tin lunch-box and thermos combo. For the more literary-minded, the same set was available in a Lord of the Rings design. Barrell and Lock from Nightmare were also available as bobbing heads.

  Lego and Steven Spielberg MovieMaker Sets launched four “Scary Thriller” Movies Sets for budding film-makers of a younger age. These included Werewolf Ambush, Vampire’s Crypt, Scary Laboratory and Curse of the Pharaoh. The “Scary Monster Madness Kit” included all four sets, while the website for “All of the Dead” was billed as “The World’s First Lego Video Nasty!”

  A nine-inch tall Cthulhu Mini-Bust was made of cold-cast resin with a bronze finish and was limited to 500 castings, each signed and numbered by sculptor Tommy Allison and packaged in a 1930s-style FBI Evidence Box.

  A “Summer Fun Cthulhu” plush doll featured H.P. Lovecraft’s tentacled Elder God dressed in a Panama hat, Hawaiian shirt, shorts and sandals. The “Baby Cthulhu Stuffed Doll” from Toy Vault was a miniature of the larger plush toy. There was also a “Gothic Cthulhu Plush” designed in black and silver with red eyes.

  The H.P. Lovecraft Pin featured two portraits of Lovecraft facing each other. A second revised edition of The H.P. Lovecraft Tarot, published by Mythos Books LLC, contained seventy-eight cards corresponding to the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana of the traditional tarot, all again illustrated by Daryl Hutchinson. The pack came with an eighty-page introductory booklet by Eric C. Friedman.

  For Hallowe’en fans with deep pockets, Creative Visions offered a “Sleeping Giant” that was nearly twelve feet high and roared at trick-or-treaters for just $35,000. Or for a mere $5,000 you could get “Deep Fryer” – a full-size man in an electric chair who writhed and smoked when it was turned on.

  London’s Madame Tussaud’s imported a wax model of Bela Lugosi as Dracula from its New York museum to appear opposite a new £50,000 model of Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a Hallowe’en attraction in the Chamber of Horrors entitled “Trail of the Vampires”. Children were encouraged to track down twenty celebrity waxworks – including Margaret Thatcher and Pierce Brosnan – who had tell-tale bite marks on their necks.

  The World Horror Convention 2002 was held in Chicago, Illinois, over 11–14 April. A nice-looking programme book featured appreciations of all the guests, along with various contributions, bibliographies and an art portfolio and colour cover by artist Guest of Honour Randy Broecker.

  The impressive line-up of multiple GoHs also included authors Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman, editor Melissa Ann Singer, toast-master Gahan Wilson, poet Jo Fletcher, photographer Beth Gwinn, musician Liz Mandville Greeson, comics creator Jill Thompson, media guests Patricia Tallman and Robert Z’dar, and special guest authors Karen Taylor, Yvonne Navarro and Brian A. Hopkins, along with Grand Master Charles L. Grant and International Horror Guild Living Legend William F. Nolan.

  The other IHG Awards were announced at the convention by Gaiman and Wilson. Recognizing outstanding achievements in the field of horror and dark fantasy, the 2002 awards were sponsored by The Design Image Group.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Threshold was voted Best Novel, and David Searcy’s Ordinary Horror won in the Best First Novel category. Best Long Fiction was Elizabeth Hand’s “Cleopatra Brimstone” (from Redshift) and Kiernan won again in the Best Short Fiction category for “Onion” (from Wrong Things). Through Shattered Glass by David B. Silva was voted Best Collection, and Richard Chizmar’s Night Visions 10 picked up Best Anthology. Best Illustrated Narrative was the five-issue miniseries Just a Pilgrim by Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra, and David J. Schow’s book of essays Wild Hairs won Best Non-fiction. Anthony Sapienza’s online magazine The Spook collected Best Publication, John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps won for Best Film, and John Picacio was voted Best Artist.

  For the first time in three years, the Bram Stoker Awards Weekend was not held in conjunction with the World Horror Convention. The 2001 Stokers were presented for Superior Achievement on 8 June at the Horror Writers Association annual meeting in New York. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods won the Novel award, while Michael Oliver’s Deadliest of the Species topped the vote for First Novel. In These Final Days of Sales by Steve Rasnic Tem picked up the Long Fiction award, and the Short Fiction prize went to “Reconstructing Amy” by Tim Lebbon (from As the Sun Goes Down). Norman Partridge’s The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists won the Collection award, and Extremes 2: Fantasy and Horror from the Ends of the Earth edited by Brian A. Hopkins, won in the Anthology category. The Non-fiction award went to Brian Keene’s Jobs in Hell, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s Memento won the Screenplay prize, and The Willow Files #2 by Yvonne Navarro collected the Work for Young Readers award. The award for Poetry Collection went to C
onsumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes by Linda Addison, Beth Gwinn and Stanley Wiater’s Dark Dreamers: Facing the Masters of Fear picked up the award for Alternative Forms, and John Farris was the recipient of the Life Achievement Award. No award was presented in the Illustrated Narrative category.

  The British Fantasy Awards were announced on 21 September at the one-day FantasyCon 2002 in London. Graham Joyce was the sole Guest of Honour after artist Jim Burns cancelled at the last minute. Decided by members of the British Fantasy Society, Simon Clark’s disappointing The Night of the Triffids was voted Best Novel (The August Derleth Fantasy Award). Best Anthology was The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Twelve, while Paul Finch’s Aftershocks won in the Best Collection category. Simon Clark also picked up the award for Best Short Fiction for “Goblin City Lights” (from Urban Gothic: Lacuna and Other Trips). Jim Burns was announced as Best Artist in his absence, and Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing collected the Best Small Press award for the second year running. After reportedly failing to reach an agreement, the awards committee decided not to present the Special Karl Edward Wagner Award.

  “Gods & Monsters” was the theme of the twenty-eighth World Fantasy Convention, chaired by Greg Ketter in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 31 October to 3 November. Guests of Honour were Dennis Etchison, Jonathan Carroll, Kathe Koja, Dave McKean and Stephen Jones, with William F. Nolan as Special Guest. Unfortunately, the other special guest, veteran author Nelson Bond, was unable to attend due to his failing eyesight. The superb-looking programme book contained appreciations of and contributions by all the guests.

  As usual, the World Fantasy Awards were presented at the Banquet on the Sunday afternoon. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Other Wind won Best Novel, Best Novella was S.P. Somtow’s “The Bird Catcher” (from The Museum of Horrors), and Alfred E. Cowdrey’s “Queen for a Day” (from F&SF) was voted Best Short Story. Dennis Etchison’s The Museum of Horrors also won Best Anthology, and the Best Collection went to Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk. Best Artist was Allen Koszowski, there was a tie in the Special Award: Professional category between Stephen Jones (for editing) and Jo Fletcher (for editing Gollancz’s “Fantasy Masterworks” series), and the Special Award: Non-Professional went to Raymond Russell and Rosalie Parker for Tartarus Press. Lifetime Achievement awards were presented to George Scithers and Forrest J. Ackerman.