The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Unfortunately, the series soon descended into soap opera scripting, Lost-like flashbacks and multi-character arcs until ABC temporarily shut down production after ten episodes as a result of plummeting ratings and the departure of co-showrunner Marc Guggenheim.

  NBC’s still pointless Heroes ended its fourth volume (“Fugitives”) with the evil Sylar (Zachary Quinto) believing he was the dead Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar) after finding out that his real father was John Glover’s chain-smoking taxidermist. The equally rambling new season (“Redemption”) owed much to HBO’s cancelled Carnivàle, as the creepy Samuel (Robert Knepper) and his travelling freak show started recruiting people with superpowers.

  After bringing John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) back from the dead, and apparently killing off Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) and everybody else in a hydrogen bomb explosion, ABC’s exasperating Lost ended its chaotic fifth and penultimate season with another two-hour special that introduced two warring super-beings, Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and the sinister Mr Loophole (Titus Weaver), and left its intriguing time-travel premise hanging. Earlier in the year, the show passed its 100th episode.

  Co-creator J.J. Abrams’ Fringe ended its premiere season on the Fox Network with FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) being transported to a parallel dimension, where she finally met the mysterious industrialist Dr William Bell (genre icon Leonard Nimoy). For the second season, Olivia, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) and his eccentric scientist father Walter (the delightful John Noble) continued to investigate X Files-like cases while trying to uncover more details about the Pattern, the enigmatic Observers, and the alternate universe and its possible threat to their own reality.

  Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, which premiered from Fox in February with just 4.7 million viewers, was about a secret underground organization that wiped people’s personalities and then imprinted them with new ones, basically turning them into high-priced hookers. Eliza Dushku played one of these “actives”, Echo, who began to remember her past.

  Like Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show took some time to settle down. Despite an intriguing stand-alone final episode set in a post-apocalyptic 2019 (only available on the DVD set in America but shown on UK TV), against the odds the show got renewed for a second series. Summer Glau joined the cast in the recurring role of programmer Bennett, and Ray Wise guest-starred as the head of Washington’s Dollhouse.

  Despite a basic concept resembling the 1980s TV show Friday the 13th: The Series, the Syfy channel’s enjoyable twelve-episode Warehouse 13 starred the likeable Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly as two bickering secret service agents reassigned to recover supernatural “artefacts” for a mysterious government storage facility run by Saul Rubinek’s Artie Nelson.

  The second season of Syfy’s Sanctuary featured an episode set in a dystopian future world ravaged by zombie-like mutations of humans and “Abnormals”, before the series returned to normal as 157-year-old Dr Helen Magnus (Amanda Tapping) and her team continued to protect their supernatural charges. Following the apparent death of Magnus’ brainwashed daughter Ashley (Emilie Ullerup) by the evil Cabal, Agam Darshi joined the cast as petty criminal Kate Freelander.

  Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) found they could not trust each other, let alone the angels, as the End of Days approached in the CW’s Supernatural, which enjoyed one of its best seasons yet, averaging three million viewers per show.

  After Sam killed the demon Lilith and inadvertently released Lucifer (the busy Mark Pellegrino) from Hell, the fifth season found the brothers teaming up with former angel Castiel (Misha Collins) to save the world from the impending Apocalypse. Sam and Dean found themselves transported to an alternate dystopian future where a virus had turned people into zombies and, in a couple of unusually fun episodes, the brothers were trapped in retro-TV hell and attended a fan convention based on their “fictional” exploits. The show even found a guest spot for Paris Hilton as a homicidal Pagan god.

  Scripted by The League of Gentleman’s Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the BBC’s Psychoville was a twisted comedy that lasted seven episodes and featured Dawn French, Eileen Atkins and Christopher Biggins as himself. Pemberton also turned up ITV’s Whitechapel, a three-part serial in which a contemporary murderer recreated Jack the Ripper’s killings in the East End of London.

  Based on the novel by John Updike, Eastwick should have been retitled Desperate Witches as three women (Lindsay Price, Jaime Ray Newman and Rebecca Romjin) were given magical powers by the devilishly charming Darryl Van Horne (Paul Gross). Guest stars included Martin Mull, Cybill Shepherd, Jerry O’Connell, Rosanna Arquette and Veronica Cartwright (who was also in the 1987 movie version).

