Stephen Jones - Best New Horror #26

On May 27, film legend Sir Christopher Lee celebrated his 92nd birthday by releasing a heavy metal album. Metal Knight featured seven tracks, including two covers from the musical Man of La Mancha .

Veteran British-born actress Angela Lansbury returned to the London stage after thirty-nine years to portray muddled medium Madame Arcati in Michael Blakemore’s impressive revival of Noël Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit at the Gielgud Theatre. Jemima Rooper played the seductive but irritating ghost accidentally called up by the flamboyant clairvoyant.

Acting scion Jack Fox starred as the eponymous immoral immortal in Linnie Reedman’s reworking of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray at the Riverside Studios in London, alongside Vanessa Redgrave’s granddaughter Daisy Bevan.

Risteárd Cooper, Brian Cox, Dervla Kirwan, Peter McDonald and Ardal O’Hanlon starred as five men telling ghost stories to each other in a remote Irish pub in Josie Rourke’s revival of Conor McPerson’s 1997 play The Weir at Wyndham’s Theatre.

Robert Icke and Duncan MacMillan’s new adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 ran for twelve weeks at London’s Playhouse Theatre in April, while Jennifer Haley’s The Nether at the Royal Court took place in an Internet-obsessed future.

Mark Hollimann and Greg Kotis’ Urinetown: The Musical was set in a dystopian future where private lavatories were banned because of ecological drought. It had its UK premiere at the St. James Theatre.

Natascha McElhone, Mark Bazeley and Kristin Davis starred in Trevor Nunn’s production of Fatal Attraction , based on the 1987 movie, which had its world stage premiere in March at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

In July, Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw , based on the short novel by Henry James, was performed at the open air Opera Holland Park in London.

The Theatre Royal Plymouth’s production Grand Guignol , a revival of the 2009 black comedy by the aptly named Carl Grose, played a five-week run from September at London’s Southwark Playhouse.

The live-action musical production Scooby-Doo! The Mystery of the Pyramid toured the UK throughout the summer,

The Marvel Universe LIVE! played arenas in eighty-five cities across America from July, while Disney’s musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame , featuring music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, had its American premier at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse in October.

Halo publisher Activision Blizzard reportedly spent $500 million (£300 million) creating and marketing Destiny , another multi-player alien shooter game and the first in a series that will span ten years. The impressive voice cast included Peter Dinklage, Bill Nighy, Gina Torres, Nathan Fillion, James Remar and Claudia Black, while Sir Paul McCartney was one of several music composers.

Detective Sebastian Castellanos investigated mass murders at a mental hospital and found himself battling nightmarish monsters known as “The Haunted” in Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami’s new survival game, The Evil Within , while gamers were armed with just a video camera as they investigated the horrific events that occurred at Mount Massive Asylum in Outlast for PS4.

Following its successful origin reboot in 2013, Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition had a 3-D graphics upgrade, while Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris saw the kick-ass heroine (once again voiced by actress Keeley Hawes) battling the evil Egyptian god Set.

With the franchise getting its second reboot since 2009, Wolfenstein: The New Order was set in an alternative 1960 where Nazi robots won World War II.

A companion to the big PS3 horror game of 2013, The Last of Us: Left Behind was a downloadable new sequence that was available for the remastered version for PS4. It featured Ellie and Riley exploring a mall and trying to stay out of the way of the fungally-Infected.

Filling the gap before the release of Dead Island 2 in 2015, Escape Dead Island was a cartoon zombie adventure, while The Walking Dead: Season Two allowed players to control a young girl in a world full of zombies.

Watch Dogs was set in an alternate Chicago where everything was linked by a network of computers, and a bespectacled witch used her magical hair and bullet-shooting boots to battle evil angels in Bayonetta 2 , which also included the original game as a free download.

Sigourney Weaver reprised her role as “Ripley”, along with original stars Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto in Crew Expendable , a free downloadable extra for those who pre-ordered Alien: Isolation .

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 video game was just as good as the movie it was based on, which wasn’t saying much.

Set between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings , Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor featured a ranger of Gondor’s attempts to revenge the killing of his family by the dark lord Sauron’s armies, while Christopher Lee narrated and also voiced “Saruman the White” for LEGO the Hobbit: The Video Game .

In November, a boxed copy of Atari’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial —widely considered to have been one of the worst video games ever produced—raised $1,537.00 (£980.00) at a charity auction in America. It was one of 800 unwanted Atari 2600 cartridges recovered from a New Mexico landfill site seven months earlier.

As part of its Pop! Movies series of cute vinyl figurines, Funko released big-eyed versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Metaluna Mutant and The Phantom of the Opera, which were also available in “metallic” painted variations.

Funko’s series of moveable ReAction Figures also included licensed Universal Studios Monsters versions of all the above, except for the Metaluna Mutant, which was replaced by The Invisible Man.

A nicely sculpted figure of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster was issued as part of Hallmark’s 2014 series of Keepsake Christmas tree ornaments.

LEGO’s Ghost Busters Ecto-1 car set celebrated the movies 30th Anniversary, and the US Post Office released a set of stamps in October featuring Batman, to mark the Caped Crusader’s 75th Anniversary.

On October 30th, a life-size bronze bust of Edgar Allan Poe, created by Bryan Moore, was unveiled at the Boston Public Library. It was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, with Guillermo del Toro as the project’s largest financial supporter.

The British Museum’s “Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination” exhibition ran in London from early October until January 2015. It featured more than 200 rare objects—including posters, books, films and even a vampire-slaying kit—tracing 250 years of the Gothic tradition. Amongst the highlights were hand-written drafts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula .

In July, one of only four known one-sheet posters of a specific design for The Phantom of the Opera (1925) sold at auction for $203,150. It had formerly belonged to the actor Nicholas Cage.

At the same auction, a 1931 German poster for Fritz Lang’s M sold for $50,787, a rare 1941 insert poster for The Wolf Man went for $47,800, a “style B” half-sheet from War of the Worlds (1953) realised $35,850 and a French grande for King Kong (1933) made $25,095.

Four months later, the only known version of a stone litho American one-sheet for the lost Lon Chaney movie London After Midnight (1927) sold for $478,000, making it the most expensive film poster ever sold at public auction.