Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Survivor Jennifer Love Hewitt and her friends found themselves on a vacation from Hell as they were stalked by the hook-handed killer of the derivative sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Disturbing Behaviour should have been called The Stepford Kids as bad teenagers were turned into “A” students by an experimental psychiatric facility, and more stupid teens were bumped off by an unseen serial killer in Urban Legend. Scott Reynolds’ The Ugly was a gruesome serial-killer story set in New Zealand, while Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy was based on the novel by Patrick McCabe.

Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson once again plundered the past and rehashed some old movie plots for Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, in which a group of teen students discovered that their teachers were really body-stealing aliens.

The most successful film of the year was Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi. Despite being overlong and filled with clichés, Michael Bay’s big-budget disaster movie worked, thanks to memorable characters, strong performances and superb special effects as a team of oilworkers were sent into space to destroy a huge asteroid that was on a collision course with Earth. Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact covered similar ground, as a comet hit the Earth, causing a giant tidal wave which decimated the American east coast and thankfully drowned star Tea Leoni.

Despite a massive publicity campaign in America, the huge boxoffice take for Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s misguided $120 million reworking of Godzilla was still considered a disappointment. Daily Variety reported that the film had trouble in Japan as well. Even though it broke records there when 500,000 people turned out to see it on the opening day, ticket sales dropped considerably during the second week.

In Stephen Sommers’s underrated Deep Rising, the likeable Treat Williams found himself unwittingly involved in a raid on a cruise ship and discovered that most of the crew and passengers had been killed by giant flesh-eating worms from the ocean depths. Ron Underwood’s remake of the 1949 RKO movie Mighty Joe Young also used some impressive special effects to bring the eponymous fifteen-foot ape to life.

The X Files movie followed on directly from the fifth season of the TV series, as FBI agents Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) finally uncovered what was really behind all the conspiracies and cover-ups. It also included a flying saucer climax that was straight out of The Thing from Another World (1951).

Alex Proyas’ wonderfully noir- ish Dark City involved Rufus Sewell as a man framed as a serial killer who discovered that he and everyone else were living in outer space, where a dying race of alien “Strangers” (who looked like Clive Barker creations) possessed the bodies of the dead and could stop time.

A big opening weekend for the fast, flashy and violent vampire action movie Blade, based on the Marvel Comics character, quickly led to rumours of a sequel to again star Wesley Snipes as the moody half-undead, half-human killing machine. The arty Wisdom of Crocodiles starred Jude Law as a psychic vampire who fed off the positive emotions that existed in his victims’ blood streams, while John Carpenter’s Vampires, based on John Steakley’s 1990 novel, was one of the director’s worst movies, thanks to a dumb script (Don Jakoby), laughable performances (especially James Woods), unconvincing special effects and the obvious low budget. Even so, it was still way ahead of Razor Blade Smile, a woefully cheap-looking vampire thriller that simply didn’t have the talent or budget to match the high concepts of 26-year-old writer/director Jake West. It also marked a sad end to the career of actor David Warbeck.

As Death, Brad Pitt took a holiday in the interminable Meet Joe Black. Based on the novel by Richard Matheson, Robin Williams had a colourful look at the after-life in What Dreams May Come, and Michael Keaton came back from the dead to revisit his children as a silly-looking snowman in Frost.

Al Pacino’s Satanic John Milton hired hotshot lawyer Keanu Reeves for his Manhattan law firm in The Devil’s Advocate, based on the novel by Andrew Neiderman. Denzel Washington played a detective attempting to catch a body-hopping demonic killer in Fallen, and Universal successfully revived its killer-doll franchise with Bride of Chucky, in which the possessed plaything was reanimated by voodoo and teamed up with his sexy psychopath girlfriend played by Jennifer Tilly.

An adaptation of Christopher Bram’s superior gay novel Father of Frankenstein, Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters was an over-long and occasionally plodding look at the final months of retired film director James Whale, expertly played by Ian McKellan. McKellan also appeared as a former Nazi being blackmailed by a 16-year-old student in Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, based on the story by Stephen King.

Based on the novel by executive producer Dean Koontz, Phantoms starred Peter O’Toole and Ben Affleck investigating a small town where a blob monster had caused everyone to disappear.

Produced by star Oprah Winfrey, Beloved was a Civil War ghost story that flopped at the boxoffice. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman played witchy sisters looking for love in Practical Magic, and the long-delayed Spanish film Killer Tongue involved a woman infected by an alien rock.

Natasha Henstridge returned as a sexy alien shape-changer still looking to get laid in the laughable Species II. Star Trek: Insurrection, the third film to feature The Next Generation crew, suffered from a weak storyline but did include an evil race of facelifting aliens, and Kurt Russell battled a cyborg warrior on another planet in the futuristic flop Soldier.

Joe Dante’s subversive dark comedy Small Soldiers was set in a small town which became a battleground for voice-activated toys fitted with munitions chips.

Vincenzo Natali’s student film Cube resembled an overlong Twilight Zone episode, as a group of strangers found themselves trapped in a endless maze of interlocking cubes, some of which contained lethal traps. In Sphere, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson discovered an alien artifact underwater which gave them the power to unconsciously manifest their dark sides.

Lost in Space starring William Hurt, Gary Oldman, Matt LeBlanc and Mimi Rogers was loosely based on the 1960s TV show about the space family Robinson. Supposedly inspired by the same period, Jeremiah Chechik’s The Avengers was an incompetent travesty of the cult sci-spy show, with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman lacking any screen chemistry as John Steed and Mrs. Peel, and Sean Connery hamming it up as the villain. It reportedly lost $40 million and became the third biggest boxoffice disaster of all time after Inchon and Heaven’s Gate.

It was hard to believe that yet another version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring a maskless Julian Sands, was the movie Italian cinemagoers said they wanted to see from co-writer/ director Dario Argento.

The anniversary re-release of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic The Exorcist in Britain meant extra business for the clergy, who were inundated with requests for spiritual guidance from moviegoers overwhelmed by the experience. BBC Radio 4 also broadcast a half-hour programme entitled Lucifer Rising — 25 Years of “The Exorcist”, in which journalist Mark Kermode interviewed writer William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin.