In UPN’s Special Unit 2, a covert branch of the Chicago Police Department investigated ‘the monsters of every child’s nightmare’. These apparently included gargoyles, virgin-craving mermen, werewolf stockbrokers and a ninja mummy, all created by Patrick Tatopoulos.
Following the movie pilot featuring Eric Roberts and Judd Nelson, Strange Frequency was an anthology series on VH1 hosted by Roger Daltrey, who appeared as a satanic talent agent in the first episode. Meanwhile, Aidan Quinn, Lou Diamond Phillips and Samantha Mathis were among the stars of the Fox anthology series Night Visions, which also failed to identify its audience.
The second series of Shockers comprised three offbeat hour-long dramas written by Stephen Volk, Joe Ahearne and Chris Bucknall.
In the Halloween episode of Relic Hunter, Sydney (Tia Carrere) teamed up with charismatic vampire novelist Lucas Blackmer (Adrian Paul) to find Vlad Tepes’s mystical chalice.
Season four of the Sci Fi series Lexx included a two-part episode, co-written by Tom De Ville, in which Stanley (Brian Downey), Xev (Xenia Seeberg) and Kai (Michael McManus) travelled to the Transylvanian castle of Count Dracul (John Standing) and encountered the power of the revived Vlad (Minna Aaltonen). Veteran Lionel Jeffries turned up briefly as a priest.
Vampire High was a Canadian teen series in which five young vampires were entrusted to the Mansbridge Academy, where they would learn to tame their instincts and live among mortals.
More Land of the Lost than Conan Doyle, the Australian syndicated series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World featured episodes in which members of the stranded expedition discovered a mysterious valley full of werewolves and received psychic visions from the knife belonging to Jack the Ripper. Judith Reeves-Stevens and Garfield Reeves-Stevens were creative consultants, and a slightly more risqué version apparently aired on DirecTV in America.
Filmed in New Zealand, the Dungeons and Dragons-inspired fantasy series Dark Knight, created by co-producer Terry Marcel, included episodes in which Ivanhoe (Ben Pullen) and his companions came to the aid of a village menaced by an ancient werewolf cult and battled an Egyptian mummy raised from the dead by a band of Templar Knights.
In the second season of the syndicated BeastMaster, Dar (Daniel Goddard) and Tao (Jackson Raine) encountered the shapechanging demon Lara (Sam Healy and Danielle Spencer) and the original film series’ star, Marc Singer, joined the cast as spirit guide Dartanus.
TV’s Tarzan, Ron Ely, turned up as a villain in Sheena, starring Gena Lee Nolin as the shapechanging heroine, while TV Batman Adam West was among those battling Black Scorpion.
During the fifth season of Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (how long can they keep using that title?), Sabrina finally moved out and lived with roommates on campus.
Creator R. L. Stine described his anthology series The Nightmare Room on Kids’ WB as ‘a Twilight Zone for kids’. Tippi Hedren (Hitchcock’s The Birds) was one of the guest stars.
Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible was a not very funny BBC series created by and starring comedian Steve Coogan. Spoofing everything from Hammer Films to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the Amicus anthology movies of the 1970s, the shows did feature such interesting guest stars as Oliver Tobias, Sheila Keith, Warwick Davis, Angela Pleasence, Tom Bell and Graham Crowden.
In the crazy world of American daytime soap operas, NBC-TV’s Passions featured homages to five classic horror films before 300-year-old witch Tabitha (Juliet Mills!) lost her head and had it sewn back on by little Timmy (Josh Ryan Evans). Meanwhile, Timmy’s magic left Charity with some odd side effects.
Over at ABC-TV’s even wackierPort Charles, after a twelve-week ‘telenovella’ involving time-travel, the town’s inhabitants found themselves succumbing to schizophrenic vampire Caleb (Michael Easton). The characters also saw the year out with an apocalyptic plot involving angels and devils.
Not to be outdone, on ABC-TV’s All My Children Gillian (Esta TerBlanche) was shot in the head by an assassin and then visited by the ghostly spirits of previous characters from the show, who helped her find her way towards the bright light.
Reworking themes and characters from The Mummy Returns, the Universal cartoon series The Mummy featured the ancient Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep searching for the ancient Scrolls of Thebes. In one episode, Rick O’Connell (voiced by John Schneider) was bitten by a wolf in Ireland and transformed into a werewolf.
Shown on the digital TV channel BBC Choice, The Fear was a series of fifteen-minute readings (with dramatized inserts) by such actors as Marianne Jean Baptiste, Jason Flemyng, Anna Friel, Sadie Frost, Kelly Macdonald, Neve Mcintosh, Nick Moran, Sean Pertwee and Ray Winstone. Authors whose work was adapted included Honore de Balzac, M. E. Braddon, F. Marion Crawford, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Berwick Harwood and Edgar Allan Poe.
American Movie Classics’ hour-long Halloween tribute to American International Pictures, It Conquered Hollywood, featured interviews with Beverly Garland, Roger Corman, Bruce Dern, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Dick Miller, Susan Hart and others.
Produced for Channel Four Television by Pete Tombs and Andy Starke, Mondo Macabro was a wonderful half-hour documentary series looking at exploitation and genre film-making in Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Asia and Turkey. Among those interviewed were Eddie Romero and José Mojica Marins (aka Coffin Joe/Ze do Caixao).
SF: UK was a jingoistic documentary series written and hosted by the irritating Mathew De Abaitua for Channel Four and The Sci-Fi Channel. Topics included Frankenstein and War of the Worlds, and Mark Gatiss and Kim Newman were among the regular contributors.
Gatiss and Newman also turned up in Inventing Monsters, an impressive half-hour documentary for digital channel BBC Knowledge hosted by Professor Christopher Frayling, who looked at the attraction of monsters in popular culture. Other contributors included David J. Skal, Marina Warner, Anne Bill-son and Ingrid Pitt, plus archive interviews with Jimmy Sangster and Yutte Stensgaard.
Mario Bava, Maestro of the Macabre was an hour-long documentary about the cult Italian director with commentary from film-makers Tim Burton, Joe Dante, John Carpenter, John Saxon, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Lamberto Bava, John Philip Law, Alfred Leone and Daria Nicoldi and from critics Allan Bryce, Tim Lucas and the ubiquitous Kim Newman.
Michelle Trachtenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer hosted the half-hour Discovery Kids seriesT ruth or Scare, in which she looked at such subjects as Dracula, The Curse of Tutankhamun, werewolves and Irish ghosts with the help of Dr Leonard Wolf, David J. Skal, James V. Hart and Professor Nina Auerbach.
In September, Canada’s Corus Entertainment launched the country’s first twenty-four-hour digital-access horror channel, entitled Scream. Horror author Edo van Belkom hosted the midnight-movie programme Post Mortem, supplying commentary during breaks in the films.
Peggy Sue Got Married, the stage musical starring Ruthie Henshall and based on the 1986 movie, became the first theatrical casualty of the September 11th terrorist attacks when it closed after just six weeks in London’s West End, blaming plummeting audience figures. It was soon followed by Notre-Dame de Paris, in which Hazel Fernandez had replaced Dannii Minogue after the Australian actress/singer walked out in June, and The Witches of Eastwick, in which Clarke Peters had taken over from Ian McShane as the Devil.