The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  American cinematographer Paul Hipp, who began his career working on such exploitation films as Sweet Trash and Trader Hornee, died on April 10th, aged 68. His other credits include Blood and Lace, The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant, Garden of the Dead, Grave of the Vampire, Psycho from Texas, Hanger 18, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1980), Earthbound, The Boogens and The Fall of the House of Usher (1982).

  Korean director Shin Sang-Ok died in Seoul on April 11th, aged 79. In the 1970s, both he and his actress wife were separately abducted and transported to North Korea, where they completed seven films before seeking asylum in the West in 1986. His 1985 socialist monster movie Pulgasari featured a metal-eating creature, while the horror film The Gardener (1998), directed under the name “Simon Sheen”, starred Malcolm McDowell, Angle Everhart and Olivia Hussey.

  50-year-old TV producer and director Scott Brazil died of respiratory failure due to complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) and lyme disease on April 17th. He directed episodes of TV’s Strange Luck, The Burning Zone and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and served as a producer on the series Space Rangers and the 1993 TV movie Lifepod.

  British-born TV director Peter Ellis died in California on April 24th. He relocated to the US in the 1980s, where he directed episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Highlander, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Highlander: The Raven, Mortal Combat: Conquest, Sliders, Tarzan, Smallville and Supernatural.

  Hollywood talent manager and publicist Jay Bernstein died of a stroke on April 30th, aged 69. His clients included Farrah Fawcett, Suzanne Somers and Kristy McNichol. He produced the TV films The Wild Wild West Revisited and More Wild Wild West.

  Austrian-born Alpine cameraman Herbert Raditschnig, who shot specialist scenes for the James Bond movies For Your Eyes Only and GoldenEye, died of a stroke on May 6th, aged 72. He was also the cinematographer on the 1987 horror film The Outing.

  American special effects technician Philip Barberio died of multiple myeloma on May 8th, aged 60. He worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Return ofthejedi, Ghostbusters, The Blob (1988), The Abyss, Waxwork II: Lost in Time and such TV series as The Flash, Star Trek: Voyager and The Sentinel.

  Veteran British film director, screenwriter and producer Val Guest (Valmond Guest) died of prostate cancer in Palm Springs on May 10th, aged 94. A former film journalist, he worked on a number of comedy scripts, including Alf’s Button Afloat, Ask a Policeman, The Ghost Train (1941) and Back Room Boy before becoming a director in the early 1940s. His numerous credits include Hammer’s The Quatermass Experiment (aka The Creeping Unknown), Quatermass 2 (aka Enemy from Space), The Abominable Snowman (aka The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas), Camp on Blood Island and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, along with Mr Drake’s Duck, Expresso Bongo (with Cliff Richard), The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Where the Spies Are, Casino Royale and the “lost” SF musical Toomorrow. He also directed episodes of the TV series Space: 1999 and Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense. Guest was married to actress Yolande Donlan.

  Former actor turned BBC-TV producer Peter Bryant died on May 19th, aged 82. From 1967–69 he produced and/or story-edited Doctor Who starring Patrick Troughton, including such shows as “The Evil of the Daleks”, “The Tomb of the Cybermen”, “The Abominable Snowmen” and “The Web of Fear”.

  Two-time Academy Award-winning production designer and art director [Lloyd] Henry Bumstead died of prostate cancer on May 24th, aged 91. He worked on more than 100 films in a career than spanned nearly seventy years, including Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo and Family Plot, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, The Brass Bottle, The War Lord, Slaughterhouse-Five (in which he also appeared), The Concorde – Airport ’79, The World According to Garp, Psycho III, Ghost Dad, Cape Fear (1991) and thirteen collaborations with Clint Eastwood.

  British documentary film-maker Michael Croucher, who produced and directed the 1973 ghost story TV series Leap in the Dark, died on May 26th, aged 76.

  American special effects pioneer Arthur Widmer, who created the Ulta Violet Travelling Matte (a forerunner of the bluescreen optical process), died on May 28th, aged 91.

  Oscar-winning computer animation pioneer Bill Kovacs died of complications of a stroke and cerebral haemorrhage on May 30th, aged 56. Having helped develop animation software at Robert Abel and Associates in the 1970s, he used the technology on Disney’s 1982 film Tron.

