The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Avatar’s George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead comics series launched with a special introductory issue, “Back from the Grave”, written by original creators Romero and John Russo and set in 1968, prior to events in the first movie. The launch edition was available in six variant editions with alternate covers by artists Jacen Burrows (“Regular” and “Splatter”), Sebastian Fiumara (“Rotting”), Juan Jose Ryp (“Terror”) and Tim Vigil (“Gore”). A special “Foil” edition came packaged with a poster signed by Romero and was limited to just 600 copies.

  Many of Marvel’s superheroes turned up as the walking dead in writer Robert Kirkman’s Marvel Zombies five-issue series, with gruesome covers echoing classic comic book images of old.

  Dark Horse Comics’ Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror contained reprint graphic versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, along with a new painted cover by Eric Powell.

  The Dark Horse Book of Monsters featured a new “Hellboy” story by Mike Mignola, Kurt Busiek and Keith Giffen presented a tribute to Jack Kirby’s creature comics of the 1960s, while Garry Gianni illustrated William Hope Hodgson’s “A Tropical Terror”.

  IDW Publishing adapted Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show as a twelve-part series. Designed as a homage to the old Warren comics magazines, IDW’s Doomed featured graphic adaptations of stories by, amongst others, David J. Schow, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and F. Paul Wilson.

  Reprinted by Headpress as a large format paperback, The Complete Saga of the Victims by “Archaic” Alan Heweston and Suso Rego originally appeared in the early 1970s in the Skyward horror comic Scream. A tale of two sexy women kidnapped and tortured by all kinds of monsters, the graphic novel included the previously unpublished sixth episode.

  The “Best Sellers Illustrated” series featured Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest illustrated by Dick Giordano and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue illustrated by Frank Brunner.

  Also available was a young adult graphic adaptation of Dracula, written by Gary Reed and illustrated by Becky Cloonan.

  Disney’s exuberant if self-indulgent sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest smashed Spider-Man 2’s opening record of $114.8 million in America with a three-day take of $132 million. It went straight to the #1 slot on both sides of the Atlantic, became the second-fastest movie to ever pass the $400 million mark (forty-five days) and was the top-grossing film of the year in the UK with a box-office take of almost £52 million. The film also became the fastest-selling DVD ever in the UK as, during the run-up to Christmas, one in four DVDs sold was a copy of Dead Man’s Chest.

  Despite their success with the Pirates sequel, Walt Disney announced that they would cut 650 studio jobs to concentrate on creating blockbuster franchises over more adult subjects. Film output would be reduced from around eighteen titles a year to a dozen, with about ten being released under the Disney name and those under the Touchstone banner being cut back to two or three releases a year.

  James Wong’s silly but stylish Final Destination 3 was held off the top spot by the long-delayed remake of The Pink Panther in America and Disney’s animated Chicken Little in the UK. Following the premise of the earlier entries, a group of teens who survived a roller-coaster disaster discovered in various gruesome ways that they couldn’t cheat Death (the voice of Tony Todd). The DVD release included a new interactive feature that let the viewer change the course of the plot. (So much for the auteur theory.)

  Jonathan Liebesman’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (from a story co-written by David J. Schow) was a pointless 1960s-set prequel to the equally misguided 2003 remake, in which audiences learned how young Thomas Hewitt (Andrew Bryniarski) ended up as the chainsaw-wielding cannibal called “Leatherface”.

  Co-scripted by Wes Craven and starring Kristen Bell (TV’s Veronica Mars), Jim Sonzero’s Pulse was another J-horror remake (Kairo) about a cursed website that released ghosts. Original Ju-On director Takashi Shimizu continued to recycle the same old tired J-horror clichés in The Grudge 2, which was once again irritatingly related out of sequence. As a local journalist, Edison Chen easily acted his American co-stars, the bland Amber Tamblyn and a returning Sarah Michelle Gellar, off the screen.

  Gellar also turned up as the star of The Return, in which she travelled to a small Texas town that seemed to hold the key to her strange hallucinations.

  Although a remake of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1979) would seem redundant to most people, director Rupert Wainwright at least managed to include some atmospherically ghostly sequences in a tame tale of a cursed town and its murderous history.

