The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  Kim Newman and James Lovegrove supplied the forewords to the fourth volumes of, respectively, Chamber of Chills and Witches Tales, the latest titles in PS ArtBooks’ “Harvey Horrors” series of comic-strip reprints.

  Roy Thomas Presents was a new series that began with The Heap Volume One, a reprint collection of the 1940s monster comic strip with a personal and historical introduction by Thomas.

  From the same imprint, The Casebook of Bryant and May: The Soho Devil! was a hardcover graphic novel written by Christopher Fowler and illustrated by Keith Page.

  Compiled by comic book historian Tim Pilcher, The Little Book of Vintage Horror from ILEX featured full-colour covers, pages and strips from Adventures Into the Unknown, Forbidden Worlds, This Magazine is Haunted and other pre-code titles, along with a free fridge magnet. Companion volumes covered Sci-Fi, Crime, Combat, Romance and Sauciness.

  For fans of pre-code horror, Yoe Comics/IDW launched Haunted Horror, which reprinted a number of stories in a regular comic book format.

  Through interviews with more than 150 insiders, Sean Howe looked at the stories behind the history in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

  A gillman monster was influenced by the torn pages from Shakespeare he found inside a bottle in Jonathan Case’s Dear Creature from Tor Books.

  Judge Dredd: Cry of the Werewolf from Rebellion collected four strips dating from 1983–2010.

  Road Rage from IDW was a four-issue adaptation of the novella by Stephen King and Joe Hill, inspired by Richard Matheson’s Duel.

  Steve Niles wrote the sequel to Mary Shelley’s novel and the great Bernie Wrightson illustrated it in IDW’s Frankenstein Alive, Alive! while the same imprint also re-launched Godzilla and Mars Attacks titles.

  Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom from Arcana Studio was a child-friendly sequel to co-writer Bruce Brown’s Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom. It involved the youthful protagonist and his tentacled pet Spot travelling to the planet of Yuggoth.

  Veteran illustrator Ernie Colon adapted four stories from the 1940s radio show for NBM’s Inner Sanctum, while Richard Corben illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s The Conqueror Worm for Dark Horse.

  The same publisher also revived Warren’s Eerie title from the 1970s with a mixture of new and reprint material.

  Dynamic Entertainment’s Vampirella vs. Dracula was actually a sequel to a 1997 story by Alan Moore while, in another major cross-over, Vampirella teamed up with Barnabas Collins to battle Jack the Ripper and Elizabeth Bathory in the Dark Shadows/Vampirella series.

  Killings in a small Minnesota town were committed by a werewolf in Avatar Press’s Ferals, and Bluewater Comics’ Dorian Gray was an updated version of Oscar Wilde’s original.

  The Infernal Man-Thing from Marvel was a three-part series based on an unpublished script by the late Steve Gerber.

  Comics writer Dan Slott received death threats after killing off Peter Parker at the arms of Doctor Octopus in the 700th and final issue of Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man in December. However, it was announced that the narrative would continue in a new title, Superior Spider-Man.

  In an ironic twist of fate, the original cheque for $130 with which Detective Comics (later DC) bought all rights to Superman from creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold at auction in April for $160,000.

  Battleship by Peter David, Snow White and the Huntsman by Lily Blake and Resident Evil: Retribution by John Shirley were all original movie tie-ins.

  Gareth Roberts’s Doctor Who: Shada: The Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams was based on the unproduced TV scripts by Adams. Other tie-ins to the show included Doctor Who: Magic of the Angels by Jacqueline Rayner, Doctor Who: Dark Horizons by J. T. Colgan and Doctor Who: The Wheel of Ice by Stephen Baxter.

  BBC Books also reissued a number of Doctor Who novelisations from the 1970s that featured additional material, including new introductions by Michael Moorcock, Alastair Reynolds, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Tom MacRae and Gary Russell.

  The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga was the second in the series set in the world of the comics and TV series, while Nancy Holder’s Teen Wolf: On Fire was based on the MTV show.

  The Vampire Diaries: Stefan’s Diaries 5: The Asylum and 6: The Compelled were the latest uncredited tie-ins to L. J. Smith’s YA books and the TV series created by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec.

