The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Another sequel, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, had one of the biggest openings in 2009, doubling the gross of the first film. It broke opening day records with a $72.7 million take, and went on to earn $140.7 million over its first weekend.

  Unfortunately, admissions collapsed by the second weekend, plunging a massive 70 per cent. However, New Moon became the most successful vampire film on record as, spurred on by its opening numbers, the film passed the $200 million mark in just eight days.

  In November, a spokesman for the Vatican condemned the film as “nothing more than a moral vacuum with a deviant message”. This came three weeks after the Catholic Church condemned Halloween as “anti-Christian and dangerous”, urging parents not to allow their children to dress up for the festivities.

  Meanwhile visiting “Twi-hards” – fans of the book and movie series – resulted in a 600 per cent increase in tourism to the Pacific Northwest town of Tiny Forks, Washington State, where much of the first two movies were filmed. Even the small Tuscan city of Volterra, Italy, became a cult destination after it was featured as the backdrop to scenes in New Moon.

  If nothing else, 2009 will be remembered as another year of sequels and remakes. Despite Hugh Jackman recreating his role as the clawed Logan for the prequel, Gavin Hood’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine was perhaps one spin-off too far, as the $150 million film dropped a massive 69 per cent in its second week in the US. However, the movie did much better worldwide. It probably didn’t help that an unfinished version of the film was leaked on to the Internet a month before it opened.

  Having just failed to beat the opening numbers for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), the fourth entry in the series, Terminator: Salvation, was most memorable for star Christian Bale’s much-publicized on-set rant at the director of photography. Directed by McG, the film barely managed to cover its $200 million budget at the US box-office.

  Once again starring Malcolm McDowell as Dr Loomis, Rob Zombie’s disappointing sequel Halloween II opened at #3 at the end of August.

  Given how over-hyped the original was, Jon Harris’ The Descent Part 2 was another sequel we didn’t need.

  Scripted by Luc Besson, the French-made District 13: Ultimatum was set in a near-future Paris and was a sequel to the original 2004 film.

  With a new lead (Rhona Mitra) and a new director (Patrick Tatopoulos), the prequel Underworld: Rise of the Lycans was the third film in the diminishing vampires vs. werewolves series.

  Ray Stevenson took over the eponymous role in The Punisher: War Zone, the third film based on the Marvel Comics character.

  Following a speedway accident, a group of bland teens met their gory fates in digital 3-D in The Final Destination, the fourth instalment in the series. It opened at #1 at the US box-office, taking $27.4 million in its first weekend. The film also topped the UK box-office, grossing more than £3.6 million.

  Although his character was killed off in an earlier entry, Tobin Bell was back for the inevitable Saw VI, which had the lowest opening weekend gross ($14.1 million) for any film in the series to date.

  After playing the Winchester brothers on TV’s Supernatural, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles both turned up in horror remakes. Based on the 1981 superior slasher film, My Bloody Valentine 3-D starred Ackles and was about a serial killer dressed as a miner.

  Produced by Michael Bay, Marcus Nispel’s Friday the 13th starred Padalecki and opened at the top of the American box-office with a record-breaking $43.6 million for a horror film before dropping 82 per cent the following week. The 1980 original was also released on video in an uncut version that reinstated around ten seconds of extra gore initially cut to earn an “R” rating.

  Dennis Iliadis’ The Last House on the Left was a remake of Wes Craven’s equally unpleasant 1972 debut, while Dylan Walsh took over the role of the psychotic patriarch looking for his “perfect” family in an unnecessary remake of the 1987 chiller The Stepfather.

  Sorority Row was another slasher remake, based on the 1983 movie The House on Sorority Row, and starred Rumer Willis (the daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore) and a bunch of screaming girls in lingerie.

  A teenager suspected that her father’s new fiancée (Elizabeth Banks) was more than she seemed in the supernatural thriller The Uninvited, which was a remake of the superior Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters.

  It is doubtful that we needed yet another version of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Ben Barnes was the handsome Victorian rake who remained forever young as his portrait aged, while Colin Firth turned up as Lord Henry Wotton, who instructed his young protégé in debauchery.