  Another unnecessary remake was Black Christmas, based on the superior and innovative 1975 slasher film of the same name. At least French director Alexandre Aja’s reworking of The Hills Have Eyes brought some social commentary and a stylish veneer to producer Wes Craven’s 1977 shocker about a murderous mutant family preying on tourists in the New Mexico desert. The film opened at #1 in the UK.

  Simon West’s remake of the 1979 film When a Stranger Calls opened at #1 in the US. Camilla Belle played the babysitter who realised that a series of threatening phone calls were coming from inside the house she was in.

  Starring Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles as the concerned parents, John Moore’s The Omen was a pointless remake of the 1976 box-office smash and opened in the US on 6.6.06. Mia Farrow played the sinister nanny who hanged herself in front of Devil-child Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick). The DVD included unrated extended scenes and an alternate ending.

  Nicolas Cage starred as the duped cop in Neil LaBute’s totally unnecessary remake of the 1973 classic The Wicker Man, which was relocated from Scotland to America, with Christopher Lee’s pagan worshippers replaced by Ellen Burstyn’s feminist beekeepers.

  With its troubled production profiled in detail on HBO’s hugely entertaining Project Greenlight more than a year earlier, John Gulager’s monster-fest Feast finally received a three-week limited run at midnight showings in September before being dumped by Dimension onto DVD.

  Another group of luckless victims were put through a series of gory tests by Tobin Bell’s dying madman in Lionsgate’s Saw III, which enjoyed the biggest opening of the series to date, debuting in the #1 slot with $33.6 million.

  “Presented by” Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth’s gratuitous and unpleasant Hostel had the interesting premise of a pair of American backpackers who discovered that an entire Slovakian town was involved in torturing and mutilating unsuspecting tourists. Apparently the Slovakian authorities were outraged at the film, along with more-discerning movie-goers. An “unrated” version released on DVD included no less than four commentary tracks featuring the director.

  Fledgling distributor Fox Atomic’s similarly-themed Turistas (aka Paradise Lost), directed by John Stockwell, in which Brazilian party-goers were sliced and diced by a mad surgeon (Miguel Lunardi), barely managed to register at the box-office with a $3.6 million opening weekend.

  Jeroen Krabbe’s eccentric film-maker assembled a group of disposable actors in Bernard Rose’s Snuff Movie, while Brett Leonard’s Feed was a pseudo-snuff film about a cyber investigator (Patrick Thompson) who uncovered a S&M world where men obsessed with overweight women bet on whether they could feed them to death.

  World Wrestling Entertainment presented Gregory Dark’s See No Evil, starring WWE wrestler “Kane” (Glen Jacobs) as a bald-headed psycho gruesomely dispatching teenagers in a creepy old hotel.

  David Slade’s Hard Candy played with audience perceptions of predator and victim when teenager Hayley (Ellen Page) hooked up with an older fashion photographer (Patrick Wilson) she met on the Internet.

  Taking the splatter genre to its obvious comedy conclusion, Christopher Smith’s Severance had a group of sales executives from a multinational weapons corporation being butchered one-by-one during a team-building exercise in the Eastern European backwoods.

  Kate Beckinsale returned as leather-cla
d vampire werewolf-hunter Selene in her husband Len Wiseman’s stylish-looking but confusing adventure Underworld: Evolution. Although not screened for US critics, it opened at #1 for a week before quickly dropping out of the box-office charts on both sides of the Atlantic. At least Sir Derek Jacobi and Bill Nighy added a touch of class to the cast. Along similar lines, Milla Jovovich donned a rubber suit to save mankind from a bio-engineered virus that turned humans into vampires in Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet.

  Kristanna Loken played a half-human, half-vampire “dhampir” in Uwe Boll’s third video game adaptation BloodRayne, which also starred Billy Zane, Michael Madsen, Meatloaf, Udo Kier, Michelle Rodriguez and Sir Ben Kingsley. It opened in the US with a gross of just $1.6 million.

  In Ti West’s low budget The Roost, a group of teens on their way to a wedding were attacked by vampire bats whose bite transformed their victims into bloodsuckers, while Frostbite was a Swedish vampire movie set in a hospital.

