The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Read online

  Left on the shelf for two years, Jaume Balagueró’s genuinely creepy Darkness, starring Anna Paquin and Lena Olin, was set in a Spanish haunted house and involved a group of dead children and a ritual that needed to be completed after forty years during a full eclipse of the sun.

  An epic confrontation between Good and Evil was at the heart of Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch, which was a huge hit at the Russian box-office, and Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s disturbing Innocence was set in a bizarre girl’s boarding school.

  Made back in 2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s J-horror Pulse (Kairo) involved a sinister website that compelled people to commit suicide.

  Emma Thompson both scripted and starred as the Mary Poppins-like Nanny McPhee in Kirk Jones’ enjoyable children’s fantasy set in Victorian times.

  Teen star Lindsay Lohan rescued the intelligent VW Beetle from a junkyard in Disney’s Herbie: Fully Loaded, which also featured Michael Keaton and Matt Dillon.

  Jon Favreau’s children’s SF adventure Zathura was a companion piece to Jumanji (1995), and both films were based on picture books by Chris Van Allsburg.

  Matt Damon and Heath Ledger played the storytelling siblings caught up in one of their own fantasies in Terry Gilliam’s long-delayed The Brothers Grimm.

  Dave McKean’s low-budget fairy tale MirrorMask was scripted by Neil Gaiman and featured fifteen-year-old circus juggler Helena (a sulky Stephanie Leonidas) waking up in a bizarre fantasy world where the balance between light and darkness had been broken. McKean’s unique computer backgrounds were nicely realised, and the film benefited from performances by the excellent Gina McKee and veteran Dora Bryan.

  Although under an hour long, Andrew Leman’s silent film version of The Call of Cthulhu, based on the H. P. Lovecraft story and filmed in “Mythoscope”, was an innovative piece of film-making that perfectly captured HLP’s nightmare visions.

  Produced using stop-motion animation, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride featured the voice of Johnny Depp as the shy Victor Van Dort, who found himself inadvertently married to the blue-skinned Corpse Bride, voiced by Helena Bonham Carter. The actress also contributed her vocal talents to the claymation horror spoof Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the first feature-length outing for the cheese-loving inventor (voiced by Peter Sallis) and his long-suffering canine companion. It opened at #1 is the US with a gross of $16 million.

  Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy was a steam-punk anime from the director of Akira (1988), featuring the voices of Anna Paquin, Patrick Stewart and Alfred Molina.

  Mark Dindal’s Chicken Little, Disney’s first fully computer-generated film since its split with Pixar Studios, took a healthy $40.1 million over its opening weekend. Featuring the voices of Zach Braff, Joan Cusack and Gary Marshall, it involved the titular character trying to convince his friends that the sky really was falling. The computer-animated SF comedy Robots featured the voices of Ewan McGregor, Robin Williams and Greg Kinnear.

  The 77th Academy Awards were presented in Los Angeles on February 27th. Amongst a lacklustre bunch, Spider-Man 2 won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, Finding Neverland won Best Music Score, Best Original Screenplay went to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Incredibles was voted Best Animated Feature Film.

  Meanwhile, Halle Berry turned up to personally collect her Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress for Catwoman. The film also won Worst Direction, Worst Screenplay and Flop of the Year at the Razzies’ silver anniversary presentation in LA the day before the Oscars.

  Probably the most eagerly awaited DVD boxed set of the year was Warner Bros’ The Val Lewton Horror Collection: 9 Tales of Terror from the Legendary Producer containing double-disc sets of Cat People/Curse of the Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie/The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead/Bedlam, The Leopard Man/The Ghost Ship and The Seventh Victim paired with the original documentary Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy, created especially for the DVD set. Commentaries were provided by Greg Mank, Simone Simon, Kim Newman and Stephen Jones, Steve Haberman, Robert Wise, Tom Weaver, and William Friedkin.

  The King Kong tin collector’s box not only included the original 1933 classic, but the sequel Son of Kong and the related Mighty Joe Young, along with reprints of the original Kong souvenir programme, ten poster postcards (fifteen if you bought from Best Buy) and hours of extras, trailers and documentaries. Although the legendary spider-pit sequence is still missing, in a fascinating but ultimately pointless documentary, Peter Jackson and his New Zealand crew attempted to recreate the footage using stop-motion techniques and original reference material.

  King Kong: Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries was a two-disc collector’s edition of behind-the-scenes video diaries from the 2005 version.

  Anchor Bay’s Box of the Banned, subtitled “The Ultimate Collection of Video Nasties” included such once-banned in the UK movies as Driller Killer, The Last House on the Left, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain and The Evil Dead, along with a documentary about the effect that the Obscene Publications Act had on horror films in the 1980s.

  Released directly to video the same weekend as Steven Spielberg’s multi-million dollar adaptation opened in cinemas, Asylum’s low budget War of the Worlds had C. Thomas Howell’s hero defeating the alien invaders with a rabies vaccine.

  Three teenage girls disappeared on their homecoming night in Urban Legends: Bloody Mary. This latest entry in the series was released directly to DVD in the UK, where all three films were also available in an “ultimate boxset”.

  The DVD reissue of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring remake included the short film Rings, directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Darkness Falls), that bridged the original film and its 2005 sequel, both starring Naomi Watts.

  Universal Studios Home Video released “The Bela Lugosi Collection” in September, containing Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat (1934), The Raven, The Invisible Ray and Black Friday. Bonus features were theatrical trailers for three out of the five films.

  The classic Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films Dressed to Kill (casually retitled Prelude to Murder) and Terror by Night were issued by Fox Home Entertainment on DVDs containing both the black white and colorised versions. They did the same for House on Haunted Hill as well.

  Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection contained the stop-motion wizard’s five puppet-animation short films (plus the recently completed The Tortoise & the Hare) along with such extras as early dinosaur test footage, conceptual drawings and effusive tributes from other film-makers.

  Perhaps the best known of Boris Karloff’s final quartet of Mexican films, Fear Chamber (1968) was released to DVD with a commentary track by co-director Jack Hill and a deleted nude scene.

  Paul Naschy’s 1982 film Panic Beats (he wrote, directed and starred) was released on the Mondo Macabro label with special features that included an exclusive interview with Naschy and a documentary on Spanish horror cinema. Bruno Gantillon’s 1971 French film Girl Slaves of Morgan Le Fay was presented on DVD in an uncut version from Mondo Macabro with deleted scenes, bonus short and an interview with the director.

  Seduction Cinema’s usual line-up of softcore erotica included such titles as G-String Vampire starring Barbie Leigh, The Witches of Breastwick (produced by Jim Wynorski) and Lust in Space (the fourth and final instalment in John Bacchus’ Erotic Witch Project series). Misty Mundae’s Euro-Vixen Collection contained European versions of Satan’s School for Lust, Vampire Vixens and Mummy Raider, along with numerous special features.

  On the companion Shock-O-Rama label, Prison-a-Go-Go costarred cult movie actress Mary Woronov, while The Devil’s Plaything was the R-rated version of Joseph Sarno’s 1974 erotic vampire film Veil of Blood. Other Shock-O-Rama releases included Richard Griffin’s zombie apocalypse Feeding the Masses, Gregory Lamberson’s 1989 grindhouse horror Slime City, and a double bill of Criminally Insane/Satan’s Black Wedding from sexploitation director “Nick Philips” (Nick Millard).

  Self-styled “Scream Queen” B
rinke Stevens scraped the bottom of the barrel with Greg Lewolt’s “erotic” Demon Sex on Alternative Cinema’s budget-priced Video Outlaw label. The DVD release also included Stevens and Johnny Legend in the short Demon Treasures. Massachusetts film-maker Brian Paulin’s mico-budgeted vampire film At Dawn They Sleep was also available from Video Outlaw with director’s commentary, out-takes and a behind-the-scenes documentary.

  All six seasons of the 1973–76 British TV series Thriller were released as a DVD boxed set. Created by Brian Clemens (The Avengers), the show comprised forty-three episodes starring such well-known faces as Jenny Agutter and Dennis Waterman.

  Star Wars: Clone Wars collected the short cartoons that aired on the Cartoon Network between 2003–04 and filled in the gaps between Episode II and Episode III.

  Although all thirteen episodes of executive producer Tim Minear’s wonderfully quirky Wonderfalls were screened on British television, American fans of the show finally caught up with the nine unaired episodes in that country with the DVD release of Wonderfalls: The Complete Viewer Collection. Caroline Dhavernas’ Niagara Falls gift shop slacker found she could communicate with inanimate animal figurines that invariably screwed up her already narcissistic life.

