Stephen Jones - Best New Horror #26

12 Stories 12 Authors was a reprint of the Doctor Who anthology that added a new story by Holly Black featuring the twelfth incarnation of the Time Lord.

Tomb Raider: The Ten Thousand Immortals by the industrious Dan Abnett and Nik Vincent was a tie-in to the video game, while Halo: Mortal Dictata by Karen Traviss was the third volume in the gaming series, followed by Halo: Broken Circle by John Shirley.

David J. Williams and Mark S. Williams’ Transformers: Retribution was a prequel to the cartoon series based on the Hasbro toys.

Gitty Daneshvari’s Monster High: Ghoulfriends to the End was the fourth volume based on Mattel’s range of “Ghoulfriends” dolls. It was illustrated by Darko Dordevic and Chuck Gonzales.

Iron Man: Extremis by Marie Javins was a novelisation of a Marvel graphic novel, as was New Avengers: Breakout by Alisa Kwitney.

To tie in with the British Film Institute’s “Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder” season, Kim Newman’s in-depth study of Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit (and the BBC-TV original) was published by BFI Film Classics/Palgrave Macmillan in a handsome softcover edition featuring numerous photographs from the film, plus cover art by Nathanael Marsh. Also published in the same series were books about Brazil by Paul McAuley, Alien by Peter Luckhurst, War of the Worlds (1953) by Barry Forshaw, Solaris by Mark Bould and Silent Running by Mark Kermode.

Film historian Gregory William Mank explored obscure horror history in The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Cinema from McFarland, which included a look at the tragic life of actress Helen Chandler through the reminiscences of her sister-in-law and a candid interview with the son of actor Lionel Atwill, amongst other fascinating pieces.

Tom Weaver, David Schecter and Steve Kronenberg did just what the title of McFarland’s The Creature Chronicles: Exploring the Black Lagoon Trilogy promised. It came with an Introduction by actress Julie Adams. From the same imprint, Weaver also published paperback editions of Attack of the Monster Movie Makers: Interviews with 20 Genre Giants (with a little help from research associates Michael Brunas and John Brunas), They Fought in the Creature Features: Interviews with 23 Classic Horror, Science Fiction and Serial Stars and I Talked to a Zombie: Interviews with 23 Veterans of Horror and Sci-Fi Films and Television .

William Schoell wasn’t quite sure about his theme in Creature Features: Nature Turned Nasty in Movies , while Psycho, The Birds and Halloween: The Intimacy of Terror in Three Classic Films by Randy Rasmussen and Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present by Jon Towlson were both decidedly more focussed in their scope.

Also from McFarland, Alexandra Heller-Nichols explored the subculture of Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality , while Unraveling Resident Evil: Essays on the Complex Universe of the Games and Films edited by Nadine Farghaly tried to put the popular zombie series into perspective.

From BearManor Media, Joseph Maddrey’s Beyond Fear: Reflections on Stephen King, Wes Craven, and George Romero’s Living Dead drew upon decades of interviews with its subjects.

From the same imprint, Joe Jordan’s biography Showmanship: The Cinema of William Castle came with a Foreword by Bela G. Lugosi and an Introduction by Thomas Page. Brian Taves’ Robert Florey, The French Expressionist was a biography of the director who was originally scheduled to direct Frankenstein (1931).

Midi-Minuit Fantastique: l’intégrale Vol.1 edited by Michel Caen and Nicolas Stanzick was the first of four projected hardcover volumes from Rouge Profonde to collect and update all twenty-four issues of the influential 1960s French film magazine.

It might still not have been the film that the fans wanted, but at least Gareth Edwards’ 3-D Godzilla was better than Roland Emmerich’s re-imagining back in 1998, as Bryan Cranston’s troubled nuclear engineer uncovered the truth about seismic anomalies in Japan before being killed-off halfway through the movie.

Universal’s origin story, Dracula Untold , re-imagined how Prince Vlad Tepes (an uncharismatic Luke Evans) was turned into one of the undead by Charles Dance’s Master Vampire to defend his family and his kingdom against the invading Turks. It didn’t suck as much as some critics claimed, but could have done without the TV movie coda.

Poor old Ben Affleck’s Nick Dunne was suspected of murdering his missing wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) in David Fincher’s twisty psychological thriller Gone Girl , based on the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn.

Despite starring Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple and being based on the novel by Joe Hill, Alexandre Aja’s delayed supernatural thriller Horns flopped at the box-office.

Susan Sarandon’s small town detective investigated a series of gruesome sacrificial killings in The Calling , which also featured Gil Bellows, Ellen Burstyn and Donald Sutherland.

January became the new Halloween, as American distributors opened their low budget fright-fests for a post-holidays audience.

A trio of high school graduates investigated the death of a witchy neighbour in Christopher Landon’s improved fourth sequel Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones , which neatly tied the series together, despite diminishing box-office returns.

A young boy’s obsession with a creepy pop-up storybook featuring the eponymous child-eater was the basis for Jennifer Kent’s Australian-made chiller The Babadook .

Annabelle was a prequel featuring the possessed doll first seen in The Conjuring (2013). It was even slightly better than the earlier film, which isn’t saying much. Meanwhile, after the success of The Woman in Black , Hammer’s The Quiet Ones was a dull supernatural mystery set in 1974, in which Jared Harris’ team of paranormal investigators looked into the case of a woman (Olivia Cooke) who believed that she had been possessed by a doll named “Evey”.

Set forty years after the superior 2012 film, Hammer’s sequel The Woman in Black: Angel of Death starred Helen McCrory as the headmistress of a group of young World War II evacuees forced to stay at the still-haunted Eel Marsh House.

A young woman (Karen Gillan) had to convince her brother (Brenton Thwaites) that they should destroy the haunted mirror that killed their parents in Mike Flanagan’s effective low budget chiller Oculus , which appeared to be inspired by Amityville II: The Possession and was expanded from the director’s award-winning short film.

Loosely based on an uncredited H.P. Lovecraft’s story ‘From Beyond’, Blair Erickson’s Banshee Chapter followed Katia Winter’s investigative journalist as she tried to discover what happened to a missing friend.

A group of friends attempted to discover why one of their number committed suicide after playing with an occult board in Ouija , another PG-13 horror movie from Platinum Dunes aimed at teenagers. It cost a reported $5 million to make and opened at #1 at the US box-office over Halloween with a gross of just $10.7 million.

Jim Sturgess’ new doctor arrived at a remote madhouse run by a creepy Ben Kingsley in Brad Anderson’s Bulgaria-shot Stonehearst Asylum , which was based on a well-known story by Edgar Allan Poe. The impressive supporting cast included Kate Beckinsale, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Caine, Jason Flemyng and Sinéad Cusack.