  Two previous attempts to adapt the material never progressed beyond the pilot stage, and ABC wisely put the feather-light show on hiatus after just thirteen episodes.

  A cross between Dawson’s Creek and Friday the 13th, Harper’s Island was an enjoyable thirteen-episode series set on an island with an unsavoury reputation where a wedding guest was gruesomely murdered each week. CBS was accused of burying the show in an unpopular time slot on Saturday nights, despite supporting it with an interactive website.

  Veteran John Lithgow played the nondescript church deacon and family man turned “Trinity Killer” for the knockout fourth season of Showtime’s Dexter, which also included appearances by Keith Carradine and Adrienne Barbeau. Fans of the show could also buy a Dexter action figure with interchangeable arms.

  In the second and final season of the CW’s Reaper, Sam (Bret Harrison) began to question if he really was the son of the Devil (Ray Wise), while his human father returned from the dead as a zombie. Also complicating things was the scheming Morgan (Arnie Hammer), the Devil’s jealous other son.

  Just days after NBC cancelled Medium, CBS picked the successful psychic show up for a sixth season. In the first-ever Halloween episode, Allison Dubois (Patricia Arquette) and her family battled black and white zombies as the actors were digitally inserted into scenes of George Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead.

  After the fifth series jumped forward five years, Melinda (Jennifer Love Hewitt) discovered that her son Aiden (Connor Gibbs) had his own special powers and she also encountered Sleepy Hollow’s real headless horseman in CBS’ faltering Ghost Whisperer.

  Both Arquette and Hewitt made their directorial debuts on their shows in 2009.

  In ITV’s four-part Boy Meets Girl, a DIY store employee (Martin Freeman) and a female fashion journalist (Rachael Sterling) swapped bodies due to a freak electrical storm.

  A shallow, dead fashion model (Brooke D’Orsay) found her soul sharing the “plus-size” body of smart but insecure lawyer Jane Bingum (Brooke Elliott) in Lifetime’s feel-good fantasy series Drop Dead Diva. Guest stars included Rosie O’Donnell, Paula Abdul, Jorja Fox, Liza Minnelli and Delta Burke.

  Meanwhile, the self-obsessed Erica Strange (Erin Karpluk) was magically transported back in time by her mysterious therapist (Michael Riley) so that she could change the mistakes she made at pivotal moments in her life in CBC’s own feel-good series Being Erica, which ran for two seasons in 2009.

  Filmed in South Africa and shown over three nights in the US, AMC’s six-episode “reinterpretation” of The Prisoner featured Jim Caviezel as the nonconformist Number Six, who found himself in the surreal Village run by Ian McKellen’s dapper Number Two. Caviezel admitted that he had never even heard of Patrick McGoohan’s cult 1960s original.

  ABC’s remake of the 1980s mini-series V featured Morena Baccarin as the leader of an invasion by reptilian aliens hidden beneath cloned human skin. FBI special agent Erica Evans (Elizabeth Mitchell) suspected that the visitors were not quite as friendly as they first appeared. In the US, the show ran for just four episodes in November before being put on hiatus until the following March.

  After five seasons, the penultimate episode of the Sci Fi Channel’s Stargate Atlantis was set in an alternate reality and featured loner detective John Sheppard
(Joe Flanigan) pursuing a serial-killing Wraith through Las Vegas. The 100th and final episode aired in early January.

  It was quickly replaced by SG-U: Stargate Universe, a grim blending of Battlestar Galactica and Lost in Space with Robert Carlyle slumming in the Dr Zachary Scott role.

  Nothing was as dreary as the thirteen-part international co-production Defying Gravity, about eight astronauts on a mysterious space mission to Venus that was designed to last six years. Despite the introduction of a sinister sub-plot, the ABC show failed to take off.

  The strike-delayed final ten episodes of Sci Fi’s Battlestar Galactica finally revealed the identity of the final Cylon (it wasn’t as big a revelation as some might have hoped) and the crew of humans and Cylons finally found Eden (literally) in the disappointing series finale.

  Meanwhile, the revisionist movie Battlestar Galactica: The Plan was directed by series star Edward James Olmos and looked at the show’s first two seasons from the perspective of the Cylons, while Caprica was a pilot movie prequel to the show that premiered on DVD.

  Picking up its eighteen-episode run in July, the third season of Syfy’s amiable Eureka (aka A Town Called Eureka) moved to Friday nights and ended with Sheriff Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and his new girlfriend Tess Fontana (Jaime Ray Newman) having to deal with not only a dark energy leak but also how their lives were changing.

  After Rufus Sewell’s dull Dr Hood investigated a mercury poisoning epidemic and a perfume that caused violence, CBS’ Eleventh Hour was cancelled, despite regularly being in the top twenty rated shows of the week. At least series creator Stephen Gallagher got to script a couple of episodes before it ended.

  The final three episodes of Pushing Daisies guest-starred David Arquette, Richard Benjamin, George Segal, Robert Picardo, Gina Torres, Fred Williamson and George Hamilton before ABC pulled the plug on the second season in March.

  The Connor family continued their battle against the evil SkyNet before the Fox Network finally cancelled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles at the end of the second season, and NBC’s misguided Knight Rider revival killed off three major characters and reintroduced the evil transforming KARR before getting a creative reboot in January that still could not prevent the show from being cancelled after just one season.

  Inspired by the 1998–99 series of the same name, ABC’s reboot of Cupid starred Bobby Cannavale as the Mt Olympus exile. It ran for just seven episodes – eight fewer than the original series.

  When the CW’s Smallville returned in January, Clark (Tom Welling) was helped by a scruffy Legion of Super-Heroes – Cosmic Boy, Black Canary and Impulse – to find Chloe (Allison Mack), who had been abducted from her own wedding by the Doomsday monster that ended up killing Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore).

  Although the producers backed away from earlier claims that the ninth season would be the darkest to date, it still involved Clark (Tom Welling) and Lois (Erica Durance) fighting virus-created zombies in Metropolis. Meanwhile, Julian Sands turned up as Superboy’s father, Jor-El (previously voiced by Terence Stamp in the series) and Callum Blue played the crazed Major Zod (the character played by Stamp in the movies).

  The third and final season of ABC Family’s Kyle XY saw the test-tube teen (Matt Dallas) using his powers to search for his girlfriend (Kirsten Prout), who was kidnapped by the mysterious Latnok Society.

  On the Season Three premiere of the Disney’s Channel’s sitcom Wizards of Waverly Place, budding sorcerer Justin Russo (David Henrie) created a Franken-girl to protect his stuff from his inquisitive sister Alex. In another episode, he had to capture his own vampire girlfriend.

  A resurrected sorcerer (Mackenzie Crook) commanded an army of living gargoyles to destroy Camelot in the second season opener of the BBC’s much-improved Merlin. Meanwhile, Morgana (Katie McGrath) discovered her own magical powers, Charles Dance turned up as a distinctly non-Arthurian Witchfinder and the evil Mordred (a creepy Asa Butterfield) became the show’s chief villain.

  In the series finale, the Great Dragon (voiced by John Hurt) was finally freed, with tragic consequences. Unfortunately, the first series of Merlin failed to find an audience when shown by NBC in America over the summer.

  Based on the series of fantasy books by Terry Goodkind, the syndicated Legend of the Seeker supplied plenty of magic, sword-fights and romance for those who like that kind of thing. In the second season, Richard Cypher (Craig Horner), Kahlan (Bridget Regan) and the wizard Zedd (Bruce Spence) battled the dead after discovering that they had inadvertently opened a doorway into the underworld.

  At least a cameo by John Rhys-Davies brought some much-needed class to the BBC’s six-part fantasy spoof Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, which starred Matt Lucas as an evil chancellor.

  The better than usual twentieth anniversary episode of Fox’s The Simpsons ‘‘Treehouse of Horror’’ not only featured the classic creatures – Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy and the Wolf Man – participating in Springfield’s Halloween celebrations, but also amusing pastiches of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, 28 Days Later and the musical stage version of Sweeney Todd.

  Based on the DreamWorks movie, Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space was a half-hour animated Halloween special on NBC featuring the voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogan and Hugh Laurie.

  Star Trek’s George Takei supplied the voice of power-crazed general Lok Durd in a two-part episode of the Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars, while Seth Green contributed to the show’s second season as the voice of a butler droid working for ruthless bounty hunter Cad Bane.

