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

Looking as if it was filmed on a $5.00-per-episode budget, Brighter in Darkness was an amateurish half-hour gay vampire soap opera filmed in and around Wales that ran for eight interminable episodes on a cut-price UK cable TV channel.

Michael Emerson’s billionaire scientist and Jim Caviezel’s former CIA hitman teamed up to prevent crimes before they happened with the help of a handy gizmo in CBS’ Person of Interest , executive produced by J. J. Abrams.

NBC’s Grimm featured David Giuntoli as a homicide detective, the descendant of the eponymous clan of supernatural hunters, who discovered that the fairy tales were based on fact. Silas Weir Mitchell’s reluctant werewolf sidekick was the best thing about the show.

Fairy tale characters inhabited two different worlds in ABC’s Once Upon a Time , which debuted with an impressive 12.8 million viewers and became the highest-rated new drama amongst adults in the US.

Meanwhile, the parallel universes merged in the fourth season of Fox’s underrated Fringe , where for a while it seemed as if Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) had never existed.

Xander Berkeley played a mysterious patron who sat in a diner and helped people solve their problems in Hulu’s five-part series The Booth at the End , which was also available as webisodes.

MTV’s reboot of the 1980s movie franchise Teen Wolf was an entertaining and edgy twelve-part series aimed at young adults. Tyler Posey’s likeable high school student Scott McCall found himself turning into a werewolf just as he discovered that the girl of his dreams (Crystal Reed) came from a long line of werewolf hunters. Unfortunately, the show premiered in a graveyard slot in the US.

Death Valley was a spoof mockumentary series on MTV about the LAPD’s Undead Task Force dealing with criminal vampires, werewolves, zombies and other supernatural creatures while being trailed around by a camera crew.

Stoner metalhead Todd Smith (Alex House) and his high school friends continued to search for the Satantic book of spells in the half-hour Fear Net comedy series Todd & the Book of Pure Evil .

A supposedly dead cop (David Lyons) donned the superhero outfit and teamed up with an investigative blogger named Orwell (Summer Glau) to bring down her father’s evil corporate company in NBC’s enjoyable superhero series The Cape , which ran for only ten episodes.

Over at Syfy, Glau also guest-starred on the eleven-part Alphas , a dropped ABC pilot in which David Strathairn’s scientist was the leader of a group of five ordinary people with extraordinary abilities who battled to save the world from a secret terrorist organisation called Red Flag.

In the third series of the E4’s eight-part Misfits , the gang of super-powered young offenders decided to change their powers and had to deal with an alternate reality involving time-travelling Nazis. Meanwhile Seth (Matthew McNulty) used his resurrection power to bring his former girlfriend back from the grave as a bloodthirsty zombie, and the gang ended up encountering a fake medium who had the power to call their fallen foes back from the dead.

ABC Family’s The Nine Lives of Chloe King was about a sixteen-year-old girl (Syler Samuels) who found out that she was descended from an ancient race of half-humans with feline powers.

Following an hour-long opener, Nickelodeon’s House of Anubis was shown in forty-five daily ten-minute instalments and involved a group of eight students investigating mysterious disappearances at an English boarding school. It averaged almost three million viewers in the US and was also available online.

In the six-part The Sparticle Mystery , a group of children discovered that everybody on Earth over the age of fifteen had been transported to a parallel dimension when an experiment went wrong.

Nathaniel Parker joined the fourth season of the BBC’s increasingly impressive Merlin as Arthur’s duplicitous uncle, Agravaine. The thirteen-part series featured Lancelot (Santiago Cabrera) sacrificing himself and then returning from the dead; the discovery of the last remaining dragon’s egg; an encounter with a vampire-like Lamia; the possessive spirit of murdered Druid child; the introduction of Tristan and Isolde, and an epic two-part finale in which the evil Morgana (Katie McGrath) led a full-on assault upon Camelot.

Eva Green’s far sexier “Morgan” also took over Arthur’s fabled city in the otherwise redundant ten-part Starz series Camelot , which also featured Joseph Fiennes as an older and dirtier version of Merlin.

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXII on Fox included lame spoofs of Dexter and Avatar , while Mike Judge’s animated Beavis and Butt-Head returned to MTV in October with an episode in which the two stupid-smart buffoons poked fun at the Twilight movies as the dumb duo tried to get themselves bitten by a werewolf so they could attract girls.

Liam Neeson and Peter Mayhew voiced their characters Qui-Gon Jinn and Chewbacca, respectively, in different episodes of the Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars .

Wolverine and Iron Man both got anime makeovers, while 1980s cartoon Thundercats was revived for a new generation of potential toy consumers.

James Roday and Dulé Hill’s comedy investigators went undercover as Tom Cruise’s Lestat and William Marshall’s Blacula, respectively, in a vampire-themed Halloween episode of USA Network’s Psych , while Castle (Nathan Fillion) and Beckett (Stana Katic) investigated the death of a TV ghost-hunter in a supposedly haunted mansion in the Halloween episode of ABC’s Castle .

The recent publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula resulted in a number of apparent vampire attacks at an exclusive girl’s school in a fourth season episode of Canada’s Murdoch Mysteries . In another episode, the uptight detective (Yannick Bisson) investigated what seemed to be a case of demonic possession.

For its special Super Bowl episode in February, Fox’s Glee included a performance of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, complete with a zombie football team.

In January, ABC’s V reboot returned for ten episodes before it was finally put out of everybody’s misery. Original star Marc Singer turned up in the final episode while Jane Badler, who reprised her role as the evil “Diana” from the original 1983 show, turned out to be alien leader Anna’s (Morena Baccarin) estranged mother.

Medium finally also reached the end of its seven-year run on NBC in January. The final episode flash-forwarded forty years into the future.

Chuck played out its fifth and final season on the same network, as Zachery Levi’s character created his own spy agency. Mark Hamill guest-starred in the first episode.

The CW’s Smallville ended after ten seasons with a satisfying two-part finale that finally saw the return of Michael Rosenbaum’s Lex Luthor.

The Syfy channel finally aired the remaining nine episodes of its overblown Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica , which ended on a virtual reality teaser for a second series that never happened.

NBC’s meandering The Event was also justifiably cancelled, as was Syfy’s SGU Stargate Universe after only two seasons.

As part of Turner Classic Movies’s “Lost and Found” series, in April the station showcased a rare print of the 1976 Spanish film The Mysterious House of Dr C (aka Dr Coppelius ), while two months later the “Drive-In Double Features” series presented a number of 1950s “Monsters, Mutants and Martians”. In August, the channel programmed a day of Lon Chaney, Sr. films, including The Monster, Mockery, The Unknown, West of Zanzibar and both the silent and sound versions of The Unholy Three .