Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

The “Best Sellers Illustrated” series featured Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest illustrated by Dick Giordano and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue illustrated by Frank Brunner.

Also available was a young adult graphic adaptation of Dracula , written by Gary Reed and illustrated by Becky Cloonan.

Disney’s exuberant if self-indulgent sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest smashed Spider-Man 2 ’s opening record of $114.8 million in America with a three-day take of $132 million. It went straight to the #1 slot on both sides of the Atlantic, became the second-fastest movie to ever pass the $400 million mark (forty-five days) and was the top-grossing film of the year in the UK with a box-office take of almost £52 million. The film also became the fastest-selling DVD ever in the UK as, during the run-up to Christmas, one in four DVDs sold was a copy of Dead Man’s Chest .

Despite their success with the Pirates sequel, Walt Disney announced that they would cut 650 studio jobs to concentrate on creating blockbuster franchises over more adult subjects. Film output would be reduced from around eighteen titles a year to a dozen, with about ten being released under the Disney name and those under the Touchstone banner being cut back to two or three releases a year.

James Wong’s silly but stylish Final Destination 3 was held off the top spot by the long-delayed remake of The Pink Panther in America and Disney’s animated Chicken Little in the UK. Following the premise of the earlier entries, a group of teens who survived a roller-coaster disaster discovered in various gruesome ways that they couldn’t cheat Death (the voice of Tony Todd). The DVD release included a new interactive feature that let the viewer change the course of the plot. (So much for the auteur theory.)

Jonathan Liebesman’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (from a story co-written by David J. Schow) was a pointless 1960s-set prequel to the equally misguided 2003 remake, in which audiences learned how young Thomas Hewitt (Andrew Bryniarski) ended up as the chainsaw-wielding cannibal called “Leatherface”.

Co-scripted by Wes Craven and starring Kristen Bell (TV’s Veronica Mars ), Jim Sonzero’s Pulse was another J-horror remake ( Kairo ) about a cursed website that released ghosts. Original Ju-On director Takashi Shimizu continued to recycle the same old tired J-horror clichés in The Grudge 2 , which was once again irritatingly related out of sequence. As a local journalist, Edison Chen easily acted his American co-stars, the bland Amber Tamblyn and a returning Sarah Michelle Gellar, off the screen.

Gellar also turned up as the star of The Return , in which she travelled to a small Texas town that seemed to hold the key to her strange hallucinations.

Although a remake of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1979) would seem redundant to most people, director Rupert Wainwright at least managed to include some atmospherically ghostly sequences in a tame tale of a cursed town and its murderous history.

Another unnecessary remake was Black Christmas , based on the superior and innovative 1975 slasher film of the same name. At least French director Alexandre Aja’s reworking of The Hills Have Eyes brought some social commentary and a stylish veneer to producer Wes Craven’s 1977 shocker about a murderous mutant family preying on tourists in the New Mexico desert. The film opened at #1 in the UK.

Simon West’s remake of the 1979 film When a Stranger Calls opened at #1 in the US. Camilla Belle played the babysitter who realised that a series of threatening phone calls were coming from inside the house she was in.

Starring Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles as the concerned parents, John Moore’s The Omen was a pointless remake of the 1976 box-office smash and opened in the US on 6.6.06. Mia Farrow played the sinister nanny who hanged herself in front of Devil-child Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick). The DVD included unrated extended scenes and an alternate ending.

Nicolas Cage starred as the duped cop in Neil LaBute’s totally unnecessary remake of the 1973 classic The Wicker Man , which was relocated from Scotland to America, with Christopher Lee’s pagan worshippers replaced by Ellen Burstyn’s feminist beekeepers.

With its troubled production profiled in detail on HBO’s hugely entertaining Project Greenlight more than a year earlier, John Gulager’s monster-fest Feast finally received a three-week limited run at midnight showings in September before being dumped by Dimension onto DVD.

Another group of luckless victims were put through a series of gory tests by Tobin Bell’s dying madman in Lionsgate’s Saw III , which enjoyed the biggest opening of the series to date, debuting in the #1 slot with $33.6 million.

“Presented by” Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth’s gratuitous and unpleasant Hostel had the interesting premise of a pair of American backpackers who discovered that an entire Slovakian town was involved in torturing and mutilating unsuspecting tourists. Apparently the Slovakian authorities were outraged at the film, along with more-discerning movie-goers. An “unrated” version released on DVD included no less than four commentary tracks featuring the director.

Fledgling distributor Fox Atomic’s similarly-themed Turistas (aka Paradise Lost ), directed by John Stockwell, in which Brazilian party-goers were sliced and diced by a mad surgeon (Miguel Lunardi), barely managed to register at the box-office with a $3.6 million opening weekend.

Jeroen Krabbe’s eccentric film-maker assembled a group of disposable actors in Bernard Rose’s Snuff Movie , while Brett Leonard’s Feed was a pseudo-snuff film about a cyber investigator (Patrick Thompson) who uncovered a S&M world where men obsessed with overweight women bet on whether they could feed them to death.

World Wrestling Entertainment presented Gregory Dark’s See No Evil , starring WWE wrestler “Kane” (Glen Jacobs) as a bald-headed psycho gruesomely dispatching teenagers in a creepy old hotel.

David Slade’s Hard Candy played with audience perceptions of predator and victim when teenager Hayley (Ellen Page) hooked up with an older fashion photographer (Patrick Wilson) she met on the Internet.

Taking the splatter genre to its obvious comedy conclusion, Christopher Smith’s Severance had a group of sales executives from a multinational weapons corporation being butchered one-by-one during a team-building exercise in the Eastern European backwoods.

Kate Beckinsale returned as leather-clad vampire werewolf-hunter Selene in her husband Len Wiseman’s stylish-looking but confusing adventure Underworld: Evolution . Although not screened for US critics, it opened at #1 for a week before quickly dropping out of the box-office charts on both sides of the Atlantic. At least Sir Derek Jacobi and Bill Nighy added a touch of class to the cast. Along similar lines, Milla Jovovich donned a rubber suit to save mankind from a bio-engineered virus that turned humans into vampires in Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet .

Kristanna Loken played a half-human, half-vampire “dhampir” in Uwe Boll’s third video game adaptation BloodRayne , which also starred Billy Zane, Michael Madsen, Meatloaf, Udo Kier, Michelle Rodriguez and Sir Ben Kingsley. It opened in the US with a gross of just $1.6 million.

In Ti West’s low budget The Roost , a group of teens on their way to a wedding were attacked by vampire bats whose bite transformed their victims into bloodsuckers, while Frostbite was a Swedish vampire movie set in a hospital.