  The creepy Countess Elizabeth Bathory used a bootleg version of a video game to select her victims in the surprisingly effective Stay Alive, featuring Frankie Muniz (TV’s Malcolm in the Middle). The “unrated director’s cut” on DVD was fifteen minutes longer than the soft PG-13 version briefly released in movie theatres.

  A woman (Radha Mitchell) searched for her sick daughter in the zombie-haunted town of Silent Hill. Christophe Gans’ confusing adaptation of the video game opened at #1 in the US. Sean Bean played hapless husbands in both Silent Hill and The Dark, John Fawcett’s low budget chiller in which another mother (Maria Bello) searched for her missing daughter after staying at a creepy Welsh house, where a religious cult once committed mass suicide.

  Jeff Broadstreet’s Night of the Living Dead 3D, featuring Sid Haig, was a long way from George Romero’s original series.

  Demi Moore played a successful novelist who moved to a remote Scottish village where she was apparently haunted by the ghost of her recently-deceased young son in Craig Rosenberg’s curiously old-fashioned British thriller Half Light. In Hadi Hajaig’s overly ambitious Puritan, Nick Moran starred as a washed-up paranormal investigator involved in a Gothic mystery in modern Whitechapel.

  David Payne’s Keeker was about a group of students in a creepily deserted desert motel menaced by mutilated ghosts and the titular monster, while Renny Harlin’s The Covenant was based on Aron Coleite’s graphic novel about teenage warlocks and flopped at the box-office.

  Lucky McKee’s long-delayed second feature The Woods, featuring Bruce Campbell, finally saw the light of day, and something nasty lurked on a deserted island in Michael J. Bassett’s survivalist horror Wilderness, featuring ubiquitous Brit actor Sean Pertwee overseeing a group of violent young offenders who were killed off by a crazed psycho.

  David Zucker’s uneven comedy Scary Movie 4 spoofed The Grudge, Saw, The Village and, er . . . Brokeback Mountain. Pamela Anderson, Charlie Sheen, Cloris Leachman, Shaquille O’Neal and Dr. Phil turned up in embarrassing cameos. Incredibly, it opened at #1 in the US and #2 in the UK in April.

  Despite a huge, Internet-fuelled publicity build-up, David R. Ellis’ entertaining Snakes on a Plane didn’t quite live up to the pre-release hype as Samuel L. Jackson’s tough-talking FBI agent had to contend with . . . a plane full of 400 deadly snakes. Although it opened in both the US and UK at #1, not screening the film for critics prior to release apparently harmed its chances at the box-office.

  Director Joon-ho Bong’s clever and amusing The Host (Gwoemul) had a giant mutant fish creature created by toxic waste storing its human victims in Seoul’s sewers. It was a huge box-office hit in its native Korea. Su-chang Kong’s R-Point was a Korean production about a cursed island and the spirits of the dead soldiers who were trapped there.

  In Marc Forster’s clever metaphysical fantasy Stranger Than Fiction, Will Ferrell’s lonely tax inspector Harold Crick discovered that he was a character about to be killed off in author Emma Thompson’s latest novel. Ewan McGregor’s psychiatrist found his life beginning to merge with Ryan Gosling’s suicidal art student in Forster’s other release of the year, the hopelessly pretentious Stay.

  Rival Victorian illusionists Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman attempted to destroy each other with real magic in Christopher Nolan’s flashback-driven The Prestige, based on the novel by Christopher Priest. Meanwhile, Edward Norton’s turn-of-the-century magician used his powers to free the woman he loved in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, which also starred Paul Giamatti.

  M. Night Shyamalan’s overly complicated fable Lady in the Water featured Giamatti’s apartment complex loner protecting Bryce Dallas Howard’s mysterious mermaid from toothy creatures from another dimension.

  Guillermo del Toro had far more success creating an alternate reality in his sumptuous Pan’s Labyrinth. Set in Franco’s civil war-ravaged Spain of 1944, the young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) discovered that she was really a princess and must complete three tasks to return to her magical underground kingdom.

  Despite being directed by Dave McKean and scripted by Neil Gaiman, MirrorMask was a dull combination of live action and digital animation as sulky young circus girl Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) found herself transported into a bizarre fantasy world. Meanwhile, the Brothers Quay looked at the links between creativity and madness in their surreal feature The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes.

