The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  A serial-killer mother (Shabana Azmi) was followed around by her ghostly victims in Gurinder Chadha’s British comedy It’s a Wonderful Afterlife.

  William Shakespeare’s sorcerer Prospero was changed to a sorceress, “Prospera” (Helen Mirren), in Julie Taymor’s re-imagined version of The Tempest, which also featured Russell Brand, Tom Conti, Alan Cumming, Alfred Molina and Djimon Hounsou as Caliban.

  As usual, a number of micro-budget British horror films were barely released theatrically before quickly turning up on DVD.

  A group of British computer hackers released more than they bargained for when they attempted to unlock the Vatican’s “Bible Code” in The 7th Dimension, and eight would-be executives had eighty minutes to answer a question and win a job with a mysterious corporation in the British-made Exam.

  A container washed up near a village in northern England on Christmas Eve caused madness and murder in the surprisingly short Salvage, something was killing livestock in rural Wales in Splintered, and a trio of cursed female witches preyed on four businessmen on a team-building exercise in the low-budget British film The Scar Crow.

  Two lonely British exorcists (Ed Gaughan and Andrew Buckley) removed the proverbial skeletons from people’s homes in Nick Whitfield’s acclaimed low-budget feature debut Skeletons.

  An upwardly mobile professional (Josie Ho) was prepared to kill to get her Dream Home in the Hong Kong slasher, and Elana Anaya’s distraught mother returned to the remote island where her five-year-old son disappeared in the Spanish-made Hierro.

  In Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, an evil Santa Claus was unwittingly released by a team of archaeologists from his Finnish ice prison, while crooked cops and Gallic gangsters teamed up to battle zombie hordes in a deserted tower block in the French-made The Horde.

  Dieter Laser’s mad German scientist stitched his three victims together end-to-end to create The Human Centipede (First Sequence) from Dutch writer/director Tom Six.

  Ciarán Hinds played a windowed father who found himself involved in a literary love triangle in the low-key ghost story The Eclipse, shot in Ireland.

  Also filmed in Ireland, Spiderhole was about four young art students who squatted in a spider-infested house in London that was already inhabited by a mad surgeon.

  Shot on a shoestring by British director Gareth Edwards, Monsters featured a photojournalist (Scoot McNairy) accompanying his boss’ spoiled daughter (Whitney Able) through a Mexico “infected” with giant Lovecraftian alien creatures.

  Also made for peanuts (well, $10 million), Colin and Greg Strause’s Skyline starred Eric Balfour in another alien-invasion plot.

  A renegade angel (Paul Bettany) and a group of strangers trapped inside a diner owned by Dennis Quaid took a stand against God’s Apocalypse in Legion, while the apocalypse had already occurred in the Hughes Bothers’ The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington as an enigmatic wanderer protecting a Bible from Gary Oldman’s crazy town leader.

  Viggo Mortensen starred as a father leading his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) through a post-apocalyptic wilderness in John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed 2006 novel The Road.

  When near-future organ collector Jude Law couldn’t keep up the payments on his artificial heart, his partner (Forrest Whitaker) was sent to recover it in Repo Men.

  In Mr Nobody, the world’s last dying man (Jared Leto) looked back on three stages of his life from the year 2092.

  Hot Tub Time Machine was a lot more fun than it had any right to be as John Cusack and his three friends took a trip back to 1986. Chevy Chase turned up as the mysterious “Repairman”.

  Based on the video game, Disney’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time from director Mike Newell was a Thief of Bagdad for the 21st century as a bickering Prince (a pumped-up Jake Gyllenhaal) and Princess (Gemma Arterton, straight from the Clash of the Titans remake) attempted to stop Ben Kingsley’s scheming pretender to the throne from going back in time and changing the past. Alfred Molina stole every scene he was in as a comedy bandit chief.

  A teen (Logan Lerman) discovered he was a powerful Olympian demi-god who had been framed for stealing Zeus’ lightning bolt in Chris Columbus’ Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (aka Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief), based on the YA books by Rick Riorden. The supporting cast included the busy Sean Bean as Zeus, Pierce Brosnan, Steve Coogan (as Hades), Rosario Dawson, Joe Pantoliano and Uma Thurman as a sexy Medusa.

  Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a live-action fantasy starring Nicholas Cage and inspired by the animated Mickey Mouse segment in Fantasia, opened to a dismal $17.6 million, despite costing an estimated $150 million to make.

  Cage was also in Matthew Vaughn’s ultra-violent but hugely enjoyable superhero fantasy Kick-Ass, based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John S. Romita, Jr, which topped the US charts with an opening gross of $19.8 million. Aaron Johnson was the teen geek who dressed up as a masked hero only to discover that the marvellous Chloë Grace Moretz’s pint-sized avenger was much deadlier than he could ever imagine being.

  Based on a Canadian comic book series, Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was set inside the video-game-saturated minds of three geeky friends.

  After the failure of 2009’s Jennifer’s Body, it seemed that actress Megan Fox’s name was once again not enough to open a movie when Jimmy Hayward’s barely feature-length supernatural Western Jonah Hex, based on the DC Comics character (played by Josh Brolin), debuted at #7 in June with just $5.4 million in takings before dropping nearly 70 per cent in its second week.

  Based on the best-selling YA book by Alice Sebold, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones starred Saoirse Ronan as a missing fourteen-year-old girl trying to contact her parents (Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg) from a Technicolor afterlife after being raped and murdered by her creepy neighbour (Stanley Tucci).

  Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson starred as a minor-league hockey player sentenced to become the titular Tooth Fairy as a punishment for crushing a child’s hopes. The impressive supporting cast included Ashley Judd, Stephen Merchant, Seth MacFarlane, Julie Andrews and an uncredited Billy Crystal.

  Freddie Highmore’s Arthur returned to the cartoon kingdom at the bottom of his Granny’s garden in Luc Besson’s sequel Arthur and the Great Adventure, featuring the voice talents of musicians Will i Am, Snoop Dogg and Lou Reed.

  Although Disney’s hand-drawn re-imagining of The Princess and the Frog flopped earlier in the year, Tangled, the studio’s revisionist version of the “Rapunzel” fairy tale, finally knocked the latest Harry Potter off the top of the US box office in early December.

  Benefiting from strong word-of-mouth, DreamWorks Animation’s 3-D animated How to Train Your Dragon returned to the top of the US charts five weeks after it opened.

  Tales from Earthsea was an anime version of the books by Ursula K. Le Guin, directed by Hayao Miyazaki’s son, Goro, and featuring the voice talents of Timothy Dalton and Willem Dafoe.

  Dan Aykroyd and singer Justin Timberlake voiced Yogi Bear and his friend Boo Boo, respectively, in the animated 3-D comedy Yogi Bear, based on the 1960s Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon series.

  A sequel to the 2007 film, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel depressingly took more than $200 million at the US box office and over £20 million in Britain, with the soundtrack even reaching #6 in the UK album charts!

  There were more animated funny animals in Alpha and Omega, Animals Unlimited, Marmaduke, Space Chimps 2 and the 3-D Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.

  In America, Toy Story 3 was the top-grossing film of 2010, with a take of $415 million, followed at some distance by Alice in Wonderland (#2), Iron Man 2 (#3), The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (#4) and Inception (#5). The remainder of the Top 10 included the children’s films Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (#6), Despicable Me (#7), Shrek Forever After (#8) and How to Train Your Dragon (#9).

  Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future was re-released theatrically
in a new digital version to celebrate the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary, and a restored version of Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis (1927) was reissued in cinemas with an extra twenty-five minutes of found footage. When the movie was shown on TCM, it was followed by an hour-long Argentina programme about how the missing material was discovered in Buenos Aires.

  In October, an overexcited local newspaper claimed that workmen refurbishing a Glasgow cinema had discovered a “lost” reel from King Kong (1933) hidden behind a partition wall in a projection booth. Sadly, it turned out not to be the missing “Spider Pit” sequence.

  In September, the American operation of video-and-games rental store chain Blockbuster filed for Chapter-11 bankruptcy protection with debts of $1.46 billion (£932 million).

  James Cameron’s overrated Avatar, which became the biggest-grossing film of all time in January (beating the same director’s Titanic), was released in April on Blu-ray in an attempt to boost sales of the struggling high-definition format. A record 1.5 million copies were sold on the first day, although the 3-D film was only initially released in a “flat” version and there were problems playing it on some machines because of the disc’s updated security software. A three-disc boxed set “Collector’s Edition” of the film released later in the year included a three-hour extended cut of Avatar, plus more than forty-five minutes of deleted footage and a making-of documentary.