  Meanwhile, The Vampire Diaries: The Hunters, Vol. 2: Moonsong and Vol. 3: Destiny Rising were the second and third volumes, respectively, in the uncredited spin-off series The Hunters, also based on Smith’s original books.

  The Secret Circle: The Divide and The Secret Circle: The Hunt, both by Aubrey Clarke, were based on another YA book series created by Smith and were tie-ins to the already-cancelled TV show.

  S. D. Perry’s Resident Evil: Caliban, Resident Evil: City of the Dead and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy were all set in the world of the video game franchise, while Nate Kenyon’s Diablo III: The Order was based on a computer game.

  Arkham Horror: The Lies of Solace by John French was the second book in the Lord of Nightmares gaming trilogy, and Graham McNeill’ s Arkham Horror: Bones of the Yopasi was the second in the Dark Waters trilogy.

  Lisi Harrison’s Monster High 4: Back and Deader Than Ever was the fourth book in a series based on a range of Mattel dolls.

  The usual slew of new film titles from McFarland & Company included Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture: A Thematic Analysis of Recent Depictions by Kimberly McMahon-Coleman and Roslyn Weaver, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia Volume Two: 2000–2010 by Peter Dendle, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film by Adam Rockoff, Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography by Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio, Caroline Munro, First Lady of Fantasy by Robert Michael “Bob” Cotter with a foreword by the actress herself, Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan by Rob Craig, American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films 1913–1929 by John T. Soister, Henry Nicoletta, Steve Joyce, Harry H. Long and Bill Chase, Character Actors in Horror and Science Fiction Films 1930–1960 by Laurence Raw, Australian Horror Films 1973–2010 by Peter Shelley and Regional Horror Films 1959–1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews by Brian Albright.

  From the same imprint, Now a Terrifying Motion Picture: Twenty-Five Classic Works of Horror Adapted from Book to Film by James F. Broderick was an idiosyncratic selection of filmed fiction that included chapters on The Amityville Horror, The Birds, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Exorcist, The Fly, Frankenstein, Ghost Story, Jaws, The Masque of the Red Death and The Night Stalker.

  Published by BearManor Media, Invasion of the Body Snatchers: The Making of a Classic by Mark Thomas McGee was a look behind-the-scenes at the 1956 movie.

  Unfortunately, the imprint also thought they could just rip-off old movie tie-ins if they couldn’t trace the copyright holders. As a result, they issued what were basically pirated editions of Bride of Frankenstein, Brides of Dracula, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, The Raven and The Revenge of Frankenstein, featuring new material “edited” by Philip J. Riley.

  More positively, Riley and BearManor also put out a series of books under the Filmonster imprint based on unproduced Universal movie scripts, including versions of Cagliostro starring Boris Karloff, Frankenstein and Dracu-la’s Daughter starring Bela Lugosi, and The Wolf Man vs Dracula with Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr.

  The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies: An A–Z Guide to Over Sixty Years of Blood and Guts by Peter Normanton was a guide to around 250 films from more than twenty countries. The trade paperback also included a full list of the “video nasties” that the UK government tried to ban.

  David Konow’s Reel Terror was a look at 100 years of horror movies, while Blair Davis charted the rise of the genre second feature in The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema.

  Edited by Richard Christian Matheson for Gauntlet Press, Stephen King’s Battleground was a commemorat
ive volume of the Emmy Award-winning TV adaptation scripted by Matheson himself for the premiere episode of TNT’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes.

  In Un-Dead TV: The Ultimate Guide to Vampire Television, Brad Middleton listed vampires in small-screen series, movies, episodes and documentaries. Vampire expert J. Gordon Melton contributed a foreword.

  Edited by Wayne Yuen for Carus Publishing/Open Court, The Walking Dead and Philosophy contained twenty essays about the philosophical concepts to be found in the comics and TV series.

  Mark Cotta Vaz wrote Breaking Dawn Part 1: The Official Illustrated Movie Companion.

  After protecting their fast-growing but ludicrously named vampire daughter Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy) from the villainous Volturi, a trick ending failed to save the boring protagonists of Bill Condon’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 from all living happily ever after. The fifth and final film in the fatuous franchise had a depressing $141 million debut and went on to gross $751 million world-wide after just four weeks, making it the most successful Twilight entry of all time.