  Bernard Loomis, one of the first people to successfully market toys through the entertainment industry, died of heart disease on June 2nd, aged 82. From the late 1950s into the 1990s, while working for Mattel, Kenner Toys and other companies, he turned various franchises (including Star Wars, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman) into greeting cards, TV movies and cartoon series. He famously rejected Close Encounters of the Third Kind for not being “toyetic” enough.

  Pioneering scuba diver Dick Anderson, who served as diving equipment technician in Nassau for Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) on June 3rd, aged 73. He was also the dive master on Jaws: The Revenge.

  Veteran Hollywood director Vincent Sherman (Abram Orovitz) died on June 18th, one month short of his 100th birthday. A former stage and screen actor, he made his directorial debut in 1939 with The Return of Dr X starring Humphrey Bogart in his only horror film role. In the 1950s Sherman was “greylisted” by the House Un-American Activities Committee, while his 1996 autobiography Studio Affairs: My Life as a Film Director revealed that his lovers included Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth.

  British film producer, director and cinematographer Monty Berman (Nestor Montague “Monty” Berman), died on June 20th, aged 93. Born in London’s Whitechapel, he worked with Michael Powell and Carol Reed before teaming up with Robert S. Baker in the late 1940s to turn out a string of low budget “B” movies, including Blood of the Vampire, The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye), Jack the Ripper (1959), The Flesh and the Fiends (aka Mania), The Hellfire Club and What a Carve Up! (aka No Place Like Homicide). In the early 1960s, Baker and Berman moved into TV with such popular ITC series as The Saint (starring Roger Moore) and The Baron (with Steve Forrest), and Berman was paired with writer Dennis Spooner for such shows as The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Department S and Jason King.

  Aaron Spelling, who began his career as a character actor in the 1950s and went on to become one of the most powerful and influential independent producers in television, died after suffering a stroke on June 23rd, aged 83. His long list of credits include Rod Serling’s short-lived series The New People, Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Kindred: The Embraced, Charmed and the TV movies How Awful About Allan, The House That Would Not Die, Cro-whaven Farm, Five Desperate Women, The Last Child, A Taste of Evil, Home for the Holidays, Satan’s School for Girls (1973 and 2000 versions), Death Cruise, Death at Love House, Cruise Into Terror, The Power Within, and Massarati and the Brain. Credited with almost 4,000 hours of television and estimated to be worth $300 million, he is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most prolific producer of TV drama. His first wife was The Addams Family actress Carolyn Jones.

  Kathy Wood, the widow of cult director Edward D. Wood, Jr (who died in 1978), died of cancer on June 26th, aged 84. She met and married the struggling film-maker in 1955, and worked closely with her husband as an editor and writer on a number of his projects (apparently coming up with the term “solarnite bomb” for Plan 9 from Outer Space). She was portrayed by Patricia Arquette in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood.

  Italian author and film-maker Stanis(lao) Nievo, credited as one of the creators of the “mondo” genre of outrageous film documentaries with Mondo Cane (1962), died on July 12th, aged 78.

  Former vaudeville comedian and country music producer June Carr Ormond died in Nashville of complications from a stroke on July 14th, aged 94. With her husband Ron (who died in 1981), she produced a number of poverty-row Western serials starring Lash LaRue and Fuzz
y St. John as well as the 1952 cult classic Mesa of Lost Women, Teenage Bride, White Lightnin’ Road and Girl from Tobacco Row. Following a plane crash in 1967, the couple turned to making religious exploitation movies, including The Monster and the Stripper, The Burning Hell and Grim Reaper (in which she played the witch, “Endor”).

  Film producer, screenwriter and publicist Sam X. Abarbanel died on August 9th, aged 92. A former publicist for Republic Pictures, he wrote and produced the 1950 cult favourite Prehistoric Women and scripted the Spanish horror film Sound of Horror, featuring Ingrid Pitt and an invisible dinosaur.

  Emmy Award-nominated TV documentary writer, producer and director Nicholas Webster died after a long illness on August 12th, aged 94. A bit player in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), he directed the feature films Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Mission Mars and the documentary Manbeast! Myth or Monster?, plus episodes of TV’s Get Smart, The New People, The Immortal and the Leonard Nimoy hosted In Search of . . . (including In Search of Bigfoot).