  In April, BBC4 broadcast a live on air recreation of Nigel Kneale’s 1953 drama The Quatermass Experiment. Jason Flemying was miscast as a young Professor Quatermass, but Andy Tiernan gave a fine performance as astronaut Victor Caroon, who returned from a space mission irrevocably changed. Future Doctor Who David Tennant was also in the cast.

  Scripted by David Pirie for BBC Scotland, The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle blurred the lines between fact and fiction as the troubled author (the excellent Douglas Henshall) was visited by the mysterious “Mr Selden” (a creepy Tim McInnery), who was not the biographer he claimed to be.

  In the Sci Fi Channel’s original movie Path of Destruction, Danica McKellar’s investigative journalist was framed by David Keith’s evil industrialist, whose lethal scientific experiment was heading towards Seattle. Meanwhile, Keith and a bunch of zombies also celebrated Day of the Dead in All Souls Day.

  Dominic Zamprogna and Joe Lando fought futuristic vampires in Bloodsuckers, which featured a cameo by Michael Ironside.

  Sean Astin invented a ten-minute time machine in Slipstream, archaeologist Casper Van Dien uncovered an unholy plot in The Fallen Ones, and Man-Thing was a cheap adaptation of Marvel Comics’ Swamp Thing knock-off.

  Brad Johnson and Carl Weathers set out to prevent diseased aliens from taking human blood in the Sci Fi Channel’s Alien Siege, and Gulf War veteran Lou Diamond Phillips had to stop the double-threat of lizard-like aliens and a suicide bomber on a hijacked train in Alien Express.

  A group of American soldiers (including Robert Beltran and Heather Donahue) battled a revived half-lion, half-dragon Manticore in the Iraq desert, while Dan Cortese led a team attempting to prevent Locusts: The 8th Plague. Corin Nemec’s clichéd cop tried to stop a mutated Mansquito making out with his scientist girlfriend (Musetta Vander), and Greg Evigan’s terrorist unleashed the three-headed guardian of Hades in Cerberus.

  Jeffrey Combs’ mad scientist turned his dying son into a shark-human hybrid in the ludicrously inept Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy, and director Mark L. Lester’s career hit rock bottom with Pterodactyl, in which a covert US army special forces unit (led by 1990s rapper Coolio) saved a group of students from a nest of flying dinosaurs that had recently hatched in a volcano.

  Sam Neill’s wealthy shipping magnate sent a team of experts (Eric Stoltz, Catherine Bell, Michael Rodgers and a twitchy Bruce Davison) to investigate disappearances in the Bermuda waters and ended up opening a rift in space and time in the entertaining The Triangle, executive produced by Bryan Singer and Dean Devlin. Shown over three nights, it was the Sci Fi Channel’s highest-rated miniseries since Steven Spielberg’s Taken in 2002.

  Proving that they could make low-budget B-movies just as well as the Sci Fi Channel, the CBS-TV movie Locusts (“If you can hear the buzz, it’s already too late”) starred Lucy Lawless as a college professor battling against a swarm of bio-engineered insects. The actress returned as the same character saving her campus from mutated bloodsuckers in the Halloween sequel, Vampire Bats.

  Incredibly, CBS also came up with an even worse sequel to the previous year’s risible Category 6: Day of Destruction. The two-part Category 7: The End of the World upped the disaster quota as Randy Quaid, Shannen Doherty, Gina Gershon, James Brolin, Swoosie Kurtz, Robert Wagner and Tom Skerritt battled mega-storms over Washington DC.

  Robert Kubilos’ dull supernatural drama The Scorned was the result of the E! Entertainment documentary series Kill Reality, in which a group of minor reality show losers shared a house. When a group of friends hired a beach house for the summer, a woman in a coma reached out to destroy those cheating on their partners. Forrest J Ackerman appeared in an uncredited cameo.

  Patrick Stewart turned up on the Hallmark Channel as an irascible Captain Nemo in an uninspired adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, complete with CGI monsters, and astrophysicists Peter Fonda and Luke Perry tried to prevent the Earth burning up in the risible Supernova. Meanwhile, Anton Rodgers and Diane Venora costarred in Hallmark’s biography, C.S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia.

  From producer Robert Halmi, Sr., NBC-TV’s Hercules starred British actor Paul Telfer battling monsters with the help of Leelee Sobieski, Sean Astin and Timothy Dalton.

  Kim Raver starred as identical twins haunted by a dead boy in the Lifetime Halloween movie Haunting Sara, and Chasing Christmas from ABC Family was yet another reworking of the Charles Dickens classic, with Tom Arnold as a modern-day Scrooge plagued by narcissistic ghosts.

