Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  Following the 2004 movie starring Jim Carrey, Neil Patrick Harris took over the role of scheming master of disguise Count Olaf in Netflix’s eight-part A Series of Unfortunate Events, based on the popular YA book series by “Lemony Snicket” (Daniel Handler). Barry Sonnenfeld directed four episodes and co-executive produced.

  The second season of Freeform’s Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments, based on the YA books by Cassandra Clare, found its cast of young demon-hunters discovering a traitor in their midst while confronting a possible uprising by the Downworlders.

  The second, ten-part season of The Shannara Chronicles, based on the series of books by Terry Brooks, moved over from MTV to Spike and was set a year after the War of the Forbidding.

  Syfy’s The Magicians, adapted from Lev Grossman’s YA book series, returned for a more adult-themed, thirteen-part second season as Quentin (Jason Ralph) and his magical friends had to come to terms with Julia’s (Stella Maeve) deal with “The Beast”, aka Martin Chatwin (Charles Mesure).

  In a surprising Season 1 finale, the selfish Eleanor (Kristen Bell) discovered that she and her new friends Chidi (William Jackson Harper) and Tahani (Jameela Jamil) were actually in The Bad Place in NBC’s smart fantasy comedy The Good Place. The second season opened with the duplicitous Michael (Ted Danson) erasing everyone’s memories of that hellish fact.

  Fashioned around the making of a 1978 documentary, FX Network’s eight-part Feud: Bette and Joan was Ryan Murphy’s semi-fictional look at the on- and off-screen rivalry between Hollywood superstars Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis (a perfectly cast Susan Sarandon), set against the making of such movies as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Strait-Jacket, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte and, incredibly, Trog. The terrific supporting cast included Judy Davis (Hedda Hopper), Alfred Molina (Robert Aldrich), Stanley Tucci (Jack Warner), Dominic Burgess (Victor Buono), Kathy Bates (Joan Blondell), John Rubinstein (George Cukor), Sarah Paulson (Geraldine Page), David A. Kimball (Freddie Francis) and John Walters (William Castle).

  Unfortunately, despite having been made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s 2017 Birthday Honours list (the oldest-ever person to achieve the distinction), 101-year-old screen legend Olivia de Havilland decided to sue over Catherine Zeta-Jones’ portrayal of her in the series. The case was subsequently thrown out by both a California appeals court and the US Supreme Court on first amendment grounds.

  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was also the basis for one of a trio of scary stories told in the by-now-traditional Hallowe’en episode of the BBC daytime soap opera, Doctors, in which three of the surgery staff revealed their greatest fears to each other. The other two tales involved a cannibal revenge and a deal with the Devil. In another episode of the show earlier in the year, a security guard apparently encountered a ghost in a reputedly haunted building on campus.

  Robert Patrick’s team of geniuses took on a case where they investigated the existence of ghosts on the Queen Mary in the Halloween episode of CBS’ Scorpion. The Christmas episode was yet another variation on It’s a Wonderful Life, set in a dream-world where Team Scorpion never existed.

  Mark Williams’ genial clergyman investigated the murder of a member of a pagan community, the supposed ghost of a 300-year-old alchemist and an alien invasion of Kembleford in the fifth season of the BBC’s Father Brown, which by now had strayed a long way from G.K. Chesterton’s original.

  On Christmas Eve, BBC4 hosted “Ghost Story Night”, which included repeats of Mark Gatiss’ disappointing version of M.R. James’ The Tractate Middoth (2013), such other recent James adaptations as A View from a Hill (2005) and No.13 (2006), two episodes of Christopher Lee’s Ghost Stories for Christmas (‘The Stalls of Barchester’ and ‘A Warning to the Curious’), along with Gatiss’ documentary M.R. James: Ghost Writer and the 1976 version of Charles Dickens’ The Signalman starring Denholm Elliott.

  The anthology series Creeped Out was a surprisingly spooky UK/Canadian co-production created by Bede Blake and Robert Butler and aimed at young children. Linked by a genuinely unnerving bobble-headed figure known as “The Curious”, each episode was like a juvenile Black Mirror, as youngsters fell foul of an evil Punch and Judy show, a legendary monster living across the road, a possessive mobile phone, a mysterious well and other teenage terrors.

  Bella Ramsey starred as the accident-prone magic student in the UK/German co-production The Worst Witch, which aired over thirteen episodes on CBBC. The cast also included Clare Higgins, Wendy Craig, Amanda Holden and Anita Dobson.

  Netflix’s four-part animated Castlevania was based on the Nintendo video game of the same name, as vampire-hunter Trevor Belmont (voiced by Richard Armitage) took on a vengeful Dracula (voiced by Graham McTavish) and his army of demonic creatures.

  David Tennant was the voice of “Scrooge McDuck” in Disney XD’s revival of the 1980s cartoon series DuckTales. His old Doctor Who companion, Catherine Tate, voiced the vengeful “Magica De Spell” over several episodes.

  Michael Jackson’s Halloween was about a pair of teenagers (voiced by Lucas Till and Kiersey Clemons) who experienced a magical adventure in a mysterious hotel. The animated CBS special also featured Christine Baranski, Alan Cumming, Lucy Liu, Jim Parsons and a dancing cartoon version of the late Michael Jackson.

  Meanwhile, over at NBC, Tom Hanks voiced the titular character he created for a silly Saturday Night Live sketch in the animated The David S. Pumpkins Halloween Special, as the pumpkin-suited mystery man and his two dancing skeleton sidekicks showed a young boy and his sister the true meaning of Halloween. Peter Dinklage narrated.

  In The Simpsons: ‘Treehouse of Horror XXVIII’, Lisa discovered a button-eyed version of her family in a clever reworking of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Maggie was possessed by Pazuzu the demon in a segment inspired by The Exorcist, and a hungry Homer cannibalised himself. Gaiman, actor Ben Daniels and director William Friedkin were the guest voices.

  In other episodes of the animated Fox show, Bart was haunted by a ghostly manifestation of his guilty conscience, there was a medieval spoof of Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, Lisa looked back on her life from the future, and Stan Lee and Norman Lear turned up as themselves.

  The sixteenth season Christmas episode of Fox’s animated Family Guy was yet another variation of A Christmas Carol, as Peter Griffin (Seth MacFarlane) was visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Carrie Fisher and Don Swayze (voicing his late brother Patrick) were featured.

  The fourth and final season of the animated Star Wars Rebels on Disney XD started out with two two-part episodes as Sabine Wren (voiced by Tiya Sircar) and the rest of the Rebel Alliance continued their resistance against the Empire.

  Meanwhile, Disney XD’s series of 2-D animated shorts, Forces of Destiny, was narrated by Lupita Nyong’o’s sage Maz Kanata and focussed on such female characters in the Star Wars universe as Rey (Daisy Ridley), a youthful Princess Leia Organa (Shelby Young) and Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones). To balance things out, Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels voiced their original movie characters. Predictably, there was also a series of related Hasbro figures.

  When werewolf teenager Luke (voiced by Tyger Drew-Honey) and his family were moved to their titular new home by the Government Housing of Unusual Lifeforms (G.H.O.U.L.), he soon found himself hanging out with some monstrous new friends in the animated CBBC series Scream Street.

  “Vee” Hauntley (voiced by Isabella Crovetti) was a young vampire girl whose family moved from Transylvania to Pennsylvania in the Disney Junior cartoon series Vampirina. The voice cast also included Wanda Sykes, James Van Der Beek and Patti LuPone.

  The late Anton Yelchin voiced the young hero of the second season of the Guillermo del Toro-created animated series Trollhunters Part 2 on Netflix. The impressive list of guest-voices included Clancy Brown, Mark Hamill, Anjelica Huston, Lena Headey, David Bradley, James Purefoy and Wallace Shawn.

  A Gizmonic Institute employee (Jonah Ray) and his robot
pals were forced to watch bad movies by the daughter (Felicia Day) of a mad scientist in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return, a Kickstarter-funded revival of the 1980s geek favourite on Netflix. The fourteen episodes included asinine commentary on such movies as Reptilicus, The Time Travelers, The Beast of Hollow Mountain, Starcrash, The Land That Time Forgot (1974) and At the Earth’s Core.

  Denis O’Hare was cast as the troubled author in PBS’ American Masters: Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive, a drama-documentary that attempted to correct many of the common misrepresentations surrounding the writer’s life (and death).

  Paul Kaye portrayed the late fantasy author, who died in 2015, in the BBC’s Terry Pratchett: Back in Black, much of which was related in the writer’s own words, with contributions from Stephen Briggs, Neil Gaiman, Eric Idle, Paul Kirby, Val McDermid and Pratchett himself.

  Harry Potter: A History of Magic on BBC2 tied in to a special exhibition at the British Library, with a little help from J.K. Rowling, David Thewlis, Evanna Lynch, Warwick Davis, Miriam Margolyes and Mark Williams.