  J.J. Abrams’ entertaining reboot of the Star Trek franchise opened at #1 in the US with a $79.2 million gross in May and four weeks later became the first film of 2009 to break the $200 million barrier.

  Costing $100 million, with a hefty advertising budget and Will Ferrell as its star, Land of the Lost was a comedy reworking of the 1960s TV series that still failed at the box-office. An appearance by original child stars Kathy Coleman and Wesley Eure never made it into the final cut.

  The Disney SF adventure Race to Witch Mountain, based on the two 1970s films, did feature original stars Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann in cameos, as Dwayne Johnson’s Las Vegas cab driver befriended two stranded teen aliens.

  Suburban dad Matthew Perry magically transformed into Zac Efron in the teen comedy remake 17 Again.

  Starring Woody Harrelson as a redneck zombie hunter, Ruben Fleischer’s horror-comedy Zombieland was set in a post-apocalyptic future overrun by cannibal corpses. Bill Murray had an amusing cameo as himself. The film opened as the #1 film in the US with a strong $24.7 million gross.

  Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid discovered that their interstellar spaceship had been overrun by mutant zombies in the German-made Pandorum, co-produced by Paul W.S. Anderson.

  A Canadian radio shock jock (Stephen McHattie) was at the centre of a zombie virus spread by language in Bruce McDonald’s low-budget Pontypool, adapted by Tony Burgess from his own novel.

  Reportedly made for £45 (mostly spent on tea and biscuits) after first-time British director Marc Price called in favours from anybody he could find, Colin was a zom-com about the eponymous hero (Alastair Kirton), who returned to only a slightly altered existence after being bitten by the walking dead. Shot on a camcorder in Wales and London, the film was well received at the Cannes Film Festival and even received a brief theatrical release in the UK.

  Set in a village filled with female cannibal zombies, Doghouse was another cheap horror-comedy from British director Jake West.

  Only slightly better was Lesbian Vampire Killers, a one-joke homage to Hammer Films starring unfunny TV comedians James Corden and Matthew Horne.

  Based on the popular series of YA books by Darren Shan, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant was a dull entry in the teen vampire stakes despite support from John C. Reilly, Willem Dafoe and Salma Hayek (as a bearded lady).

  A Korean priest was turned into a vampire in Park Chan-wook’s stylish Thirst, apparently inspired by Émile Zola’s nineteenth-century novel Thérèse Raquin, while Blood: The Last Vampire was a live-action version of the popular manga/anime series about a half-vampire female samurai (Gianna Jun).

  Made for just $11,000 in seven days, Oren Peli’s disturbing haunted house movie Paranormal Activity grossed $7.9 million during its initial limited release in 160 US cinemas, averaging a remarkable $49,379 per screen (the highest all-time gross for a movie playing in less than 200 theatres). DreamWorks originally bought the film in 2008 for remake rights, but eventually decided to distribute it theatrically over Halloween. As a result, it grossed more than $100 million.

  Co-scripted by Adam Simon and supposedly “based on true events”, The Haunting in Connecticut involved Virginia Madsen and her family moving into a haunted home that turned out to be a former mortuary.

  Also supposedly based on true stories were The Spell, a micro-budget UK horror film about witchcraft shot in Leeds, and Summer Sca
rs, in which a deranged drifter tortured a group of teenage truants.

  Tormented was another low-budget British horror film given a theatrical release in 2009. It involved a group of selfish schoolfriends getting their come-uppance from the classmate they bullied to death.

  A couple found themselves locked in a recording studio haunted by a dead 1970s rock star in Reverb, and a cocktail of drugs turned a coma patient into a body-hopping psycho in Paddy Breathnach’s derivitive Red Mist (aka Freakdog). Mark Tonderai’s low-budget feature debut Hush was no British Duel.

  A group of friends out sailing found themselves trapped in a time loop in Christopher Smith’s UK/Australian co-production Triangle, and a voyeur (Karra Elejaide) found himself trapped in a time loop in the Spanish-made Timecrimes (Los cronocrímenes).

  Based on the best-seller by Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife starred Eric Bana as the husband who moved backwards and forwards in time. Unfortunately, the film version failed to match the huge success of its source novel.