  For an audience too young to remember its numerous SF precedents, Gary Ross’s version of Suzanne Collins’s best-selling YA novel The Hunger Games featured Jennifer Lawrence as a teenager forced to compete in televised fight-to-the-death tournaments in a dystopian future. Older members of the cast included Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz and Donald Sutherland.

  The film became the third-biggest opener at the time when it took $152.5 million (£100 million) at the US boxoffice over its first weekend in March, making it the highest-grossing opening of any “non-sequel”. Outside America, where the books are less well known, the movie did not perform quite so spectacularly, but in the US it managed to out-gross all the Twilight and Harry Potter movies.

  Finally bringing together Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and a bunch of other heroes nobody cares about, Joss Whedon’s 3-D The Avengers (bizarrely retitled Marvel Avengers Assemble! in the UK to stop it being confused with the 1960s TV series) opened to an incredible $207.4 million (£123.7 million) at the US box-office in May, breaking all previous opening-weekend records. The film also became the first movie to reach $150 million in only two days, $200 million in three days and $450 million in seventeen days. It went on to become only the third film (along with James Cameron’s Avatar and Titanic) to pass the $600 million mark in domestic release.

  Meanwhile, Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man was a likeable 3-D reboot of the recent franchise (last seen in 2007) that was aimed at the chick-flick market and recast British actor Andrew Garfield as the angst-ridden web-slinger. At least a subdued Rhys Ifans was on hand as mutant reptilian villain The Lizard.

  Five years after he last played the role, Nicholas Cage was back as Marvel’s motorcycle-riding avenger battling Ciarán Hinds’s suave Satan in 3-D in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance which, if anything, was more bonkers than the original.

  Christian Bale’s sombre Batman battled Tom Hardy’s masked terrorist Bane and teamed up with Anne Hatha-way’s slinky cat burglar Selina Kyle/Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, the $250 million concluding chapter in Christopher Nolan’s revisionist trilogy.

  Tragically, a masked gunman went on a rampage at a midnight screening of the film in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, and used legally purchased semi-automatic weapons to kill twelve people and injure fifty-eight more. As a consequence, the film’s remaining premieres around the world were cancelled, advertising was pulled, and the studio decided not to announce box-office figures during that opening weekend.

  It subsequently emerged that The Dark Knight Rises took $160.9 million at the domestic box-office over its inaugural weekend. Although this was the best debut ever for a non-3-D movie and the third-best weekend at the time, it still fell below industry expectations. The film went on to take $300 million domestically in just twelve days, with only The Avengers and The Dark Knight getting there faster.

  In Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the highly-anticipated prequel to Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen, recreating his role) enlisted Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his band of fellow hobbits in a quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the dragon Smaug. The first in a trilogy, it also featured Andy Serkis’s Gollum and blink-and-you’ll-miss- ’em cameos by Ian Holm, Elijah Wood, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett and Christopher Lee.

  Meanwhile, J. R. R. Tolkien’s estate and publisher HarperCollins sued Warner Bros, New Line and the Saul Zaentz Company for $80 million (£50 million) for causing “irreparable harm” to the author’s legacy and reputation by registering various trademarks “to which they are not entitled”, including a Lord of the Rings online slot machine. The case dates back to the granting of merchandising rights in 1969 (with amendments in 1975 and 1981).

  Having excised “of Mars” from the advertising for reportedly commercial considerations (it’s still on the end titles), Disney’s overlong $250 million version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter starred former fashion model Taylor Kitsch as the titular Confederate Civil War hero accidentally transported to the red planet. After costing $250 million to make and around a further $100 million in distribution fees and marketing, the movie opened in the US to a disastrous $30.2 million weekend gross and went on to take around $184 million world-wide, making it the most expensive movie flop in history.

  Kitsch was also one of the stars of Peter Berg’s $209 million alien invasion movie Battleship (along with Liam Neeson and singer Rihanna), which was based on the board game from Hasbro, who were also responsible for the Transformers franchise. It had the worst US opening ever for a picture costing at least $200 million.