  A group of soldiers battled zombies on a remote island in Survival of the Dead, the sixth in George A. Romero’s series about the walking dead.

  Writer and director Ti West tried unsuccessfully to have his name removed from Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever after it was re-shot and edited by the producers.

  David DeCoteau directed Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, the tenth entry in the series started by producer Charles Band in 1989. This time the action was set during World War II.

  In After.Life, Christina Ricci awakened after a car accident to discover that she was a prisoner of Liam Neeson’s creepy funeral director, who insisted that she was actually dead.

  Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman) teamed up with a best-selling author (Tanit Phoenix) to hunt down a powerful vampire in Lost Boys: The Thirst, which was filmed in South Africa and included clips featuring the late Corey Haim. 30 Days of Night: Dark Days was another direct-to-DVD vampire sequel.

  A struggling rock band became involved with vampires in the Canadian comedy Suck, featuring appearances by Alice Cooper, Moby, Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop and Malcolm McDowell as “Eddie Van Helsing”.

  When terrorists threatened to detonate a nuclear weapon in Universal Soldier: Regeneration, decommissioned cyborg Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) was reactivated and pitted against an old adversary (Dolph Lundgren, returning from the first film).

  Isabella Calthorpe was among those trapped by a werewolf in an isolated old dark house in the British-made 13hrs.

  In Carlos Brook’s contrived horror thriller Burning Bright, a teenage girl (Briana Evigan) and her autistic younger brother found themselves trapped in a hurricane-ravaged house with a hungry Bengal tiger.

  A remake of the 1970 British psychological thriller scripted by Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, And Soon the Darkness moved the original’s location from France to Argentina (where it was filmed).

  The Australian-made The Loved Ones was about a high-school senior who was kidnapped and tortured by the girl he didn’t invite to the prom, while a teenager searched for his missing brother amongst the undead in the South Korean/Japanese production Higanjima: Escape from Vampire Island.

  When Dario Argento’s serial-killer thriller Giallo was released directly to DVD in the US in October, star Adrien Brody sued the film-makers, claiming that he had not been fully paid and that, contractually, the 2009 movie could not be released without his permission. The lawsuit blocking the movie’s release was quickly settled.

  Thriller: The Complete Series from Image Entertainment finally collected all sixty-seven episodes of the superior 1960s Boris Karloff-hosted TV series on a fourteen-disc box set that included audio commentaries from cast and crew, rare episode previews and extensive stills galleries.

  Mark Harmon voiced Superman in the direct-to-DVD animated movie Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths.

  Family Guy Presents It’s a Trap! was the disappointing third instalment in the animated Star Wars-inspired trilogy. Carrie Fisher was one of the guest voices, along with Patrick Stewart and Michael Dorn from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

  Richard Donner’s The Goonies celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with new DVD and Blu-ray transfers, packed with such extras as deleted scenes, storyboards and a commentary track featuring the director and his now grown-up stars. The Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy boxed set also included plenty of bonus material, including long-lost clips of Eric Stoltz as the original Marty McFly.

  True: A XXX Parody was a hardcore spoof of the vampire show True Blood from New Sensations starring Ashlynn Brooke and Misty Stone. Actress Anna Paquin admitted on an American late-night talk show that she bought copies of the porno DVD as a wrap gift for cast and crew on the HBO TV series.

  In September, The Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) banned the DVD release of Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) for “depicting acts of gross violence and cruelty towards humans”. The film was still issued in an “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” in the UK.

  The Syfy channel continued to churn out low-budget monster movies, horror films, science fiction adventures and natural disasters at an alarming rate.

  In one of his last roles, David Carradine played an evil industrialist in Syfy’s terrible Dinocroc vs. Supergator. Directed by Jim Wynorski under a pseudonym, Roger Corman was executive producer.

  Corman not only produced Dinoshark starring Eric Balfour, but also gave himself a supporting role, and he also turned up in an uncredited cameo in his Sharktopus starring Eric Roberts.