  The first episode in a new series of the BBC’s Imagine…featured Alan Yentob talking to Canadian author Margaret Atwood about her life and work.

  AMC’s six-part documentary series, Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics, looked at the people and events that shaped the medium with the help of actresses Lynda Carter, Gal Gadot and Lucy Lawless, amongst others.

  Aaron Mahnke’s horror podcast Lore premiered as a live-action show on Amazon in October with six episodes based on supposedly true historical events.

  BBC Radio 4 kicked off the year with Hatti Naylor’s hour-long dramatisation of Ann Radcliffe’s 18th-century Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, while Richard Kurti’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot ran over five nights as part of 15-Minute Drama.

  As part of “Mars Week”, Melissa Murray’s two-part dramatisation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds starred Blake Ritson, and in the five-part Following the Martian Invasion, author Francis Spufford and such guests as Roger Luckhurst, Darryl Jones, Ian McDonald and Stephen Baxter, followed the path of the Martian invasion in Wells’ book, from the Basingstoke Canal to London’s Primrose Hill.

  Recorded in front of a live audience at London’s Science Museum, Cells and Celluloid: Aliens on Film found host Francine Stock and “space geek” presenter Adam Rutherford talking about science fiction movies with a number of special guests.

  The three-part series I Was…, which looked at encounters between members of the general public and famous personalities, concluded with ‘I Was Philip K. Dick’s Reluctant Host’, as Michael and Susan Walsh explained to Andrew McGibbon how the SF author shared their Vancouver home after his wife left him.

  The short drama series To the Ends of the Earth consisted of two-part adaptations of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, featuring Stephen Critchlow as Professor Otto Lindenbrock, and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, with Tim McInnerny as Allan Quatermain.

  To the Ends of the Earth: Lost Worlds, New Worlds found Alex Clark talking to writers Fay Weldon and Tom Holland about fictonal imaginary worlds and “boy’s own” adventures.

  Stephen Wyatt’s drama The Shadow of Dorian Gray was about the poet John Gray (Blake Ritson), who is believed to be the inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

  Beatrice Colin’s darkly comic drama The Ferryman’s Apprentice found a human rights lawyer (Rosalind Sydney) being transported across the river Acheron to Hell by a curmudgeonly Charon (Gary Lewis), while her sympathetic son Thomas (Chris O’Reilly) encouraged his mother to reassess her morals.

  The Hauntening featured two fifteen-minute ghost stories written and starring Tom Neenan as a tech blogger haunted by modern technology, while Alexandra Roach’s Ms. Sherman searched for her tower block’s missing thirteenth floor in Sam Burns’ Floor 13.

  Adapted into two one-hour episodes by Roy Williams for Graeae, a theatrical company for disabled performers, Graeae’s Midwich Cuckoos was a re-telling of John Wyndham’s 1957 novel, and Matthew Graham’s psychological thriller Jayne Lake featured partially-sighted stand-up comic Georgie Morrell as a blind woman forced to face unknown terrors in a Cornish holiday cottage.

  BBC Radio 4’s annual “Dangerous Visions” stream featured an hour-long dramatisation of Arthur Koestler’s totalitarian future novel Darkness at Noon starring Matthew Marsh as the doomed prisoner Rubashov.

  Al Smith’s Culture starred Pippa Nixon as a doctor working in a dystopian future Britain where antibiotics had stopped working and access to NHS treatment was judged on percieved lifestyle or worth. Adrian Penketh’s three-part Siege was set in 2020, when Joseph Millson’s charismatic French National Front candidate became mayor of a traditionally left-wing city.

  As part of the same series, Alan Harris gave Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis a darkly comic modern twist. Tom Basden starred as call-centre worker Gregor Samsa, who woke up one day to find he had turned into a giant insect.

  Alex Jennings read a ten-part adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 as part of Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime: Dangerous Visions.

  In February, Tristan Sturrock read Richard Hamilton’s three-part abridgement of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds over three nights in the same slot while, later in the year, Rosie Cavaliero and Tracy Wiles read Sarah Pinborough’s psychological thriller Behind Her Eyes over ten nights, abridged by Jeremy Osborne.

  Radio 4 celebrated a Philip Pullman week in October with Book at Bedtime: The Book of Dust: Part One: La Belle Sauvage, the first in a three-book prequel to His Dark Materials read by Simon Russell Beale, and Book of the Week: Daemon Voices, in which the author himself read five essays about the art of storytelling.

