Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

Danny Glover’s obsessed Captain Ahab wanted revenge on a Great White. er, Dragon, in the Syfy “original” movie Age of the Dragons , a medieval reworking of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick .

H. G. Wells was no doubt spinning in his grave as mutated monsters travelled back in time in Morlocks , and Ray Harryhausen would have been equally disappointed by the bargain-basement Sinbad and the Minotaur .

Meanwhile, an unrecognisable Richard Grieco played the evil Loki in Almighty Thor , another cheap knock-off from The Asylum, who would also have you believe that its low budget alien invasion movie Battle of Los Angeles was in no way similar to the bigger budget Battle: Los Angeles .

Alien bacteria animated an eighteen-foot golem in Iron Invader (aka Metal Shifters ), and alien technology created a terrorist weapon in Cold Fusion .

The Syfy’s channel’s two-part Neverland was yet another version of the Peter Pan story, with Rhys Ifans as the future Captain Hook, Anna Friel as his pirate lover, and Keira Knightley as the voice of a CGI Tinkerbell.

A modern-day Dorothy Gale (Paulie Rojas) discovered that the best-selling books she had written were based on her suppressed childhood memories in Syfy’s two-part The Witches of Oz . The supporting cast included Billy Boyd, Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, Mia Sara, Sean Astin and Christopher Lloyd.

Pierce Brosnan’s best-selling novelist investigated the death of his wife (Annabeth Gish) in Mick Garris’ two-part, four-hour supernatural mini-series of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones on A&E, which also featured genre veteran William Schallert.

Based on a comic book, the unfortunately titled Steve Niles’ Remains was yet another reworking of Night of the Living Dead and was the first original movie produced by the Chiller cable TV channel.

Housewife Halloween movies included Lifetime’s Possessing Piper Rose starring Rebecca Romijin, and Hallmark’s The Good Witch’s Family starring Catherine Bell. Martin Mull’s titular phantom attempted to scare away a family who moved into his house in Oliver’s Ghost for the same network.

Eddie Izzard portrayed a mysterious stranger who turned up on Christmas Eve in the BBC-TV movie Lost Christmas , while The Borrowers was yet another version of Mary Norton’s classic children’s books. It featured Christopher Eccleston, Victoria Wood and Stephen Fry, and was also broadcast by the BBC at Christmas.

Lifetime’s unauthorised biopic Magic Beyond Words: The J. K. Rowling Story featured Poppy Montgomery as the struggling young Harry Potter writer and proved, if there was any doubt, just how boring being an author really is.

For the first time since its 2005 revival, the BBC’s Doctor Who totally lost the plot (literally) under new show-runner Steven Moffat. Matt Smith’s increasingly annoying time traveller faced his “final” days as he and his various companions bumbled their way through thirteen episodes that culminated in a ludicrously complicated finale that totally failed to deliver a satisfying conclusion to the season’s multiple plots.

Neil Gaiman, Mark Gattis and Toby Whithouse scripted episodes, and guest stars included Frances Barber, Hugh Bonneville, Lily Cole, James Corden, Ian McNeice, Simon Callow, Mark Gattis, David Walliams, and Alex Kingston as the no-longer-enigmatic River Song.

As usual, the Christmas special, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe , was also a disappointment, as the Doctor whisked a wartime widow (the excellent Claire Skinner) and her two children off to a Narnia-like winter wonderland filled with menace. Guest stars Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir and Alexander Armstrong were completely wasted, thanks to Moffat’s lacklustre script.

Earlier in the year, viewers of the children’s show Blue Peter took part in a competition to design a new version of the central console of the TARDIS.

Despite an injection of cash from America’s Starz network, the BBC’s ten-part mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day , in which the usually immortal Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) was the last man in the world who could die, was ultimately disappointing, despite solid support from series regular Eve Myles and new team members Mekhl Phifer and Alexa Havins. The impressive list of US guest-stars included Bill Pullman (as a creepy paedophile-murder), Lauren Ambrose, Wayne Knight, C. Thomas Howell, Ernie Hudson, John de Lancie, Nana Visitor and Frances Fisher.

Angela Pleasence popped up as a psychic bag lady, Peter Bowles played an old newspaper editor, and the intrepid reporter adopted an alien daughter in the BBC’s fifth and sadly final series of The Sarah Jane Adventures , which only ran for three two-part episodes in October due to the death of its star, Elisabeth Sladen.

Although ostensibly aimed at young adults, BBC 3’s six-part The Fades was one of the best and darkest supernatural shows of the year as teenage outsider Paul (Ian de Caestecker) discovered that he was really one of a group of “Angelics” that could see the cannibalistic dead, who were returning in corporeal form to wreak revenge upon the living and bring about an apocalyptic future. Daniel Kaluuya as Paul’s geeky friend Mac managed to keep the tone of Jack Thorne’s superior series from getting too dark.

At the beginning of February British TV came up with not just one, but two haunted house series. Based on an unproduced 2008 pilot for an American show called The Oaks , ITV’s Marchlands was about three families living in the same rambling old house in 1968, 1987 and 2010, who were all connected by the restless spirit of a drowned eight-year-old girl. Atmospherically told over five one-hour episodes, the increasingly spooky series featured Jodie Whittaker, Alex Kingston, Dean Andrews, Denis Lawson and Anne Reid amongst its impressive ensemble cast.

Less impressive was Bedlam , the first original drama commission from cable TV channel Sky Living, in which no horror cliché was left unturned by its three soap opera creators. Over six episodes, former mental illness patient Jed Harper (Theo James), who could see ghosts and how they died, and his only likeable flatmate Ryan McAllister ( Pop Idol winner Will Young) investigated multiple hauntings in Bedlam Heights, a creepy apartment block converted from an old insane asylum. Coincidentally, the first episode also involved the vengeful ghost of a drowning victim.

Neither show was as outright ludicrous as FX’s thirteen-part American Horror Story , but what would you expect from the people who brought you Nip/Tuck and Glee ? Connie Britton, Dylan McDermot and Taissa Farmiga were the dysfunctional Harmon family who moved into an old Los Angeles mansion, only to discover that it was not only haunted by the world’s most dysfunctional ghosts, but that they had also inherited the neighbour from hell (a scene-stealing Jessica Lange). A two-part Halloween episode introduced Zachary Quinto and Teddy Sears as a deceased gay couple, Mena Suvari guest-starred as the 1940s “The Black Dahlia” murder victim, and pretty much everybody ended up dead (if not gone) at the end.

The second season of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s gruesome six-part comedy horror series Psychoville from the BBC saw the return of embittered clown Mr Jelly (Shearsmith) and Imelda Staunton’s mysterious company director Grace Andrews, and the introduction of obsessive librarian Jeremy Goode (Shearsmith again), who was haunted by a Silent Singer (also Shearsmith). Christopher Biggins and American director John Landis both had cameos in the second episode.