Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  The fifth season of the BBC’s Wolfblood found the pack about to lose their alpha, Jana (Leona Vaughan), until they discovered they had a traitor in their midst, and the sixth and final season of MTV’s Teen Wolf kicked off with “True Alpha” Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) and his pack searching for the missing Stiles, who was trapped inside the Wild Hunt, while protecting their friends from the Ghost Riders.

  The six-episode second season of the Australian Cleverman found the mythological “Hairies” being persecuted by a near-future human government.

  Adam Scott’s nerdy scientist and Craig Robinson’s ex-cop were teamed up by the top-secret Bureau Underground, led by Ally Walker’s acerbic Captain Lafrey, to battle supernatural and paranormal threats in Fox’s Ghosted. Adeel Akhtar and Amber Stevens West added solid support to the often silly half-hour comedy show.

  John C. McGinley’s alcoholic ex-cop and Janet Varney’s small-town sheriff continued to battle witches, ghosts and demons while travelling back and forth through time in the second season of the half-hour comedy series Stan Against Evil on IFC. Genre veterans Jeffrey Combs and Patty McCormack guest-starred.

  The opening episode of Sky Arts’ second series of three new Halloween Comedy Shorts featured veteran actress Sheila Reid as a woman who claimed to see the future.

  To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the BBC’s The League of Gentlemen returned for three new episodes in December, as creators Mark Gatiss, Jeremy Dyson, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith caught up with the decidedly odd inhabitants of Royston Vasey.

  Meanwhile, the third series of Shearsmith and Pemberton’s Inside No.9 on BBC2 featured five more off-kilter stories with a twist at the end. Episodes featured the two creators along with such guest stars as Philip Glenister, Alexandra Roach, Tamzin Outhwaite, Keeley Hawes, Muriel Gray, Peter Kay, Felicity Kendal, Montserrat Lombard and Fiona Shaw.

  In the second season of Adult Swim’s Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter, John Glaser’s eponymous one-eyed hero had to save mankind over five half-hour episodes, while Jenna Elfman played a woman whose childhood imaginary friend (voiced by Rachel Dratch) returned when she started dating a divorced dad in the ABC sit-com Imaginary Mary. It only lasted nine episodes.

  The titular Toronto detective (Yannick Bisson) encountered a teenaged Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Tyler East) in an episode of CBC’s cosy Murdoch’s Mysteries. Other episodes revolved around a murderer who claimed he was possessed and a mysterious youth tonic.

  Pop singer Rihanna turned up as the ill-fated Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh in the 1960 movie Psycho) in the fifth and final season of A&E Television Networks’ prequel series Bates Motel, which ended with Norma Bates (Vera Farmiga) and her lover Alex Romero (Nestor Carbonell) ending up dead, along with serial killer Norman (Freddie Highmore) a major betrayal of Robert Bloch’s novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie.

  The seventh and final season of Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars finally revealed who the real “A.D.” was.

  Fifty-one years after Gene Roddenberry’s seminal SF show debuted on NBC, the prequel Star Trek: Discovery followed the crew of the eponymous Starfleet warship. These included rebellious First Officer Michael Burman (Sonequa Martin-Green), mysterious Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), alien Commander Saru (Doug Jones) and Lieutenant Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) as they literally went where no crew had been before while battling the Klingon Empire. Rainn Wilson also turned up as “Harry Mudd”. The first two-part episode debuted on CBS in September, before the series moved over to the digital subscription service CBS All Access in the US.

  More Star Trek: The Next Generation than Stark Trek: Discovery, the Fox Network’s The Orville saw Captain Ed Mercer (creator Seth MacFarlane) and his motley crew (including Adrianne Palicki, Scott Grimes and Penny Johnson Jerald) boldly going where everybody had gone before in the titular exploratory starship. Despite such interesting guest stars as Charlize Theron, Rob Lowe, Jeffrey Tambor, Victor Garber, Steven Culp, Brian Thompson and a reportedly uncredited Liam Neeson, this pastiche charted an uneasy course between comedy and drama.

  The first season of NBC’s Timeless featured the time-travelling team encountering such historical figures as Jesse James, Ernest Hemingway and Al Capone in their pursuit of Goran Visnjic’s time-tampering villain.

  Eric McCormack’s FBI special agent led a team comprising some of the last surviving humans from the future, who sent their consciousness back in time to possess recently-dead bodies so that they could correct the problems that created their dystopia in Netflix’s Travelers.

