Also on Chiller, a group of friends were trapped in an isolated cabin by a bloodthirsty predator in the monster movie Animal, while 5 States of Fear was an anthology of short films told through a series of nightmare hallucinations.
Produced by Ridley Scott and pieced together from a five-part mini-series on Xbox One, the mostly incomprehensible Halo: Nightfall was based on the popular shooter video game. It concerned a group of soldiers trapped in a hostile alien environment and menaced by deadly Hunter Worms.
John Hamm, Rafe Spall and Oona Chaplin starred in Black Mirror: White Christmas on Channel 4, a Christmas special of Charlie Brooker’s anthology series, which featured three interconnected stories about the dangers of technology.
In a reversal of the 1985 movie Weird Science, two tech-savvy teens (China Anne McClain and Kelli Berglund) used military software to create the perfect boyfriend (Marshall Williams) in the Disney Channels’ How to Build a Better Boy.
Probably the best genre show on television in 2014, and arguably the best for years, was HBO’s eight-part slice of Southern Gothic, True Detective, created by Nick Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga.
Two contrasting Louisiana detectives (impeccably played by casting heavyweights Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson) were forced to revisit a case they thought they had closed in the mid-1990s, involving a cult of ritualistic serial killers whose mythology was linked with that of Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 collection The King in Yellow.
Although the show ultimately pulled back from its inevitable cosmic horror climax, other sources directly or indirectly cited included the fiction of Thomas Ligotti and Karl Edward Wagner.
Now the most expensive and most-watched TV show on the planet, the fourth season of HBO’s multi-layered Game of Thrones saw the sadistic boy-king Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) poisoned, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) murder his father Tywin (Charles Dance), and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) lock up her dragons, as the zombie Winter came ever closer.
In July, scripts and two rough-cut episodes of the BBC’s eighth new series of Doctor Who were leaked online prior to transmission, after a security breach at BBC Worldwide’s Miami, Florida, office.
In the show, Peter Capaldi replaced Matt Smith as a more adult Time Lord to excellent effect. Unfortunately, the stories he was stuck in (mostly co-written by Steven Moffat) weren’t up to the exuberance the actor brought to the role.
The newly regenerated twelfth Doctor and his increasingly annoying companion Clara (Jenna Coleman)—occasionally accompanied by her mopey new boyfriend (Samuel Anderson)—encountered a dinosaur in Victorian London, found themselves trapped inside a Dalek, joined forces with a robot Robin Hood (Tom Riley), battled alien spiders on the Moon and an alien mummy on an interstellar Orient Express, and confronted the Cybermen (yet again). The latter episode featured a nice tribute to the late Nicholas Courtney’s character “Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart”.
At least an old foe of the Doctor was revealed in an unexpected new guise, and Victorian detectives Vastra, Jenny and Strax showed up again (they really should have their own series). However, the BBC was criticised by gay rights campaigners when it cut a “lesbian kiss” between Vastra and Jenny when the episode was shown in Asia.
The now-obligatory holiday special, ‘Last Christmas’, found the Doctor and Clara teaming up with Nick Frost’s Santa Claus in a cut-price version of The Thing, with support from Michael Gambon, singer Katherine Jenkins, and Michael Troughton, the son of second Doctor Patrick Troughton.
Creator John Logan plundered classic literature and Hollywood “B” movies for Sky/Showtime’s handsome-looking mash-up series Penny Dreadful. Timothy Dalton’s Sir Malcolm Murray put together a league of extraordinary gentlemen (and woman)—including possessed psychic Vanessa Ives (the wonderful Eva Green), a tortured Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and werewolf gunslinger Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett)—to save his daughter Mina Harker from an ancient nosferatu.
Meanwhile, Reeve Carney’s Dorian Gray hung around looking pretty, Frankenstein’s homicidal Creature (Rory Kinnear) demanded a mate, and David Warner turned up as an ill-fated Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
David Bradley played another vampire-hunter named Abraham, trying to warn the citizens of New York that the plague spreading through their city was caused by the nosferatu-like Master smuggled into the country, in the FX Network’s refreshingly adult horror series The Strain, based on the trilogy of novels by executive producers Guillermo del Toro and crime writer Chuck Hogan.
To tie-in with the premiere of the show in the UK, veteran author and paranormal researcher Lionel Fanthorpe was commissioned to discover the country’s “Horror Hotspots”. Compiling the findings from archives, police reports and eye-witness accounts over the past 100 years, he uncovered more than 200 reported vampire sightings in Britain—compared to just eight in Transylvania—and the county of Yorkshire came out top with 615 unexplained encounters.
Replace vampires with zombies, NYC with a secret Arctic research station, add a touch of The X Files, and you had the first season of Syfy’s Helix, which started off well but never really knew where it was heading.
Another group who had no idea where they were going were the meandering survivors of season five of AMC’s interminable The Walking Dead as they made their way to the supposed sanctuary of Terminus, where—predictably—all was not quite what it seemed. A documentary special, Inside the Walking Dead, was a behind-the-scenes look at the production.
Made on a fraction of The Walking Dead‘s budget, at least Syfy’s gory Z Nation was more fun, set three years after a zombie virus has decimated America, while the same network’s Town of the Living Dead was an unscripted docu-series set in a small Alabama town trying to make their own indie zombie movie. Robert Englund guest-starred.
The second, six-part season of the BBC’s thoughtful In the Flesh saw those suffering from Partially Deceased Syndrome (PDS) battling zombie extremists and an MP’s political machinations.
As always, the best thing about The CW’s Supernatural was the show’s easy humour and well-drawn supporting characters—whether it was likeable self-styled “King of Hell” Crowley (the wonderfully droll Mark Sheppard), compassionate Sheriff/Hunter Jody Mills (Kim Rhodes) or a werewolf-loving Garth (D.J. Qualls).
As the war between the angels dragged on, Dean (Jensen Ackles) was cursed with the Mark of Cain, and by the beginning of the tenth season was transformed into a devil-may-care demon himself as the series passed its 200th episode with a fun meta-episode based around a fan fiction-inspired high school show.
Supernatural‘s ‘Bloodlines’ episode was a back-door pilot for a series about five powerful clans of monsters running the city of Chicago.
Clearly inspired by Tod Browning’s Freaks, Sunset Blvd. and American Psycho, the fourth season of the Fox’s American Horror Story, subtitled Freak Show, continued to push the envelope of good taste.
Now set in 1952 Florida and based around a travelling carnival run by former cabaret star Elsa Mars (series regular Jessica Lange, camping it up with a Marlene Dietrich accent), it featured Sarah Paulson as a pair of conjoined twins (a remarkable optical effect), Kathy Bates as a bearded lady, and Michael Chiklis as a strongman with a temper, while John Carroll Lynch played a truly terrifying homicidal clown.