  A crew of scientists (including Charlize Theron, Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender’s sardonic cyborg) found themselves stranded on a distant planet that held the answer to mankind’s origin in Ridley Scott’s epic 3-D prequel-of-sorts Prometheus, which was set in the same universe as the director’s classic Alien.

  A futuristic assassin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was hired to kill his older self (Bruce Willis) in Rian Johnson’s twisty time-travel thriller Looper.

  Fifteen years after the first film and a decade since the forgettable sequel, Will Smith’s Agent J travelled back in time to 1969 to save a young Agent K (Josh Brolin, expertly channelling Tommy Lee Jones) from an alien assassination plot in Barry Sonnenfeld’s reportedly troubled 3-D Men in Black 3.

  Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel were the stars of Total Recall, Len Wiseman’s schlocky $125 million remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, also based on the novel by Philip K. Dick.

  Meanwhile, Karl Urban was the future cop who dispensed extremely rough justice in Mega City One in the 3-D Dredd which, like the 1995 film starring Sylvester Stallone, was based on the British comic strip Judge Dredd.

  The addition of 3-D and a CGI Yoda added little to the re-release of the 1999 misfire Star Wars Episode One – The Phantom Menace, as George Lucus looked to wring every last cent out of the franchise.

  He need not have worried – in October, Lucas agreed to sell his production company, Lucasfilm Ltd., to Disney for $4.05 billion (£2.5 billion) in cash and stock, thus paving the way for the Mouse House to immediately announce three more Star Wars sequels with Lucas serving as “creative consultant”. The new Episode VII is due to be released in 2015.

  Sam Worthington returned as Perseus, who travelled to the Underworld to rescue his father Zeus (Liam Neeson), in the unexpected 3-D sequel Wrath of the Titans.

  Directed by Drew Goddard, who co-wrote the script with producer Joss Whedon, The Cabin in the Woods defied audience expectations as five college kids explored the titular fright-house. The film, which featured future Thor star Chris Hemsworth, was originally shot in 2009 but delayed after the bankruptcy of original studio MGM.

  Hemsworth also led a band of attractive young Americans defending their country agains
t an invasion by North Korea in Red Dawn, an updated remake of the 1984 film.

  As nobody seemed to remember the 1989 TV movie scripted by Nigel Kneale, Hammer remade Susan Hill’s 1983 novel The Woman in Black starring a post-Potter Daniel Radcliffe as a widowed lawyer stuck in a haunted house in Yorkshire.

  Unbelievably, according to the British Board of Film Classification, it became the most complained-about film of the year in the UK, as more than 120 idiots protested that it was “scary and sinister” and not what they were expecting from a 12A-rated film starring Radcliffe. Apparently they failed to notice from the publicity that it was a horror movie.

  Co-written by Seth Grahame-Smith and based on his own best-selling 2010 mash-up novel, the future sixteenth US President (Benjamin Walker) battled Rufus Sewell’s secret Southern cabal of bloodsuckers in Timur Bekmambe-tov’s 3-D Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, produced by Tim Burton.

  Also lazily scripted by Grahame-Smith, Burton’s own Dark Shadows was a stylish re-imagining of the 1960s TV soap opera, with Johnny Depp as 200-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins, out of his depth in the modern world of 1972. The formidable supporting cast included Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green and even Alice Cooper.

  John Cusack’s alcoholic Edgar Allan Poe teamed up with a local detective (Luke Evans) to track down a serial killer who used the author’s stories as inspiration in James McTeigue’s curiously muted The Raven.

  Anthony Hopkins portrayed the director of Psycho in Hitchcock, which also featured Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Helen Mirren as the director’s long-suffering wife Alma.

  Inspired by the video game franchise, Michael J. Bassett’s Silent Hill: Revelation in 3-D was a belated Hallowe’en sequel that nobody wanted featuring Malcolm McDowell, Carrie-Anne Moss and a returning Sean Bean.

  Milla Jovovich was back kicking monster and mutant zombie arse across a series of virtual realities in her husband Paul W. S. Anderson’s 3-D Resident Evil: Retribution. Previous cast members Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr and Colin Salmon also returned in the fifth movie in the videogame-inspired franchise, which opened at #1 in the US.