  Based on the 1979 cult movie, Time After Time was created by co-executive producer Kevin Williamson and starred Josh Bowman as Jack the Ripper, pursued through time from 1893 to present-day New York by Freddie Stroma’s hot young H.G. Wells. ABC ran just five of the twelve episodes before pulling the show from its schedule.

  A mother (Paula Patton) travelled back into the past to try to prevent the murder of her eight-year-old daughter by a serial killer in ABC’s ten-part Somewhere Between.

  Although The CW wisely cancelled the ham radio time-travel thriller Frequency in January, after just one season, nearly four months later the network released a four-minute epilogue that brought the show to a tidy conclusion.

  Elisabeth Moss’ fertility surrogate Offred/June found herself living in the home of Joseph Fiennes’ creepy patriarch in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian, puritan near-future America, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s grim ten-episode adaptation of the1985 dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood (who had a cameo in the opening episode).

  Previously filmed as a movie in 1990, the book became one of the UK’s best-selling fiction paperbacks in 2017 thanks to the popularity of the TV series.

  Meanwhile, the BBC’s five-part series SS-GB was based on Len Deighton’s 1978 novel, set in an alternate 1941 London where the Nazis had won the Battle of Britain. Sam Riley played a Scotland Yard detective forced to work for his German masters.

  The second season of the USA Network’s Colony started with a look back to the first day of the invasion before returning to the present timeline, where Will and Katie Bowman (Josh Holloway and Sarah Wayne Callies) discovered they were on opposite sides of the struggle as they attempted to keep their family safe after a near-future alien occupation.

  Following the revelation that their town was under attack from thawed prehistoric insects in Season 1, Dennis Quaid starred in the second series of Sky Atlantic’s Fortitude, which found the remote Arctic community plunged into the middle of another series of gory murders as Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer) went through a disturbing transformation.

  First shown on Japanese TV in 2016, the incredibly gory six-episode Crow’s Blood involved some questionable scientific experiments in regeneration based around pupils at the International Dolly Girls’ College.

  Having come to a natural conclusion at the end of Season 2, CBS’ Zoo returned for a completely unecessary third season set in a dystopian near-future, as an army of mutated “hybrids” threatened to wipe-out an already sterilised humankind.

  Season 2 of AMC’s Into the Badlands found its characters still trying to survive in a feudal, post-apocalyptic America.

  The second season of BBC America’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency found Dirk (Samuel Barnett), Todd (Elijah Wood) and Farah (Jade Eshete) reunited again and teaming up with the unpredictable Amanda (the wonderful Fiona Dourif) to solve a cold case that led them all into a magical realm.

  BBC America’s fan favourite Orphan Black ended after five seasons, as Sarah and her #CloneClub “sestras” (all portrayed by Tatiana Meslany) finally made their stand against the sinister Neolution movement and its 170-year-old founder (Stephen McHattie).

  Executive produced by actor Bryan Cranston, Electric Dreams was an hour-long anthology show inspired by the stories of Philip K. Dick. Despite an ensemble cast that included Cranston, Steve Buscemi, Geraldine Chaplin, Timothy Spall, Anna Paquin, Greg Kinnear, Juno Temple, Maura Tierney, Liam Cun
ningham, Julia Davis, Vera Farmiga, Lara Pulver and Tuppence Middleton, the results were a decidedly mixed bag, although when it was good it was very good. The first six episodes were shown on Channel 4 in late 2017, with the remaining four scheduled for the following year.

  The second Netflix series of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror featured an unexpected Star Trek parody, robot dogs, a tribute to the Amicus horror anthologies and an episode directed by Jodie Foster.

  Hulu’s six-part anthology series Dimension 404 was narrated by Mark Hamill and apparently inspired by the 1980s Twilight Zone with appearances by Tom Noonan, Charles Fleischer, Ken Foree, Joel McHale, Megan Mullally and Adrienne Barbeau.

  Created by Jay and Mark Duplass, HBO’s anthology series Room 104 featured twelve offbeat stories set in the same motel room.

  The Netflix fan favourite Sense8—about a number of chracters connected mentally with each other around the world—was cancelled after the second season.

  The inhabitants of Arkadia had to deal with an apocalyptic radiation death-wave in The CW’s thirteen-part, fourth season of The 100, which had now developed well beyond its original concept, and the Earth had just six months before it was destroyed by an asteroid in CBS’ thirteen-episode conspiracy series Salvation.

