The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor Part One by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga was the third volume based on the AMC TV series.
Other TV tie-ins included Grimm: The Icy Touch by John Shirley, Once Upon a Time: Reawakened by Odette Beane, Supernatural: Fresh Meat by Alice Henderson and Supernatural: Carved in Flesh by Tim Waggoner, while Christa Faust’s Fringe: The Zodiac Paradox and Fringe: The Burning Man were the first two volumes in a new series based on the now-cancelled show.
Lara Parker’s Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising was based on the 1960s TV show, and Torchwood: Exodus Code was co-credited to series star John Barrowman and his sister Carole E. Barrowman.
It was an important year for new Doctor Who books. These included the novelizations The Dalek Generation by Nicholas Briggs, Shroud of Sorrow by Tommy Donbavand, Harvest of Time by Alastair Reynolds and Plague of the Cybermen by Justin Richards.
Doctor Who: Summer Falls and Other Stories collected three novellas by Justin Richards that were originally published as ebooks, while Doctor Who: 11 Doctors, 11 Stories contained tales originally published as monthly ebooks throughout the year. Mike Tucker’s novella Doctor Who: The Silurian Gift was published at just £1.00 by BBC Books for World Book Day.
Doctor Who: The Doctor – His Life and Times was a fictional biography of the Time Lord by James Goss and Steve Tribe, told through interviews, letters, etc.
Barry Forshaw’s British Gothic Cinema was an insightful guide to an often-neglected sub-genre of UK cinema. It included some fascinating chapters on films of the 1930s and ’40s, Hammer’s rivals, and one-shots and short-run series. An Appendix of brief interviews featured pithy insights from, amongst others, Ingrid Pitt, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Kim Newman, Christopher Wicking, Peter James and Stephen Volk.
For Auteur Publishing’s “Devil’s Rejects” series, Forshaw wrote an incisive examination of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, which also managed to take in Dr Lecter’s other appearances.
Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities not only looked behind the scenes at the writer-director’s movies, but also allowed a sneak peek at his wonderful home of horrors.
From PS Publishing, editor Johnny Mains compiled The Sorcerers by John Burke, a fascinating look at the controversy surrounding the true authorship of the 1967 British film starring Boris Karloff. The handsome hardcover not only included Burke’s original screenplay (entitled “Terror for Kicks”), but also commentary by Mains, Matthew Sweet, Benjamin Halligan, Kim Newman and Tony Earnshaw, along with a selection of Burke’s correspondence from the period.
David Miller’s updated biography Peter Cushing: A Life in Film was published to coincide with the centenary of the actor’s birth in May. It contained previously unpublished correspondence by Cushing himself.
Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie by Chris Nashawaty included reminiscences from the influential director’s many discoveries, who looked back over his six-decade career.
In Chain Saw Confidential, actor Gunnar Hansen explained what it was like to play “Leatherface” in the original Texas Chainsaw movie.
Christopher Wayne Curry’s Film Alchemy: The Independent Cinema of Ted V. Mikels from McFarland & Company, Inc. looked at the career of the American exploitation director, while Robert Michael “Bobb” Cotter’s The Women of Hammer Horror: A Biographical Dictionary and Filmography listed the hundreds of women who worked both in front of and behind the camera.
In Fang Fan Fiction: Variations on Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries from the same publisher, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and Malin Isaksson compared the original book series with the filmed adaptations and the fan fiction based upon them.
The subtitles helpfully told you everything you needed to know about Bryan Senn’s The Most Dangerous Cinema: People Hunting People on Film and Rob Craig’s It Came from 1957: A Critical Guide to the Year’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.
Editors James Aston and John Walliss collected articles around the impact of the popular movie franchise in To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, while Aalya Ahmad and Sean Moreland edited Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror.
Remaking Horror: Hollywood’s New Reliance on Scares of Old by James Francis, Jr took its cue from Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho.
Editor Gillian I. Leitch’s Doctor Who in Time and Space collected a number of new essays about the BBC series, and Mark Campbell’s Doctor Who: The Complete Guide was a fully revised and updated guide to every TV episode, along with radio, cinema, stage and Internet spinoffs, plus novels, audio adventures and missing episodes. It also included a website listing and a comprehensive bibliography.
Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History was an insider’s view written by Glen Berger, the scriptwriter of the $65-million stage production that debuted in June 2011.
Marc Forster’s sprawling $170-million 3-D zombie epic, World War Z, may not have had much to do with Max Brooks’ original novel, but producer Brad Pitt’s UN investigator travelled all over the globe attempting to find a cure for the resurrection virus, as those around him met grisly fates, usually due to their own incompetence. The extended director’s cut filled in some of the gaps.
Chloë Grace Moretz was the blood-covered teen with psychic powers and Julianne Moore her fundamentalist-crazy mother in Kimberly Peirce’s unnecessary remake of Stephen King’s Carrie.
Fede Alvarez’s extremely gory Evil Dead, starring Jane Levy and Shiloh Fernandez, was a perfectly reasonable – if derivative – remake we didn’t need, despite being produced by original creators Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell.
Alexandre Aja’s Maniac was a remake of the 1980 slasher movie, filmed from the point-of-view of the deranged killer and scalper (Elijah Wood).
Based on Moira Buffini’s play A Vampire Story, Neil Jordan directed Byzantium, about the relationship between a 200-year-old undead prostitute (Gemma Arterton) and her vampire daughter (Saoirse Ronan). Meanwhile, Xan Cassavetes’ Kiss of the Damned explored the connection between a beautiful vampire (Joséphine de La Baume) and her new screenwriter lover (Milo Ventimiglia).
Creepy family secrets were revealed in Korean director Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut Stoker which, despite the title, had nothing to do with vampires. Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode and Nicole Kidman starred.
January is now established as the month when studios release trashy, low-budget horror movies such as Andrés Muschietti’s Mama, “presented” by executive producer Guillermo del Toro. When a couple (Nokolai Coster-Waldau and Jessica Chastain) took in two orphaned sisters (Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse), a malevolent spirit accompanied them.
That same month, Dan Yeager was the latest chainsaw-wielding psycho behind the human-faced mask in director John Luessenhop’s pointless reboot/sequel Texas Chainsaw 3D. At least it featured cameos by actors from the original film, Marilyn Burns, John Dugan and Gunnar Hansen, along with Bill Moseley from the 1986 sequel.
James Wan’s overrated The Conjuring starred Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as real-life paranormal experts Ed and Lorraine Warren (The Amityville Horror) investigating a farmhouse haunting centred around a creepy doll, while the same director’s Insidious: Chapter 2 also featured Wilson and was a sequel to the 2011 movie. Depressingly, both were huge box-office hits in the US.
One night a year Americans were allowed to go crazy in an otherwise crime-free future in The Purge, which starred Ethan Hawke and was made by the people behind the Paranormal Activity franchise.
Ashley Bell returned as a woman possessed by a demon in The Last Exorcism Part II, which dropped the “found footage” narrative of the first movie, and the family of a suburban Arizona couple (Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton) were plagued by alien “greys” in Scott Stewart’s Dark Skies.
In Jeremy Lovering’s impressive debut feature In Fear, a couple
(Iain De Caestecker and Alice Englert) found themselves lost on the Irish back roads at night.
Although he was playing Professor Van Helsing on TV, Thomas Kretschmann switched sides to portray the bloodthirsty Count himself in (Dario) Argento’s Dracula 3-D. In another role reversal, former Dracula actor Rutger Hauer turned up as Van Helsing.
A radio disc jockey (Sheri Moon Zombie) received a record album that literally unleashed Hell in Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem.
Barry Levinson’s The Bay used “found footage” to make its point about ecological pollution, as a flesh-eating bacteria transferred itself from fish to humans.
In writer/director Elliot Goldner’s feature debut The Borderlands, Gordon Kennedy and Robin Hill starred in yet another example of “found footage”, as two Vatican investigators were sent to a remote church in Britain’s West Country to investigate paranormal activity.
Michael Axelgaard’s Hollow was a micro-budget British Blair Witch Project, and a couple expecting twins moved into a haunted house from Hell in the zany comedy Hell Baby.