  Filmed during a break in the making of The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam’s Tideland was an odd Southern Gothic about a lonely little girl (Jodelle Ferland) growing up in an old derelict house and her encounters with the bizarre locals.

  Darren Aronofsky’s long-in-development The Fountain, which starred Hugh Jackman as three different characters in history searching for immortality and love with the writer-director’s real-life partner Rachel Weisz, died at the box-office, despite wasting $18 million before it was ever made.

  Hans Horn’s Adrift was about a group of old friends on a luxury yacht who all dived overboard before they realised that they had forgotten to lower the ladder, leaving them stranded in open sea. A toxic terrorist attack on Los Angeles looked at the human fallout in a city under siege in Chris Gorak’s impressive directorial debut Right at Your Door.

  Sissy Spacek and Donald Sutherland starred in Courtney Solomon’s An American Haunting, a not-really ghost story set in the early 19th century and “based on true events”, while a student (Sandra Hüller) thought she was possessed by the Devil in Requiem.

  Rock musicians Jack Black and Kyle Gass were on the trail of a mythical Satanic guitar plectrum in the uneven comedy Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny.

  For film-goers who thought they had seen it all before, Denzel Washington’s ATF agent used advanced digital surveillance to “travel back through time” to prevent a terrorist bombing in Tony Scott’s high-concept SF thriller Déjà Vu, which also featured Val Kilmer and Jim Caviezel. Keanu Reeves’ architect and Sandra Bullock’s doctor exchanged letters through time in Alejandro Agresti’s romantic drama The Lake House.

  Nathan Fillion was the likeable small town sheriff who had to contend with a killer alien plague that turned the townsfolk into zombies in Slither, writer/director James Gunn’s inventive and entertaining tribute to 1950s SF movies. Made on a pathetically low budget, Jake West’s dire SF/comedy Evil Aliens, about extraterrestrial rapists in Wales, somehow managed to get a (mercifully brief) theatrical release in the UK.

  Alfonso Cuarón’s impressive Children of Men, based on a novel by P. D. James, was set in a dystopian near-future where women could no longer give birth. Clive Owen’s reluctant hero had to deliver the last pregnant woman to safety with the help of Michael Caine’s aging hippie. The film opened at #1 in the UK in September.

  Utilising a rotoscoped animation process, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly was based on the novel by Philip K. Dick and starred two-dimensional representations of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder. Along the same lines, Christian Volckman’s animated French film Renaissance was shot in motion-captured
black and white and featured a tough detective (voiced by Daniel Craig) searching for a missing geneticist in a dystopian Paris of the near-future.

  Scripted by Larry and Andy Wachowski and based on Alan Moore’s cult graphic novel (he asked for his name to be taken off the credits, as usual), Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving starred as the political revolutionaries in James McTeigue’s delayed V for Vendetta, set in a near-future Britain controlled by John Hurt’s totalitarian dictator. It opened at #1 in the US with a lower-than-expected gross.

  When Bryan Singer pulled out to revive another comic book franchise, Brett Ratner took over at the helm of the third and possibly final entry in the mutant superhero franchise, X-Men: The Last Stand. With a war between the mutants triggered by the discovery of a “cure” for their powers, this flashy but bland sequel featured former footballer Vinnie Jones as the brutish Juggernaut and a surprisingly good Kelsey Grammer as Beast.

  Despite technically being a semi-sequel to Richard Donner’s 1978 film, Singer’s Superman Returns was unable to match the heights of that movie, with newcomer Brandon Routh failing to fill Christopher Reeve’s tights as the Man of Steel and Kevin Spacey apparently content to simply channel Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. The less said about Kate Bosworth’s insipid Lois Lane the better, but at least the late Marlon Brando was back as Jor-El in an extended cameo. In the US, the film dropped 58% at the box-office in its second week.

  Shown theatrically in Beverly Hills for one night only in November to benefit The Christopher Reeve Foundation, original director Donner’s cut of Superman II (1980) was finally destined for DVD release.

  Ben Affleck portrayed former Superman actor George Reeves, found dead under suspicious circumstances in 1959, in Allen Coulter’s period mystery Hollywoodland.