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

Hollywood talent manager and publicist Jay Bernsteindied of a stroke on April 30th, aged 69. His clients included Farrah Fawcett, Suzanne Somers and Kristy McNichol. He produced the TV films The Wild Wild West Revisited and More Wild Wild West .

Austrian-born Alpine cameraman Herbert Raditschnig,who shot specialist scenes for the James Bond movies For Your Eyes Only and GoldenEye , died of a stroke on May 6th, aged 72. He was also the cinematographer on the 1987 horror film The Outing .

American special effects technician Philip Barberiodied of multiple myeloma on May 8th, aged 60. He worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Return ofthejedi, Ghostbusters, The Blob (1988), The Abyss, Waxwork II: Lost in Time and such TV series as The Flash, Star Trek: Voyager and The Sentinel .

Veteran British film director, screenwriter and producer Val Guest(Valmond Guest) died of prostate cancer in Palm Springs on May 10th, aged 94. A former film journalist, he worked on a number of comedy scripts, including Alf’s Button Afloat, Ask a Policeman, The Ghost Train (1941) and Back Room Boy before becoming a director in the early 1940s. His numerous credits include Hammer’s The Quatermass Experiment (aka The Creeping Unknown), Quatermass 2 (aka Enemy from Space), The Abominable Snowman (aka The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas), Camp on Blood Island and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth , along with Mr Drake’s Duck, Expresso Bongo (with Cliff Richard), The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Where the Spies Are, Casino Royale and the “lost” SF musical Toomorrow . He also directed episodes of the TV series Space: 1999 and Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense . Guest was married to actress Yolande Donlan.

Former actor turned BBC-TV producer Peter Bryantdied on May 19th, aged 82. From 1967–69 he produced and/or story-edited Doctor Who starring Patrick Troughton, including such shows as “The Evil of the Daleks”, “The Tomb of the Cybermen”, “The Abominable Snowmen” and “The Web of Fear”.

Two-time Academy Award-winning production designer and art director [Lloyd] Henry Bumsteaddied of prostate cancer on May 24th, aged 91. He worked on more than 100 films in a career than spanned nearly seventy years, including Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo and Family Plot, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, The Brass Bottle, The War Lord, Slaughterhouse-Five (in which he also appeared), The Concorde – Airport ’79, The World According to Garp, Psycho III, Ghost Dad, Cape Fear (1991) and thirteen collaborations with Clint Eastwood.

British documentary film-maker Michael Croucher,who produced and directed the 1973 ghost story TV series Leap in the Dark , died on May 26th, aged 76.

American special effects pioneer Arthur Widmer,who created the Ulta Violet Travelling Matte (a forerunner of the bluescreen optical process), died on May 28th, aged 91.

Oscar-winning computer animation pioneer Bill Kovacsdied of complications of a stroke and cerebral haemorrhage on May 30th, aged 56 . Having helped develop animation software at Robert Abel and Associates in the 1970s, he used the technology on Disney’s 1982 film Tron .

Bernard Loomis,one of the first people to successfully market toys through the entertainment industry, died of heart disease on June 2nd, aged 82. From the late 1950s into the 1990s, while working for Mattel, Kenner Toys and other companies, he turned various franchises (including Star Wars, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman ) into greeting cards, TV movies and cartoon series. He famously rejected Close Encounters of the Third Kind for not being “toyetic” enough.

Pioneering scuba diver Dick Anderson,who served as diving equipment technician in Nassau for Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea , died of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) on June 3rd, aged 73. He was also the dive master on Jaws: The Revenge .

Veteran Hollywood director Vincent Sherman(Abram Orovitz) died on June 18th, one month short of his 100th birthday. A former stage and screen actor, he made his directorial debut in 1939 with The Return of Dr X starring Humphrey Bogart in his only horror film role. In the 1950s Sherman was “greylisted” by the House Un-American Activities Committee, while his 1996 autobiography Studio Affairs: My Life as a Film Director revealed that his lovers included Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth.

British film producer, director and cinematographer Monty Berman(Nestor Montague “Monty” Berman), died on June 20th, aged 93. Born in London’s Whitechapel, he worked with Michael Powell and Carol Reed before teaming up with Robert S. Baker in the late 1940s to turn out a string of low budget “B” movies, including Blood of the Vampire, The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye), Jack the Ripper (1959), The Flesh and the Fiends (aka Mania), The Hellfire Club and What a Carve Up! (aka No Place Like Homicide ). In the early 1960s, Baker and Berman moved into TV with such popular ITC series as The Saint (starring Roger Moore) and The Baron (with Steve Forrest), and Berman was paired with writer Dennis Spooner for such shows as The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Department S and Jason King .

Aaron Spelling,who began his career as a character actor in the 1950s and went on to become one of the most powerful and influential independent producers in television, died after suffering a stroke on June 23rd, aged 83. His long list of credits include Rod Serling’s short-lived series The New People, Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Kindred: The Embraced, Charmed and the TV movies How Awful About Allan, The House That Would Not Die, Cro-whaven Farm, Five Desperate Women, The Last Child, A Taste of Evil, Home for the Holidays, Satan’s School for Girls (1973 and 2000 versions), Death Cruise, Death at Love House, Cruise Into Terror, The Power Within , and Massarati and the Brain . Credited with almost 4,000 hours of television and estimated to be worth $300 million, he is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most prolific producer of TV drama. His first wife was The Addams Family actress Carolyn Jones.

Kathy Wood,the widow of cult director Edward D. Wood, Jr (who died in 1978), died of cancer on June 26th, aged 84. She met and married the struggling film-maker in 1955, and worked closely with her husband as an editor and writer on a number of his projects (apparently coming up with the term “solarnite bomb” for Plan 9 from Outer Space ). She was portrayed by Patricia Arquette in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood .

Italian author and film-maker Stanis(lao) Nievo,credited as one of the creators of the “mondo” genre of outrageous film documentaries with Mondo Cane (1962), died on July 12th, aged 78.

Former vaudeville comedian and country music producer June Carr Ormonddied in Nashville of complications from a stroke on July 14th, aged 94. With her husband Ron (who died in 1981), she produced a number of poverty-row Western serials starring Lash LaRue and Fuzzy St. John as well as the 1952 cult classic Mesa of Lost Women, Teenage Bride, White Lightnin’ Road and Girl from Tobacco Row . Following a plane crash in 1967, the couple turned to making religious exploitation movies, including The Monster and the Stripper, The Burning Hell and Grim Reaper (in which she played the witch, “Endor”).