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

On October 3, TCM premiered A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King , an hour-long documentary in which the author traced the history of the genre through personal recollections and film clips.

Appropriately, director John Carpenter was the TCM’s Guest Programmer for the month, and his picks included The Thing from Another World, It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The Curse of Frankenstein .

Rex Appeal was an hour-long BBC4 documentary about dinosaurs in the movies.

William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Michols, Billy Mumy, Angela Carter and Marta Kristen were amongst those who recalled the golden age of TV science fiction and the sometimes rivalry between Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry and Irwin Allen in an episode of PBS’ Pioneers of Television .

Ridley Scott executive produced the Science channel’s eight-part Prophets of Science Fiction docu-series, which began its run with an episode about Mary Shelley (played by Mara King in the re-enactments).

Broadcast by BBC3 from Kirkstall Abbey on 19 March, Frankenstein’s Wedding: Live in Leeds was a muddled musical retelling of Shelley’s classic novel. Andrew Gower played Dr Victor Frankenstein, while David Harewood was his sympathetic Creature.

During the summer, actress Joanna Lumley joined an online petition of those opposed to BBC Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams’ plans to cut the broadcaster’s short story output in favour of more news coverage.

To tie-in with the launch of the mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day in July, Radio 4’s Afternoon Play presented Torchwood: The Lost Files . Broadcast in three forty-five minute episodes, John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd and Kai Owen recreated their original TV roles alongside Martin Jarvis, Juliet Mills and Rosalind Ayres.

All the Dark Corners featured three spooky tales by Andrew Readman, Paul Cornell and Rosemary Kay and was broadcast over three successive days in the Afternoon Play slot, while The Shining Guest was written and narrated by Paul Evans and used real-life sound recordings to tell the story of a puzzling ancient corpse discovered in the Welsh hills. It was produced by the same team that created The Ditch in 2010.

Other editions of the Afternoon Play featured Kim Newman’s Cry Babies , about busy couple’s genetically enhanced daughter; Sally Griffiths’ Haunted , in which a professional illusionist and a spiritualist medium teamed up for a television show with unexpected results, and A Time to Dance , directed by Julian Simpson, in which a mysterious plague affected London’s South Bank.

Joan Aiken’s Black Hearts of Battersea was adapted over two days in the same slot at Christmas.

Julian Simpson’s Bad Memories for Radio 4’s The Friday Play slot involved the macabre disappearance of a family from their remote country home in 2004, and the discovery six years later in the cellar of five bodies apparently dating back to 1926. The hour-long drama made use of digital audio files to unlock the key to the time-travel mystery.

David Robb starred as Professor Challenger in Chris Harrald’s two-part dramatisation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as part of the radio station’s Classic Serial series.

Wilkie Collins’ 1868 macabre mystery The Moonstone was adapted into four one-hour episodes on Radio 4 starring Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron and Bill Paterson, and Cranham also portrayed carnival owner Mr Dark in Diana Griffiths’ hour-long adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes , broadcast as The Saturday Play on 29 October.

The following month, Robert Powell starred in an hour-long adaptation of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in the same slot.

The crew of a spaceship retrieving a valuable ore from an abandoned mining operation on a mysterious planet encountered an intelligent life form in Mike Walker’s hour-long The Saturday Play: Landfall .

Radio 4’s Weird Tales returned for four new episodes, while Beasts on the Lawn: Saki 2011 featured updated dramatisations of five stories by Edwardian author Saki (H. H. Munro), set in a gated community and linked by security guard Clovis (Pippa Haywood).

Filmed twice by director George Slulzer, The Vanishing was an hour-long radio dramatisation in July of Tim Krabbe’s The Golden Egg , about a man attempting to discover what happened to his missing girlfriend.

Dramatised by Brian Sibley in six one-hour episodes to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mervyn Peake, The History of Titus Groan encompassed the entire Gormenghast trilogy and the epilogue written by his widow, with a cast that included David Warner, Miranda Richardson, Tamsin Greig and William Gaunt.

As part of the morning fifteen-minute Woman’s Hour Drama slot, Kiss Kiss presented five macabre stories by Roald Dahl, dramatised by Stephen Sheridan. Each episode starred Charles Dance, supported by a cast that included Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup and John Baddeley.

In May, The Doll: Short Stories by Daphne du Maurier featured abridged readings of three stories by the author of The Birds , while Summer Ghosts in August presented readings of three fifteen-minute spooky tales set in daylight written by Sophie Hannah, Louise Welsh and Adam Thorpe.

David Tennant returned to Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime with A Night with a Vampire 2 , for which he read fifteen minute adaptations of “The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber, “Bewitched” by Edith Wharton, “Drink My Blood” by Richard Matheson and “A Lot of Mince Pies” by Robert Swindells.

In the same slot, Derek Jacobi read Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche The House of Silk over ten nights in early November. Meanwhile, James Fleet played Inspector Lestrade, who introduced four half-hour episodes of The Rivals , featuring other fictional detectives of the period. The weekly series kicked off with an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” starring Andrew Scott as C. Auguste Dupin.

In April, BBC Radio 7 was re-branded BBC Radio 4 Extra. Jonathan Morris’ four-part Doctor Who: Cobwebs reunited fifth Doctor Peter Davison with companions Turlough, Tegan and Nyssa in an abandoned gene-tech facility, and their adventures continued in Stephen Cole’s Doctor Who: The Whispering Forest and Marc Platt’s Doctor Who: The Cradle of the Snake .

Meanwhile, Doctor Who: The Hornet’s Nest featured fourth Doctor Tom Baker in three two-part adventures (“The Stuff of Nightmares”, “The Dead Shoes” and “The Circus of Doom”) scripted by Paul Magrs.

The Horror at Bly was Neville Teller’s response to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw , while actor Richard Coyle read H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness over five half-hour episodes on successive nights in June.

Don Webb’s four-part dramatisation of Elidor updated Alan Garner’s 1965 novel for a new audience of younger listeners.

In mid-September, Radio 4 Extra broadcast half-hour productions of “The Captain of the Polestar” by Arthur Conan Doyle, “Olalia” by Robert Louis Stevenson and “The Brownie of the Black Haggs” by James Hogg under the umbrella title The Darker Side of the Border .

Mark Gattis returned to introduce new half-hour episodes of The Man in Black on the same station in October, including “Lights Out” by Christopher Golden and Amber Benson.