  Brad Pitt aged backwards in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, loosely based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Spider-Man director Sam Raimi returned to his low-budget horror roots with the inventive Drag Me to Hell, in which a bank clerk (Alison Lohman) was cursed by an old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver) whose mortgage extension she had turned down.

  Ti West’s The House of the Devil was the twenty-nine-year-old editor/writer/director’s low-budget tribute to the horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s as college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) found herself babysitting in a spooky house of horrors. Genre veterans Mary Woronov, Tom Noonan and Dee Wallace all had supporting roles.

  Newlywed couples were being stalked and killed in a tropical paradise in David Twohy’s accomplished slasher film A Perfect Getaway, featuring Steve Zahn, Milla Jovovich and Timothy Olyphant. Jovovich also starred in The Fourth Kind, an alien-abduction thriller that told its story by juxtaposing the “movie” version with “actual” events.

  Based on a story by Richard Matheson, Richard Kelly’s The Box featured Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a couple given an impossible choice by a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella).

  Despite being scripted by Oscar-winner Diablo Cody (Juno) and starring Megan Fox as a man-eating cheerleader, Jennifer’s Body took a pathetic $6.8 million on its opening weekend.

  Gary Oldman was obviously slumming as a rabbi exorcist in David S. Goyer’s The Unborn, in which a teenage babysitter (Odette Justman) was possessed by the lost soul of a “dybbuk”. James Remar, Carla Gugino and Jane Alexander must also have wondered where their careers were heading as well.

  An adopted nine-year-old (Isabelle Fuhrman) was hiding a dark secret in Spanish director Jaume Collet-Sarra’s Orphan.

  Executive produced by her father, David, Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance involved FBI agents Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman investigating a series of gruesome murders in a small town.

  After Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. reached a resolution in their copyright infringement dispute in early January, Zack Snyder’s impressive Watchmen opened in March at the top of both the US and UK box-office charts. Based on Alan Moore’s “unfilmable” 1986 graphic novel, it revolved around a series of murders amongst a group of retired superheroes.

  Based on the Hasbro toy line, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was made by the same people behind the Transformers franchise and sported numerous scenes of equally mindless violence.

  James Wong’s hyperactive Dragonball Evolution was based on the cult manga series and involved a quest to find seven Dragon Balls to save the world. Chow Yun-Fat, Emmy Rossum and James Marsters were all somehow involved.

  Ignoring the 1994 film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li featured Kristin Kreuk and Michael Clarke Duncan and was also based on the popular video game.

  Robert Downey Jr’s dynamic detective and Jude Law’s dapper Dr Watson pitted their wits against Mark Strong’s Victorian Satanist, Lord Blackwood, in Guy Ritchie’s troubled but surprisingly entertaining re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes.

  German director Roland Emmerich once again destroyed the world spectacularly in 2012, when an ancient Mayan prophecy came true as the Earth’s crust exploded and John Cusack’s science fiction writer tried to save his family. It opened with a $65 million box-office in the US and had the fifth-biggest international opening ever.

  Meanwhile, MIT astrophysics professor Nicolas Cage investigated a series of fifty-year-old numbers that appeared to predict past and future disasters, including the end of the world, in Alex Proyas’ apocalyptic Knowing.

  When Heath Ledger died while filming Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp and Jude Law stepped in to play the same character in various fantasy incarnations, while Christopher Plummer’s titular carnival owner pitted his wits against the Devil (Tom Waits).

  Four strangers co-existed between two parallel cities in Gerald McMorrow’s ambitious, if incomprehensible, debut Franklyn, and Paul Giamatti’s actor found a place to store his soul in Sophie Barthes’ equally oddball Cold Souls.

  Based on his own Oscar-nominated short film, Shane Acker’s computer-generated SF tale 9 was co-produced by Tim Burton and featured the voices of Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau.

  Set in an alien shanty town outside Johannesburg (does nobody remember Alien Nation?), Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 topped the US box-office charts in early August and went on to take more than $100 million. Made for just over $30 million, it was produced by Peter Jackson and also based on a short film.