  Former 1980s pop singer Tiffany was amongst those trying to prevent a mutant strain of giant fish from eating their way to Florida in Mega Piranha, and Colin Ferguson’s game warden learned that his young son should not feed the crocodiles in Lake Placid 3, which also featured Yancy Butler and Michael Ironside.

  Sean Patrick Flanery’s treasure hunter discovered that experimental oil drilling had awakened the legendary Mongolian Death Worm, while the desecration of a mystical Indian burial ground by Robert Picardo’s evil industrialist led to the release of a mythical monster in the entertaining Monsterwolf.

  In Red: Werewolf Hunter, also from Syfy, Kavan Smith discovered that his fiancée (Felicia Day) was a modern-day descendant of Little Red Riding Hood who tracked down lycanthropes.

  A rural hamlet was visited every Halloween by a child-stealing creature in Goblin starring Gil Bellows, and TV ghost hunters Charisma Carpenter and Corin Nemec investigated a haunted House of Bones.

  An archaeological team awakened a bloodthirsty half-plant half-animal creature in Mandrake, while a West Virginian urban legend took revenge on five childhood friends who covered up an accidental murder in Mothman.

  Luke Goss was the new king trying to save his kingdom from evil witch-queen Sarah Douglas and her army of sorceresses in Witchville, which was filmed in China.

  Sean Bean was among the survivors of a post-apocalyptic world battling mutated zombies in the South African-filmed The Lost Future, and yet another bunch of TV genre actors attempted to prevent ancient technology from destroying the Earth in the fun Stonehenge Apocalypse.

  A group of scientists tried to stop the Earth being destroyed by a rogue comet in Quantum Apocalypse, and Michael Trucco and Kari Matchett attempted to prevent San Francisco being obliterated by rogue meteorites in Meteor Storm.

  Michael Shanks was amongst those caught in a super-chilled Arctic Blast, and Brendan Fehr and Victor Garber attempted to survive a deadly Ice Quake.

  Kevin Sorbo played a homicide detective on a parallel Earth investigating a series of magical murders in the enjoyable pilot Paradox, b
ased on a comic book by Christos N. Gage.

  Having previously attempted to bring Philip Jose Farmer’s novels to TV in 2003, Syfy took another shot at adapting Riverworld as a two-part mini-series, this time featuring Tahmoh Penikett and Alan Cumming.

  Based on the masked comic character created by Lee Falk, the Syfy mini-series The Phantom starred Ryan Carnes as “The Ghost That Walks” battling Isabella Rossellini’s mind-controlling villain.

  The unfortunately titled Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal was Sky’s third TV film based on the author’s popular “Discworld” series of novels. A likeable Richard Coyle starred as conman Moist von Lipwig, who was forced to reopen Ankh-Morpork’s moribund mail system aided by an army of Golems and the grumpy Adora Belle Dearheart (the wonderful Claire Foy).

  Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat co-created (with Mark Gatiss) Sherlock, three TV movies for the BBC that re-imagined Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective in contemporary London. Benedict Cumberbatch played the charismatic Holmes, who teamed up with former soldier Dr John Watson (Martin Freeman, supplying the series’ heart and soul) to solve a trio of baffling mysteries. The first and third episodes worked best, with Una Stubbs as an eccentric Mrs Hudson, Gatiss himself as a sinister Mycroft and Andrew Scott as a very modern Moriarty.

  The ever-busy Mark Gatiss also scripted and starred as a fussy Professor Cavor, the eccentric inventor of the anti-gravity substance “cavorite”, in the BBC’s feature-length adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon. Unfortunately, an illogical 1969 framing story and some unconvincing CGI effects meant that it wasn’t nearly as good as the 1964 Ray Harryhausen movie.

  MTV’s My Super Psycho Sweet 16 Part 2 was a disappointing sequel to the previous year’s Halloween reality slasher.

  Catherine Bell returned for the third time as Cassandra “Cassie” Nightingale, who was preparing to get married at Christmas in Hallmark’s The Good Witch’s Gift. In the same network’s The Santa Incident, Ione Skye helped Santa (James Cosmo) after he was shot out of the sky by a Homeland Security agent’s heat-seeking missile, and R.D. Reid’s Santa was accidentally sent out a day early and ended up with amnesia in The Night Before the Night Before Christmas.