  75-year-old British TV producer and director Kim Mills died after a long illness on August 28th. After working as an assistant director on such films as Behemoth the Sea Monster (aka The Giant Behemoth), he moved into television in 1960, working on such series as Plateau of Fear, City Beneath the Sea and Secret Beneath the Sea. Two years later he joined the drama team at ABC-TV, where he directed several episodes of The Avengers. His other credits include three episodes of Mystery and Imagination, Zodiac and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

  Hollywood producer William M. Aldrich, the son of director Robert Aldrich, died of cancer on August 31st, aged 62. He began his career as an actor in his father’s films What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and he has associate producer credits on What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice and the 1991 TV version of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

  Belgian director Remy Belvaux died in northern France on September 4th, aged 38. He co-directed and acted in the 1992 cult film Man Bites Dog, about a camera crew making a documentary about a serial killer. In 1998 he threw a custard pie at Microsoft founder Bill Gates and was found guilty of “mild violence” and fined.

  Italian production manager Armando Govoni died on September 17th, aged 79. After working in the wardrobe department for Mario Bava’s Giant of Marathon, he was the production assistant on the director’s Black Sunday (aka Revenge of the Vampire) and The Evil Eye.

  83-year-old Swedish-born cinematographer Sven Nykvist died of complications from the rare brain disease primary progressive aphasia and Alzheimer’s disease on September 20th. In a career in which he worked with such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bob Fosse and Andrei Tarkovsky, the two-time Oscar winner’s more than 120 film credits include Hour of the Wolf, The Magic Flute (1975), Black Moon, The Tenant, Dream Lover and Curtain Call.

  American director, writer and producer Stanley Z. Cherry died of cancer on September 27th, aged 74. His various credits include The Addams Family, The Monkees and The Kids from C.A.P.E.R.

  Italian director Renato Polselli (aka “Ralph Brown”) died on October 1st, aged 84. His many credits include The Vampire and the Ballerina (which was reportedly the first Italian horror film to show a profit), II Monstro dell’opera, La Verita secondo Satana, Delirium, The Reincarnation of Isabel and Mania.

  Veteran film and TV producer Herbert B. [Breiter] Leonard died of cancer on October 14th, aged 84. He worked in various production capacities on numerous serials and low budget movies, including Batman and Robin, Atom Man vs. Superman, Mysterious Island (1951), The Magic Carpet, Captain Video, King of the Congo, Blackhawk and Adventures of Captain Africa, along with such “Jungle Jim” adventures as Mark of the Gorilla, Captive Girl, Jungle Jim in Pygmy Island, Fury of the Congo, Killer Ape and Jungle Man-Eaters. His TV credits include the series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Circus Boy and Route 66.

  Indian entrepreneur Spoony Singh [Sundher], who founded the world-famous Hollywood Wax Museum in 1965, died of congestive heart failure on October 18th, aged 83.

  64-year-old Emmy Award-winning cinematographer James M. Glennon died from a blood clot following surgery for prostate cancer on October 19th. As well as working as a camera operator on such films as Altered States and Star Wars Episode IV: Return ofthejedi, and contributing additional photography to Weird Science, he shot Jaws of Death, Flight of the Navigator, In the Deep Woods, the 1995 TV drama/documentary Edgar Allan Foe: Terror of the Soul, Invader, Carnivale and Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt.

  Canadian film and TV director Daryl Duke died of pulmonary fribosis on October 21st, aged 77. His credits include The Return of Charlie Chan (aka Happiness is a Warm Clue) and episodes of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and Ghost Story.

  American set designer and art director Roy Barnes died of lung and bone cancer on October 29th, aged 70. His many credits include Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Red Dawn, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Deadly Friend, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Jurassic Park III, The Scorpion King, Hulk, Big Fish, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, War of the Worlds (2005) and Serenity.

  Film producer and composer Edward L. Alperson, Jr died on Halloween, aged 81. He received an associate producer credit on the 1986 remake of his father’s classic Invaders from Mars.