  Shades of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea! Having saved America at the end of Season 3, Commander Tom Chandler (Eric Dane) and the crew of the Nathan James found themselves dealing with another global threat, this time from Peter Weller’s mad scientist, in TNT’s redundant fourth season of The Last Ship.

  The finale of Dave’s twelfth series of Red Dwarf found hologram Rimmer (Chris Barrie) and his fellow crew members experiencing a tear in time, thus allowing Norman Lovett to return as “Holly”, eighteen years after he last played the role, and Mac McDonald to reprise the part of “Captain Hollister” for the first time since 1999. Comedian Johnny Vegas guest-starred in an earlier episode.

  In the half-hour ITV2 comedy series Timewasters, a struggling jazz quartet from South London was transported by an elevator back in time to 1926. Guest stars included Nigel Havers and Nigel Planer.

  In the fourth season of Fox’s half-hour comedy series The Last Man on Earth, the apocalypse survivors travelled to Mexico, while Josh Hutcherson’s janitor by day and gamer by night found himself recruited by visitors from the future to travel back and forth through time to save humanity in Hulu’s half-hour comedy series Future Man. Ed Begley, Jr, and the late Glenne Headley co-starred, and Seth Rogan co-directed three of the thirteen episodes, including the pilot.

  Season 3 of The CW’s The Flash concluded with a member of Team Flash sacrificing themselves so that Barry (Grant Gustin) could prevent Savitar (voiced by Tobin Bell), his vengeful doppelgänger from the future, from killing Iris (Candice Patton). The fourth season introduced a new villain, DeVoe aka “The Thinker” (Neil Sandilands), and Hartley Sawyer joined the team as Ralph Dibny aka The Elongated Man. Danny Trejo also turned up as a bounty hunter from an alternate Earth.

  The sixth season of the same network’s increasingly grim Arrow ended with Stephen Amell’s Oliver Queen teaming up with a group of old foes to finally take down whiny villain Prometheus/Adrian Chase (Josh Segarra). That threat was soon replaced in Season 7 by an alternate Earth’s Black Siren (Katie Cassidy) and computer genius Cayden James (Michael Emerson), who wanted to hold Star City to ransom.

  The second season of The CW’s Supergirl found the Girl of Steel (Melissa Benoist) battling such super-villains as Livewire (Brit Morgan), Metallo (Frederick Schmidt), Mr. Mxyzptik (Peter Gaidot) and Music Meister (Darren Kris). Calista Flockhart’s Cat Grant returned for a couple of episodes, Tyler Hoechlin was back as Superman, and the inspired stunt casting included 1990s TV Lois Lane Teri Hatcher (Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman), Kevin Sorbo (Hercules: Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) and Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman).

  Season 3 of Supergirl introduced a new threat in the form of “World Killer” Reign (Odette Annable) and another TV Lois Lane, Erica Durance, turned up in several episodes as Supergirl’s Kryptonian mother.

  DC’s Legends of Tomorrow still refused to take itself seriously, as the disparate team of time travellers finally managed to defeat the Legion of Doom with the help of a young J.R.R. Tolkien (Jack Turner) and the Spear of Destiny at the end of Season 2 on The CW. The third season opened with the Legends falling foul of the Time Bureau for breaking time, and in a later episode they were on the trail of a time-travelling vampire in 1895 London.

  All The CW shows based on DC Comics characters included cross-over episodes, including the epic four-part ‘Crisis on Earth-X’ (featuring all the heroes from the various shows and a cameo by William Katt from The Greatest American Hero).

  Edward Nygma (Cory Michael Smith) finally became the Riddler in the third season (‘Heroes Rise’) of Gotham, the Fox Network’s Batman prequel series, as the Court of Owls planned to destroy the city and Alexander Siddig joined the cast as Ra’s al Ghul.

  NBC’s Powerless was a half-hour workplace comedy also set in the DC universe. The staff of a Wayne Corp. subsidiary created products to prevent innocent bystanders from being injured by superheroes and villains. The twelve-episode series included guest appearances by Adam West, Corbin Bernsen and Marc McClure, before the network pulled the final three episodes from airing and cancelled the show.

  The Fox Network’s The Gifted was set at an indeterminate time in the X-Men universe, as a couple (Stephen Moyer and Amy Acker) discovered that their two children had mutant power. They soon found themselves on the run from a distrustful government’s Sentinel Services and teaming up with a super-powered Mutant Underground.

