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

Ray Winstone did little more than walk through his performance as the sympathetic barber who cut the throats of his customers in David Moore’s BBC film of Sweeney Todd , shot on nicely atmospheric Romanian locations. Essie Davis was a nymphomaniac Mrs Lovett who turned the victims into pies, and David Warner played a blind policeman investigating the mysterious disappearances. The “Director’s Cut” was subsequently released on DVD with exclusive unseen footage.

Based on a story by Dennis Wheatley, The Haunted Airman was a short BBC film about a recuperating RAF pilot (Robert Pattinson) who was tormented by terrifying flashbacks. Julian Sands played his sinister doctor.

Number 13 was the latest M. R. James ghost story for Christmas. Greg Wise starred as the academic who discovered that his lodging house contained a ghostly room next to his own.

In Stuart Orme’s two-part Ghostboat , based on the novel by George E. Simpson, David Jason played the only survivor of a World War II submarine disaster who found he was still linked with the past when the haunted vessel mysteriously reappeared thirty-eight years later.

Ian Richardson provided the voice of Death who, with his reluctant assistant Albert (David Jason), had to save Christmas from Marc Warren’s psychotic Mr Teatime and the mysterious “Auditors” in Vadim Jean’s all-star holiday treat Terry Pratchett’s Hog-father , which was shown over two nights on Sky Television. Based on Pratchett’s 20th “Discworld” novel, the author contributed to the script and turned up in a cameo as a Toymaker.

For younger viewers, Pratchett’s time-travel adventure Johnny and the Bomb was adapted as a three-part children’s series starring Zoë Wanamaker, Frank Finlay and Keith Barron.

In Return to Halloweentown , the fourth instalment in the Disney franchise, Sara Paxton starred as teenage witch Marnie, who was on her way to Witch College with a little help from Grandma Aggie (Debbie Reynolds).

John Goodman starred as Saint Nick in NBC’s live-action remake of The Year Without a Santa Claus , based on the 1974 Rankin/Bass claymation original.

Re-Animated , the Cartoon Network’s first live-action movie, was about a young boy who received a brain transplant from the founder of a theme park. Fred Willard played the Walt Disney-like entrepreneur.

The animated Superman: Brainiac Attacks on the Cartoon Network pitted the Man of Steel against his two greatest enemies, Brainiac and Lex Luthor. The network also aired the superhero movies Teen Titans in Tokyo, Ultimate Avengers II and the Japan-set Hellboy: Sword of Storms (featuring the voices of Ron Perlman and Selma Blair).

BBC-TV’s revived Doctor Who series continued to be one of Britain’s most popular programmes. For the second, thirteen-part series, Scottish actor David Tennant took over as a dynamic incarnation of the Time Lord, who shared a more romantic relationship with his companion, Rose Tyler (Billie Piper). The better episodes involved a werewolf murder mystery surrounding Queen Victoria (Pauline Collins), the poignant return of former companions Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and the robot dog K-9, a two-part Cyberman invasion of London, a soul-sucking 1950s TV entity (Maureen Lip-man) and a Satanic creature trapped by the power of a black hole. In the epic two-part finale, an Earth besieged by ghosts and the destruction of the mysterious Torchwood Institute were only a prelude to an apocalyptic confrontation between the Cybermen and the Daleks as Rose made a decision that would change her life forever.

For the show’s Christmas special, “The Runaway Bride”, the Doctor teamed up with comedian Catherine Tate as a sarcastic bride who vanished from her wedding ceremony and ended up on the Tardis. Together they battled Sarah Parish’s impressive giant spider-queen.

Although the first episode of the “adult” Doctor Who spin-off series Torchwood broke the record for the biggest audience for a UK digital TV channel, Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and his Cardiff team of ludicrously bisexual paranormal investigators were never as entertaining as the show that spawned them.

Modern Manchester police detective Sam Tyler (John Simm) was knocked down by a car and apparently found himself transported back to a surprisingly un-PC 1973 in the BBC’s enjoyable and amusing eight-part series Life on Mars (named after the David Bowie song). While Tyler (and the viewers) tried to work out if he had actually travelled back in time or if it was all in his head, he also had to contend with his no-nonsense boss Gene Hunt (the excellent Philip Glenister) and a particularly creepy young girl off the television test card.

Less successful was the BBC’s feature-length remake of Fred Hoyle and James Elliot’s 1961 SF series A for Andromeda , shot on HD video and shown in March. Kelly Reilly starred as the eponymous new biological life form.

Also disappointing, Random Quest was an hour-long adaptation of the John Wyndham story (previously filmed for TV in 1969 and as Quest for Love in 1971). Following a laboratory accident, research scientist Colin Trafford (Samuel West) found himself in a parallel universe inhabiting the body of his namesake and living a very different life.

For those fans still missing Buffy and Angel , rapper Kirk “Sticky” Jones starred as the vengeance-seeking half-human, half-vampire “daywalker”, who teamed up with Jill Wagner’s undercover bloodsucker to defeat the sinister House of Chthon in Spike TV’s surprisingly engaging Blade: The Series , created by David Goyer and based on the Marvel Comics character.

The second, thirteen-episode season of Showtime Network’s anthology series Masters of Horror kicked off in October with Richard Christian Matheson’s loose adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing”, directed by Tobe Hooper and starring Sean Patrick Flanery. The series also included hour-long episodes directed by John Landis, Ernest Dickerson, Brad Anderson, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Joe Dante and creator Mick Garris, and featured George Wendt, Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman, Meat Loaf, Elliot Gould and Tony Todd among the guest stars.

Richard Christian Matheson also scripted “Battle Ground”, the first and probably best episode of TNT’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes , an hour-long anthology show filmed in Australia and based on eight of Stephen King’s lesser-known stories. The series continued through the Lovecraftian “Crouch End” (set in a very peculiar depiction of London), “Umney’s Last Case”, “The End of the Whole Mess”, “The Road Virus Heads North”, “The Fifth Quarter”, “Autopsy Room Four” and “You Know They’ve Got a Hell of a Band”. Guest stars included William Hurt, William H. Macy, Henry Thomas, Tom Berenger, Samantha Mathis, Richard Thomas and Steven Weber.

In Showtime Network’s blackly humorous Dexter , Miami police forensic expert and secret serial killer Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) discovered that his sister’s new boyfriend was the Ice Truck Killer and that he had a familial connection to the mixed-up murderer. Although the season finale marginally failed to live up to the promise of the rest of the series, Dexter was still one of the best new shows on TV, based on Jeff Lindsay’s 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter .

In America, The CW was the network that was created out of the merger of The WB and UPN. Co-owners CBS and Time Warner launched the new channel in September with a $50 million promotional campaign.

In The CW’s Supernatural , Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) finally teamed up with their missing father John Winchester (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to confront vampires and obtain a mystical gun that could destroy the demon that killed their mother. Not only did the boys have to deal with Reapers, a flesh-eating clown and the death of their father, but they also battled the ghost of America’s first serial killer, H. H. Holmes and encountered a seriously homicidal vampire-hunter. In a clever piece of stunt-casting that was guaranteed to turn heads, Linda Blair turned up as a sympathetic cop in an episode entitled “The Usual Suspects”.