  Stewie built a transporter and beamed the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation to Quahog in Fox’s Family Guy, which also presented an episode that parodied the Stephen King movies Stand By Me, Misery and The Shawshank Redemption with the voices of Richard Dreyfuss, the late Roy Scheider, George Wendt and Adam West.

  In the Season Eight opener, Stewie and Brian explored a series of alternative universes, including one based on Disney cartoons; there was a King Kong spoof involving a Miley Cyrus Terminator (don’t ask!), and the season closed with ‘‘Something, Something, Something, Dark Side’’, the show’s second full-length Star Wars homage based, this time, on The Empire Strikes Back.

  The Caped Crusader teamed up with Green Arrow, Wildcat, the original Blue Beetle and Atom in the Cartoon Network’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Neil Patrick Harris sang his way through the role of the villainous Music Meister.

  With Professor X and Jean Grey missing, Logan found himself leading the mutant fight in the aptly-titled cartoon series Wolverine and the X-Men, on the Nicktoons Network, and fledgling hero Tony Stark battled a group of evil scientists, amongst other foes, in the same channel’s Iron Man: Armored Adventures. Over on Disney XD, The Spectacular Spider-Man chronicled the early exploits of Peter Parker’s webslinger.

  Based on Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s children’s picture book (which has sold four million copies worldwide), The Gruffalo was a half-hour animated film featuring the voices of Robbie Coltrane, John Hurt and Tom Wilkinson.

  Statuesque was written and directed by Neil Gaiman for Sky’s 10 Minute Tales series of short films. Bill Nighy and Amanda Palmer starred in a tale of love involving living statues.

  At The Big Chill music festival in early August, more than 4,000 revellers set the world record for the largest zombie gathering while also being featured in a scene for a Film4/Warp Films mockumentary entitled I Spit on Your Rave.

  In February, the busy Dominic Monaghan guest-starred in a 3-D episode of NBC’s sci-spy series, Chuck. Unfortunately, getting hold of the special glasses proved to be a bit of a problem on both sides of the Atlantic, not that the process actually worked anyway. Meanwhile, the Subway sandwich chain became a major sponsor of the struggling show’s third season.

  When a serial killer started recreating murders from his books, a successful mystery novelist (Nathan Fillion) teamed up with a female NYPD detective (Stana
Katic) in the first two seasons of ABC’s entertaining Castle. The pair investigated a series of ritualistic voodoo murders, Cyndi Lauper as a psychic suspected of murder and, in the Halloween episode, the staking of a vampire fetishist in a cemetery.

  Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Booth (David Boreanaz) were called in to investigate a mystery involving a missing ancient Egyptian mummy in an October episode of Fox’s Bones, and an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation involved a murder at a science fiction convention.

  Following a spoof episode based on the Friday the 13th movies, Shawn (James Roday) and Gus (Dulé Hill) investigated a suicide apparently caused by the Devil and were hired to protect a man who thought he was a werewolf in the USA Network’s Psych. In the season finale of Fox’s Mental, a man claiming to be a werewolf took the psych ward hostage.

  Having started out as a religious-themed radio show in the late 1930s, CBS-TV’s daytime soap opera Guiding Light finally ended after seventy-two years in September. The longest-running drama series ever moved to TV in 1952, and its 15,700 episodes included Wizard of Oz fantasies, time-travel, cloning and characters returning from the dead.

  Meanwhile, on the same network’s The Young and the Restless, an entire episode was narrated by an exhumed corpse (eighty-year-old Jeanne Cooper), and Marcia Wallace played a crazed knife-wielding psycho nurse named ‘Annie’ – a homage to Stephen King’s Misery.

  Sam Raimi was one of the producers on the CWs horror-themed game show, Fear is Real, in which contestants competed for a $66,666 prize.

  Shown on BBC4 for Halloween, Ghosts in the Machine, narrated by Robert Hardy, was a fascinating look back at the supernatural – both imagined and “real” – on British television. It included clips from Quatermass and the Pit, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Stone Tape, Ghostwatch, Sea of Souls, Crooked House and other shows, along with interviews with Kim Newman, Mark Gattiss, Stephen Volk, Sir Jonathan Miller, Jane Asher, Kenneth Cope, Louise Jameson and Bill Paterson, amongst others.