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

Fan-of-the-show Peter Straub played a blind retired police officer on the March 27th episode of the daytime soap opera One Life to Live .

Inspired by the book by Michael Lawrence, the BBC’s Young Dracula was a fourteen-part children’s comedy in which single father Count Dracula (Keith-Lee Castle) couldn’t understand why his son Vlad (Gerran Howell) wanted to turn his back on blood-drinking and become a normal London teenager, much to the disgust of Vlad’s older sister, Ingrid (Clare Thomas).

Filmed in New Zealand, Maddigan’s Quest was based on Margaret Mahy’s book and was set in a post-apocalyptic world.

The animated Zombie Hotel was about eight-year-old twins, Fungus and Maggot, and their dead parents Rictus and Funerella.

An episode of The CW’s animated series The Batman featured new Superman actor Brandon Routh as the villainous Everywhere Man, who used quantum technology to duplicate himself.

Ghostly DC Comics characters Deadman, Mr Terrific, Stargirl and the Shining Knight all turned up in episodes of the animated Justice League Unlimited . After five seasons, the show ended with a two-part episode in which Lex Luthor and the Legion of Doom attempted to reanimate Brainiac.

Fox’s seventeenth annual The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror featured the guest voices of Dr Phil, Richard Lewis and Fran Drescher. The Halloween episode’s three tales of terror included Homer being transformed into a man-eating blob by a meteorite, Springfield’s own version of the Golem, and a spoof on Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast featuring aliens Kang and Kodos.

Mario Bava: Maestro of the Macabre was the title of a documentary that aired on IFC in September. John Carpenter, Joe Dante and Tim Burton were amongst those who paid tribute to the influential Italian director and cinematographer. Over on the History Channel, Vampire Secrets looked at vampire mythology and its influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula .

Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film was a Starz documentary on Friday the 13th in October, and Bravo celebrated Halloween with the two-hour Even Scarier Movie Moments . Meanwhile, there was a two-day Munsters Marathon on TV Land, the Sci Fi Channel programmed 13 Days of Halloween , ABC Family went with 13 Nights of Halloween , and AMC offered up Monster fest X , a ten-day non-stop monster movie marathon to celebrate the horror-day season.

Michael Sheen portrayed the author in the BBC dramatised profile H. G. Wells: War with the World , while Jonathan Ross, Lord Hattersley and astronomer Patrick Moore contributed to the documentary H. G. Wells and Me .

Dennis Wheatley: A Letter to Posterity was an hour-long documentary about the bestselling writer whose work has now fallen out of favour.

The Martians and Us was a three-part BBC series exploring the roots of British science fiction. Contributors included Brian W. Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Doris Lessing, Ian M. Banks, Margaret Atwood, Will Self and Kim Newman. Over six episodes, The Cult of . . . looked at the history of cult TV shows Adam Adamant Lives!, Doomwatch, Star Cops, Survivors, Blakes 7 and Tripods .

Transylvania Babylon presented an entertaining selection of clips of big and small screen Draculas from the past.

The third season finale of the Sci Fi Channel’s “reality” show Ghost Hunters featured a visit to Colorado’s Stanley Hotel, the real-life inspiration for Stephen King’s Overlook in The Shining .

Spike TV broadcast the Spike Scream Awards 2006 in October, “hosted by the women of Grindhouse ” (Rosario Dawson, Rose McGowan and Marley Shelton). For some reason it also featured a special tribute to Ozzy Osbourne.

In early December, BBC Radio 3 broadcast Weird Tales – The Strange Life of H. P. Lovecraft . Geoff Ward, professor of literature at Dundee University presented the forty-five minute show about the influential author with contributions from Neil Gaiman, S. T. Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Miéville.

Playwright and poet Lemn Sissay traced Poe the Poet for Radio 3’s Twenty Minutes programme, while actor Kerry Shale read from some of Edgar Allan’s better-known verse.

BBC Radio 4’s Confessions of a Crap Artist was a half-hour documentary about Philip K. Dick’s reported encounter with God in 1974, while writer Francis Spufford looked at the history of British science fiction in the four-part series Imagining Albion: The Great British Future .

Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novel Small Gods was dramatised in four parts on Radio 4. Thea von Harbou’s classic SF novel Metropolis was adapted for the hour-long Friday Play in March, and Ian McKellen narrated a dramatisation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the Afternoon Play at Christmas.

Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre became the first venue in the world to mount the epic three-and-a-half hour stage production of The Lord of the Rings . Matthew Warchus and Shaun McKenna squeezed J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy into a three-act structure with stunning special effects and a score by A. R. Rahman and the Finnish musical group Vårttinå. Touted as the most expensive production in theatre history, the show reportedly cost more than $23 million.

Despite being nominated for two Tony Awards, Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s lavish stage musical of Anne Rice’s Lestat closed on Broadway in May, after just thirty-three preview and thirty-nine regular performances. Directed by Robert Jess Roth, Hugh Panaro was cast as the titular vampire.

It was announced in February that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical The Woman in White , based on the Gothic novel by Wilkie Collins, was to end its Broadway run after only two months at New York’s Marquis Theatre. Although it was playing to less than capacity audiences, producers blamed illness amongst the cast. Meanwhile, the original production in London’s West End starring Ruthie Henshall closed after nineteen months to make way for the Monty Python musical Spamalot .

There was more success for Sir Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera which, in the previous month, became the longest-running show in Broadway history when it notched up performance #7,486. Since the show opened in London in 1986, it had been seen by more than 80 million people worldwide.

Having started out in a small club in Toronto in 2003, Evil Dead: The Musical finally arrived in New York City as an Off Broadway show in time for Halloween. Inspired by Sam Raimi’s 1980s cult horror films, audience members in the front two rows of the theatre at the World Stages complex ended up nightly drenched in fake blood.

In Los Angeles, the Gangbusters Theatre Company presented the official world stage premiere of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead . Running from October through December at The Stella Adler Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, the poorly-reviewed production starred Mancini Graves as the zombie-battling Ben and was produced and directed by Christian Levatino. Free beer was offered to all adult patrons.

A short drive across town at the Lex Theatre, Theatre East’s They’re Not Zombies , written and directed by Leif Gantvoort, covered much the same ground with more humour. Many of the characters were named after people connected with the original Romero movie. Adding to the LA zombiefest, Zombies! was an improv show put on by The Acme Comedy Theatre.