Nobody really needed the “found footage” comedy Scary Movie V featuring Heather Locklear, Jerry O’Connell, Snoop Dogg, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, but at least it was an improvement over the haunted house spoof A Haunted House, which starred the annoying Marlon Wayans.
Twenty-six international directors, including Jorge Michel Grau, Noboru Iguchi, Jake West, Ti West and Ben Wheatley, were invited to make a short film about death based on a different letter of the alphabet in The ABCs of Death, while V/H/S/2 was a “found footage” anthology with multiple directors featuring zombies, demons and aliens.
After a delay of seven years due to distribution problems, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane starred Amber Heard as a high school student caught up in a series of killings on a remote Texas cattle ranch. You’re Next, Adam Wingard’s tale of a family fighting back against a gang of animal-masked psychos, had also spent a couple of years sitting on the shelf.
While camping in rural Maine, Katie Aselton (who also directed), Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth were menaced by psycho hunters in Black Rock, which was apparently supposed to be a feminist version of Deliverance.
Sean Pertwee was the militia leader who took over a Balkans brothel in Paul Hyett’s directing debut The Seasoning House, and a father had to save his baby daughter from a gang of feral children by taking a stand in an abandoned tower block in the Irish-made Citadel.
Nicholas Hoult’s nice teen zombie ate the brain of a victim and fell in love with the dead man’s girlfriend (Teresa Palmer) in Jonathan Levine’s romzomcom Warm Bodies, which also featured John Malkovich.
British stand-up comedian Ross Noble played a homicidal zombie clown in Stitches, while director Dominic Brunt and his real-life wife Joanne Mitchell travelled to the Yorkshire Moors to renew their marriage and ended up battling zombies in Before Dawn.
An exterminator (Greg Grunberg) and a hospital handyman (Lombardo “Bardo” Boyar) tried to stop a giant arachnid destroying Los Angeles in the comedy Big Ass Spider!
Ben Wheatley’s £300,000 supernatural drama A Field in England premiered in Britain on cinema screens, Freeview television, Blu-ray, DVD and Video on Demand, all on the same day. It featured Reece Shearsmith in a story of dark magick set during the English Civil War.
Indie horror movie Escape from Tomorrow, about a man traumatized by his visits to theme parks, was secretly filmed inside Disney World and Disneyland by first-time writer-director Randy Moore.
Aleksandr Sokurov’s art-house Faust updated the story to the 19th century. A suicidal doorman (Luis Tosar) stalked a woman in her Barcelona apartment in Jaume Balagueró’s psychological thriller Sleep Tight, and We Are What We Are was a remake of a 2010 Mexican movie about a family of cannibals.
In Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second film in the extended trilogy, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) found himself up against giant spiders and the titular gold-hoarding dragon (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch).
James Franco made a likeable younger version of the character in Sam Raimi’s colourful 3-D prequel Oz the Great and Powerful from Disney, which featured Michelle Williams, Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz as a trio of beautiful witches, and Bruce Campbell as a Winkie guard.
Leather-clad brother and sister Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton were celebrity witch assassins during medieval times in Tommy Wirkola’s long-delayed Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters in 3-D.
After being pushed back from the previous summer, Jack (Nicholas Hoult) and his companions eventually climbed the giant beanstalk and disappeared at the box-office in Bryan Singer’s $185-million Jack the Giant Slayer, also released in 3-D. The impressive supporting cast included Ewan McGregor, Bill Nighy, Eddie Marsan, Ian McShane, Stanley Tucci and John Kassir.
Based on Japanese folklore, the $175-million 47 Ronin was another flop that starred Keanu Reeves as an 18th-century samurai warrior who joined the travelling swordsmen on a quest for revenge and their battles against supernatural enemies.
Robert Downey Jr was back as the smart-mouthed Tony Stark in Shane Black’s action-packed 3-D sequel Iron Man 3, the best in the Marvel series so far. Ben Kingsley was hilarious as terrorist villain The Mandarin, who turned out to not be quite what everyone expected. Costing $200 million, it had the second-biggest opening weekend in America ever, after Avengers Assemble. A revised version of the film, featuring different footage and an appearance by actress Fan Bingbing, was released in China.
Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World was a totally serviceable sequel in which the Norse god (Chris Hemsworth) teamed up with his scheming stepbrother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to save London from the Dark Elves, led by the evil Malekith (Christopher Eccleston). Despite a sometimes dull plot, the $170-million movie still managed to surpass what the first movie grossed in 2011.
In his second solo outing in the unexcitingly titled The Wolverine, Hugh Jackman’s razor-clawed crusader travelled to modern-day Japan in a story based on the 1980s Marvel Comics mini-series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. There he rescued a woman (Tao Okamoto) from ninja assassins and was betrayed by an old friend seeking to steal his powers.
The latest “Marvel One-Shot” short, Agent Carter, starred Hayley Atwell reprising her role as British operative Peggy Carter from the Captain America films. As an analyst for the nascent S.H.I.E.L.D. organization, she was looking for the mysterious “Zodiac” key.
Zack Snyder’s $225-million Man of Steel was the second Superman reboot that failed to fly in the past seven years. British actor Henry Cavill donned the cape and boots, while Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe played the hero’s adoptive and alien birth fathers. Michael Shannon portrayed Kryptonian villain General Zod, Laurence Fishburne turned up as Perry White and Amy Adams was sidelined as Lois Lane.
After Cobra killed off most of the G. I. Joes, it was up to Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum and Bruce Willis to take the evil organization down in the action-packed reboot G. I. Joe: Retaliation.
Based on the Dark Horse comic, R.I.P.D. in 3-D starred Ryan Reynolds as a murdered Boston detective who joined the Rest in Peace Department and teamed up with Jeff Bridges’ deceased Old West lawman to track down the crooked partner (Kevin Bacon) who killed him.
Told via an evocative Ray Bradbury-style wraparound story, Disney’s $250-million The Lone Ranger starred Armie Hammer as the masked avenger and executive producer Johnny Depp as his eccentric Native American companion, Tonto. It was a lot of fun but flopped at the box office, despite being made by the same team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Chloë Grace Moretz reprised their roles as teenage crime-fighters in Kick-Ass 2, based on the comic by Mark Millar. However, co-star Jim Carrey refused to publicize the film after he objected to the excessive on-screen violence.
With super-warrior Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) now a dangerously iconic figure, the fascist President (Donald Sutherland) forced her to compete again in Francis Lawrence
’s highly anticipated YA sequel The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, based on the books by Suzanne Collins. The film not only broke the five-day Thanksgiving weekend record, but went on to surpass Iron Man 3 to become the highest-grossing film released in America in 2013.
Along similar lines, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was based on the popular YA book series by Cassandra Clare and starred Lily Collins as a tough demonslayer and role-model for young girls.
An alien took over the body of a seventeen-year-old girl (Saoirse Ronan) and nothing much else happened in The Host, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer. It failed to match even the minimal sophistication of the author’s Twilight series.
Ronan also starred in How I Live Now, based on the dystopian YA novel by Meg Rosoff, in which a nuclear attack on London interrupted a forbidden love affair with her cousin (George MacKay).
Beautiful Creatures, based on the popular series of YA novels by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, didn’t do well at the box office, as feuding family elders Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson argued over whether teen witch Lena’s (Alice Englert) powers should be used for good of evil.
Logan Lerman was back as the teen Greek demi-god searching the Bermuda Triangle for the Golden Fleece in the belated 3-D sequel Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, based on the popular YA book series by Rick Riordan. It included zombie pirates, a giant cyclops, the monstrous Kronos and the Furies recast as blind taxi drivers.
Astronauts George Clooney and Sandra Bullock got lost in space in Alfonso Cuarón’s technically impressive 3-D Gravity, which enjoyed the biggest October weekend opening in the US of all time.
Meanwhile, Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley brought some much-needed gravitas to Ender’s Game, based on the militaristic SF novel by Orson Scott Card. A group called Geeks OUT called for a boycott of the movie due to Card’s anti-gay marriage stance, although that probably had nothing to do with the $110-million movie’s drop of sixty-two per cent in its second week at the US box office. J. J. Abrams’ superior 3-D sequel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, featured Benedict Cumberbatch as an alternate version of genetically enhanced terrorist Khan Noonien, played by Ricardo Montalban in the original movie series.
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