  Kermit the Frog, Gonzo and Fozzie Bear helped Ashanti’s aspiring singer Dorothy follow the Yellow Brick Road in ABC-TV’s “Wonderful World of Disney” movie The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz, which also featured Jeffrey Tambor as the Wizard, Queen Latifah as Aunt Em, and Quentin Tarantino as himself.

  The cowardly canine and pals teamed up with ’N Sync’s JC Chasez to investigate couples disappearing from Lovers’ Lane in The WB’s cartoon special A Scooby-Doo Valentine, and those meddling kids were back solving an Egyptian mystery in Scooby-Doo in Where’s My Mummy? and trying to stop a marauding snowman in A Scooby-Doo Christmas.

  ABC-TV’s network premier of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in May was hosted by teenage stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint and included never-before-seen footage along with an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

  Showtime Network’s unrelentingly grim series Masters of Horror lured directors such as Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Larry Cohen, Don Coscarelli, John McNaughton, William Malone and Lucky McKee to the small screen, adapting stories by Richard Matheson, Clive Barker, Joe R. Lansdale, David J. Schow and others. The standout episodes included Stuart Gordon’s updating of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House”, John Landis’ “Deer Woman”, John Carpenter’s “Cigarette Burns” and Joe Dante’s provocative “Homecoming” (based on a story by Dale Bailey), while series creator Mick Garris scripted and directed a version of one of his own stories. Takashi Miike’s episode was apparently considered too strong for even cable television in the US, and was held back for the DVD release.

  BBC Three’s anthology series Twisted Tales featured fourteen contemporary urban horror stories with a comic twist. Homicidal technology, bizarre witchcraft, fake haunted houses, demonic movies, Women’s Institute zombies and gay ghosts were all featured, while guest stars included Mary Tamm, Paul Darrow, Adrian Edmondson, Alison Steadman and Jan Francis.

  The seventh season of The WB’s Charmed featured guest stars John De Lancie and Billy Zane, while Julian McMahon returned as the ghost of the evil Cole for the show’s 150th episode, which aired in April. In the season finale, the demon Zankou stole the powers of the Charmed Ones so that he could control the mysterious “Nexus”. Kaley Cuoco joined th
e show for its eighth and final season as young witch Billie, who was not averse to using her powers in public while the three Halliwell sisters hid behind their new identities.

  A surprise mid-season hit for NBC-TV, Medium starred a dour Patricia Arquette as real-life psychic Allison DuBois (the show’s consultant) who helped the Phoenix district attorney (the always-excellent Miguel Sandoval) catch killers with the help of dead people. Although the series often appeared more interested in Allison’s chaotic family life, it was a hit with American female viewers, who made up more than 60 per cent of the audience. The second season opener picked up the serial killer cliff-hanger, and a special 3-D episode in November cleverly spoofed The Twilight Zone, although the 3-D effects were ultimately disappointing. Kelsey Grammer was one of the show’s executive producers.

  CBS-TV’s Ghost Whisperer starred the likeable Jennifer Love Hewitt as newlywed Melinda Gordon, who was able to help the spirits of the dead close unresolved issues and cross over. The excellent Lesley Sharp played reluctant clairvoyant Alison Mundy, having a miserable time coming to terms with her powers in the six-part British series Afterlife, created by Stephen Volk.

  Starring Anthony Michael Hall as psychic Johnny Smith, the apocalyptic fourth season of The Dead Zone opened on USA Networks with the conclusion to the previous year’s cliff-hanger, and ended with Johnny teaming up with his arch-enemy, scheming senator Greg Stillson (Sean Patrick Flanery), to find a missing woman. A one-off Christmas special reunited Johnny with mischievous psychic Alex Sinclair (Jennifer Finnigan), as they helped a disturbed Santa Claus and a trio of street urchins.

  Despite a guest appearance by Hilary Duff and the addition of her older sister Haylie in a recurring role, even God could not save Joan of Arcadia from being cancelled by CBS after its second series when viewing figures dropped from an average of ten million to around eight million.

  Although Jason Priestley returned as Jack, the antithesis of Eliza Dushku’s helping-the-dead morgue attendant, the second season of Tru Calling limped through just five episodes before it was abruptly cancelled by Fox. In the UK, the new episodes made their debut on DVD along with a sixth, previously unaired episode.