  Crashed alien Jim Caviezel teamed up with John Hurt’s tribe of Vikings to battle a fire-breathing monster in Outlander, while Gerard Butler played an Iraq special ops veteran in a near-future prison forced to participate in violent scenarios in Gamer.

  Based on a graphic novel, Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates starred Bruce Willis as a futuristic detective investigating the killings of synthetic avatars and their operators.

  Following a car accident, Lena Headey’s radiologist believed that everyone around her had been replaced by deadly doppelgängers in Sean Ellis’ The Brøken, and Lunar miner Sam Rockwell apparently encountered his own doppelgänger in Moon, written and directed by David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones (aka Zowie Bowie).

  Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was a chick flick re-imagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol starring an unsympathetic Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and Michael Douglas.

  Meanwhile, Jim Carrey voiced Ebenezer Scrooge and all three ghosts in Robert Zemeckis’ more traditional adaptation of A Christmas Carol, filmed in his 3-D performance-capture technique.

  Jennifer Garner also featured in The Invention of Lying, co-directed, co-written and co-produced by Ricky Gervais, who starred as a screenwriter in an alternate world who discovered that he was the only person who could lie.

  A neglectful father (Eddie Murphy, back on a downward career path) started getting financial advice from his daughter’s imaginary friends in the dire Imagine That.

  Literary characters swapped places with people in the real world in Inkheart, based on the 2003 YA novel by Cornelia Funke. Brendan Fraser found himself trapped amongst a cast of British character actors that included Helen Mirren, Jim Broadbent and Andy Serkis.

  A young girl (Dakota Blue Richards) was sent to live in a magical mansion in The Secret of Moonacre, based on Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse (said to be J.K. Rowling’s favourite childhood book).

  Featuring Jon Cryer, James Spader and William H. Macey, Robert Rodriguez’s Shorts was a children’s fantasy film about a colourful magic rock that could grant wishes.

  Reuniting most of the original cast against Hank Azaria’s Karloff-like pharaoh, the family-friendly sequel Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (aka Night at the Museum 2) opened at #1 over the Memorial Day weekend with a take of just over $70 million
.

  Dakota Fanning was a teen with telekinetic powers in Hong Kong in the convoluted Push, and the young actress also voiced the titular animated character in Henry Selick’s Coraline. The impressive 3-D stop-motion movie was based on the popular children’s novel by Neil Gaiman and also featured the voices of Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman, Ian McShane, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.

  Wes Anderson’s stop-motion fable Fantastic Mr Fox was based on a 1970 children’s book by Roald Dahl, while Spike Jonze’s long-awaited Where the Wild Things Are was an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s illustrated children’s classic that was shot in Australia.

  Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen and Hugh Laurie were among those who provided voices for DreamWorks’ fun 3-D cartoon Monsters vs. Aliens. Amongst the other animated films presented in 3-D were Disney/Pixar’s Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Ice Age 3: Age of the Dinosaurs and Battle for Terra. Meanwhile, Astro Boy, Aliens in the Attic and Planet 51 were all released “fl at”.

  Thorold Dickinson’s marvellously creepy The Queen of Spades (1940), based on Alexander Pushkin’s classic short story, was given a welcome UK cinema reissue at the end of the year.

  In America, the year’s most successful film was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, followed at some distance by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (which topped both the UK film and DVD charts). Then came Up (#3), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (#5), Star Trek (#6), Monsters vs. Aliens (#7), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (#8), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (#9) and Night at the Museum 2 (#10). In fact, the only non-genre title in the US Top 10 for 2009 was the comedy The Hangover at #4.

  The Ice Age sequel (#2), Up (#3), the Transformers sequel (#5), Star Trek (#7), Monsters vs. Aliens (#8) and the Night at the Museum sequel (#9) all featured in the UK Top 10, which also included Slumdog Millionaire (#4), The Hangover (#6) and Angels and Demons creeping in at #10.

  It may be too late now, but it was revealed in 2009 that the UK’s infamous Video Recordings Act 1984 was never actually referred to the European Commission. As a result, the ill-conceived “video nasties” law brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was never officially enacted and should never have been enforced.