  Exploitation cinematographer, director, producer, film editor and actor Gary Graver died of cancer on November 16th, aged 68. He collaborated with Orson Welles on such unfinished projects as The Other Side of the Wind, The Dreamers, King Lear, The Magic Show and Moby Dick, plus the documentaries F for Fake, Filming Othello and It’s All True. However, among Graver’s more than 300 credits, he is better known for photographing such low-budget titles as The Mighty Gorga, Satan’s Sadists, Horror of the Blood Monsters (with John Carradine), Dracula vs. Frankenstein (with Lon Chaney, Jr), Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Clones, I Spit on Your Corpse!, Naughty Stewardesses, The Toolbox Murders, Doctor Dracula (again with Carradine), Deathsport, Death Dimension, The Glove, the US footage for Screamers, The Attic, Mortuary, The Phantom Empire, Ancient Evil, Deep Space, B.O.R.N., Alienator, Wizards of the Demon Sword, Bad Girls from Mars, Haunting Fear, Merlin (1992), Evil Toons, Witch Academy, Time Wars, Dinosaur Island, Possessed by the Night, Star Hunter, Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfolds, Sorceress and Sorceress II The Temptress, Invisible Dad, Alien Escape, Femalien II, Timegate: Tales of the Saddle Tramps, Shandra: The Jungle Girl, Curtis Harrington’s Usher, 13 Erotic Ghosts, Leeches!, Haunting Desires, Tomb of the Werewolf (with Paul Naschy), Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood and The Mummy’s Kiss: 2nd Dynasty. He also shot (uncredited) the Edward D. Wood, Jr-scripted One Million AC/DC. As a director/cinematographer, Graver’s credits include Trick or Treats, Moon in Scorpio, Evil Spirits and Veronica 2030, while as “Robert McCallum” he directed numerous adult films to support his other projects.

  Maverick American writer, producer and director Robert [Bernard] Altman died of cancer on November 20th, aged 81. After briefly trying acting (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), he turned to writing and directing. His credits include Countdown, Brewster McCloud, Images, The Long Goodbye, Quintet, the live-action Popeye, The Player, Gosford Park, A Prairie Home Companion and episodes of TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He received an honorary Oscar at the 2006 Academy Awards.

  Japanese director Akio Jissoji died of stomach cancer on November 29th, aged 69. In the mid-1960s, while working for Tokyo Broadcasting System, he created the TV series Ultraman and Ultra Seven with special effects expert Eiji Tsuburaya. He later formed his own production company, and his films include Ultraman (1979), Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, Silver Mask, A Watcher in the Attic, Murder on D Street and the omnibus Rampo Noir (the latter three titles based on stories by Edogawa Rampo).

  Independent American writer, producer and director Don Dohler died of cancer on December 2nd, aged 60. Inspired by reading Famous Monsters of Filmland, he started making his own films at the age of twelve
. His later credits include The Alien Factor, Fiend, Nightbeast, The Galaxy Invader, Blood Massacre and The Alien Factor 2: Alien Rampage. Dohler also scripted and produced Harvesters, Stakes, Crawler and Vampire Sisters. He was the founding editor of Cinemagic magazine, which published eleven issues between 1972–79.

  83-year-old record producer Ahmet Ertegun, founder of the Atlantic Records label, died on December 14th, after falling and injuring his head at a Rolling Stones concert at New York’s Beacon Theatre on October 29th. In 1947 he borrowed $10,000 to start Atlantic Records, whose artists included Dizzy Gillespie, The Drifters, Bill Haley and the Comets, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Buffalo Springfield and Bobby Darin (Ertegun produced his recording of “Mack the Knife”).

  Joseph Barbera, who co-founded the animation studio Hanna-Barbera with William Hanna (who died in 2001), died on December 18th, aged 90. Joining forces at MGM in 1937, the team won seven Academy Awards for their work on Tom and Jerry cartoons before setting up their own production company in 1957 to cater for television. Starting with Ruff and Ready that same year, they churned out around 300 cartoon series, including The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Yogi Bear Show, The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons, The Adventures ofjonny Quest, Abbott & Costello, Space Ghost, Frankenstein Jr and the Impossibles, Scooby-Doo Where Are You!, The Funky Phantom, Sealab 2020 and numerous others, eventually winning eight Emmy Awards. In recent years, many shows originally created by Hanna-Barbera have been turned into big-budget movies with varying success. Barbera’s autobiography, My Life in Toons, was published in 1994.