  For Hallowe’en, Mark Gatiss co-scripted and directed the feature-length radio drama Unmade Movies: The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula. Lewis MacLeod played the Count and Meera Syal was his evil High Priestess in Anthony Hinds’ unproduced 1970s Hammer script, Kali: Devil Bride of Dracula, set in 1930s India. Michael Sheen narrated.

  Miles Jupp used Jonathan Harker’s journey in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as a train timetable to plot a route across Europe by rail in The Trainspotter’s Guide to Dracula.

  To commemorate the unveiling in November of an eight-foot high bronze statue of George Orwell outside the New Broadcasting House in London, George Orwell Back at the BBC was a half-hour documentary that included an interview with 100-year-old Annie Oliver Bell, to whom the widowed author once proposed.

  Dirk Maggs’ six-part adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2005 novel Anansi Boys debuted on Christmas Day on Radio 4. The cast featured Jacob Anderson and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as long-lost brothers Fat Charlie and Spider, Lenny Henry (for whom the book was written) as the trickster god Anansi, and a cameo by Gaiman himself.

  Meanwhile, over on BBC Radio 4 Extra, Maggs’ adaptation of Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens from 2014 was repeated in six half-hour episodes.

  Also on Radio 4 Extra, Paul Magrs’ Doctor Who—Serpent Crest featured Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor and Susan Jameson as Mrs. Wibbsey. The half-hour audio productions comprised five two-part stories, ‘Tsar Wars’, ‘The Broken Crown’, ‘Aladdin Time’, ‘The Hexford Invasion’ and ‘Survivors in Space’.

  Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant starred in Brian and Paul Finch’s two-part stories ‘Leviathan’, ‘Paradise 5’, ‘Point of Entry’ and ‘The Song of Megaptera’ as part of Doctor Who—The Lost Stories.

  As usual, Radio 4 Extra grouped various repeated readings and dramas under various series titles: Thirty-two years after Radio 4 first ran a series of supernatural dramas under the title Spine Chillers, Radio 4 Extra resurrected three episodes—Don Webb’s ‘Witch Water Green’, Jill Hyem’s ‘Origami’ and Peter Redgrove’s ‘Dracula in White’.

  From 1983, The Price of Fear found the late Vincent Price introducing William Ingram’s stories ‘Goody Two Shoes’, ‘To My Dear, Dear Saladin’, ‘The Family Album’, ‘Ou
t of the Mouths’, ‘Not Wanted on the Voyage’ and ‘Is Anybody There?’.

  Under the umbrella title Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch, Tamara Kennedy read five stories from Scottish writer Dorothy K. Haynes’ 1996 collection: ‘Gas’, ‘The Gay Goshawk’, ‘Pentecost—A Flashback’, ‘The Memory’ and ‘Windfall’, while Haunting Women featured five supernatural tales by Dermot Bolger.

  A Sting in the Tail featured Brony Glassco’s ‘Myrtle, Mamonia and Rue’, Philip Martin’s ‘Voices from Another Room’ and Natalia Powers’ ‘Sally Go Round the Moon’, while Edward de Souza introduced a half-hour adaptation of Denise Sims’ ‘Dark Feathers’ for Fear on Four.

  Ruth Gemmell read ‘The Transfer’ and Matthew Marsh read ‘Keeping His Promise’, ‘The Land of Green Ginger’, ‘The Man Who Lived Backwards’ and ‘The Kit Bag’ for Algernon Blackwood’s Ghost Stories, while Phlip Madoc’s unabridged reading of Blackwood’s 1927 werewolf story, Ancient Sorceries, was repeated from 2005 over four evenings in March.

  The half-hour radio series Haunted included 1980s adaptations of Rosemary Timperley’s ‘Listen to the Silence’ and Bram Stoker’s ‘The Judge’s House’ in May; ‘The Inexperienced Ghost’ by H.G. Wells, ‘The Emissary’ by Ray Bradbury, ‘Mists of Memory’ and ‘Channel Crossing’ by Rosemary Timperley, and ‘Esmeralda’ by John Keir Cross in May, and Agatha Christie’s ‘The Lamp’, R. Chetwynd-Hayes’ ‘The Liberated Tiger’ and ‘Which One?’, J.B. Priestley’s ‘The Grey Ones’ and the anonymously-authored ‘The Dead Man of Varley Grange’ in December.

  In May and early June, Ray Bradbury’s Tales of the Bizarre featured ‘The Jar’, ‘The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl’, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ and ‘Skeleton’.