  The utterly bonkers Legion was to Marvel what Preacher was to DC, as Dan Stevens’ schizophrenic patient discovered that his often psychedelic visions were manifestations of his mutant powers. The FX Network’s eight-episode series was based on an X-Men spin-off by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz.

  A group of teens got back together to investigate a friend’s death and discovered that their privileged parents were all members of a sinister resurrection cult in Marvel’s Runaways on Hulu. Based on the comic book series created by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, Buffy’s James Marsters turned up as a sinister scientist named “Victor Stein”.

  Having successfully escaped an AI parallel universe where Hydra ruled, and with the help of Ghost Rider having thwarted renegade robot Aida’s plans to destroy the world, the fifth season of ABC’s convoluted Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. unwisely moved the action into outer space, as Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team found themselves trapped with the remnants of humanity on a far-future spaceship controlled by the alien Kree.

  And then there was the S.H.I.E.L.D. spin-off Inhumans, which thankfully lasted for just eight turgid episodes before it was cancelled. Based on the Marvel comic series created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, a group of superhumans living on the dark side of the Moon and led by their dull king Black Bolt (Anson Mount) were teleported by a big dog to Hawaii after his evil brother Maximus (Iwan Rheon, channelling his Game of Thrones character) seized power. A month before the show debuted on ABC, the first two episodes were released as a movie in selected IMAX theatres across America.

  Over on Netflix, Finn Jones’ billionaire Danny Rand used mystical martial arts to fight New York’s criminal underworld in Iron Fist, based on the 1970s Marvel comics character created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane.

  Jones was back on Netflix later in the year for Marvel’s eight-episode The Defenders, which teamed Rand up with Daredevil (Charlie Cox), Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) and Luke Cage (Mike Colter) to battle an evil underworld organisation led by Sigourney Weaver’s villainous Alexandra.

  Meanwhile, Jon Bernthal spun his anti-hero Frank Castle from Daredevil off into Netflix’s sixteen-part series The Punisher, as the ruthless vigilante confronted his past.

  The second season of Stan Lee’s Lucky Man on Sky 1 saw police detective Harry Clayton (Jame
s Nesbitt) encountering a mysterious woman (Thekla Reuten) with an identical magic Chinese bracelet which she used for selfish reasons, no matter what the consequences were.

  Amazon Prime’s revival of The Tick starred Griffin Newman as an average accountant who teamed up with the eponymous blue-suited hero (Peter Serafinowicz) to battle supervillain The Terror (Jackie Earle Haley).

  The OA was a Netflix Original. The eight mismatched episodes (with various running times) began with a blind girl (Brit Marling), who had been missing for seven years, turning up older and able to see. Only her name was now “the OA” (“Original Angel”), and that was only the first of many mysteries surrounding her. Guest stars included Scott Wilson, Alice Krige, and Jason Isaacs as a creepy scientist.

  The approaching anniversary of the “Sudden Departure” heralded a global apocalypse in the third and final season of HBO’s The Leftovers, which ran for just eight episodes and was mostly set in Australia, three years after the previous series.

  Following a lacklustre sixth season that featured a musical wedding episode and saw ratings fall, ABC’s Once Upon a Time went through something of a reboot for Season 7 as the story picked up six years later with a grown-up Henry (Andrew J. West) living under a curse in the new neighbourhood of Hyperion Heights. Although most of the original cast had departed following the natural conclusion to the previous season, Colin O’Donoghue’s Hook, Lana Parrilla’s Regina and Robert Carlyle’s Rumplestiltskin were all still around in new personas.

  NBC decided to give L. Frank Baum’s classic Wizard of Oz books another misguided make-over with Tarsem Singh’s ten-episode re-imagining Emerald City, as Adria Arjona’s troubled millennial set out on a journey of self-discovery with the help or hindrance of, amongst others, Glinda the Good (Joely Richardson), the Wicked Witch of the West (Florence Kasumba) and the Wizard himself (Vincent D’Onofrio).

  After Eve’s betrayal and the storming of The Library by General Cynthia Rockwell and her black ops team at the end of Season 3, TNT’s The Librarians was quickly back to normal for its fourth season, as Flynn (Noah Wyle) and his companions set out to prevent a secret sect of the Vatican Church from locating the seven cornerstones of the Library of Alexandria, amongst other magical threats.