Were this an ordinary year, I would be marking its close with a fond look back at what came before. Alas, this was not an ordinary year, so I’ll keep things brief.
“What came before” has already been ably handled by other bloggers. For one, we have the annual round-up of “year’s best horror films” posts, which are handy if you’d like to catch up on titles you missed.Vulture, Rotten Tomatoes, Den of Geek and Rolling Stone (to name a few) have all chipped in. If you would like a list highlighting lesser-known films, then perhaps you might enjoy Killer Horror Critic’s feature on the 20 best horror films from 2020 that you might have missed or Bloody Disgusting’s take on the 10 best international horror films of 2020. Articles on the year’s top horror novels are a harder to come by, although The Lineup has one.
As we bid farewell to 2020, let us bid farewell to some of the horror creators we lost this month.
Richard Corben was a comic artist and writer known for his spectacular paintings of otherworldly settings. His most famous creation was the saga of Den, a sword-wielding protagonist who has adventures on an alien world. But Corben also lent his talents to the horror genre by illustrating comic adaptations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson, along with detailing the exploits of horror-adjacent franchise characters like Constantine, Ghost Rider and Hellboy. He passed away on December 2, aged 80.
Harlan Band worked as a production assistant on films produced by his father Charles Band, namely Killer Eye: Halloween Haunt, Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, Killer Clown and Evil Bong: High 5. Struggling with addiction for 12 years, he passed away at the age of 29.
David Giler was a producer and writer who was closely associated with the Alien and Tales from the Crypt series. He served as a producer or executive producer on all of the Alien films, including Prometheus and the Predator crossovers; he also co-wrote Alien 3 and had a story credit on Aliens. His work for Tales from the Crypt included not only acting as executive producer on the 1989-1996 television series, but also serving as producer or executive producer on the spin-off cartoon series Tales from the Cryptkeeper, the spiritual successor Perversions of Science and the film tie-ins Demon Knight, Bordello of Blood and Ritual. He passed away on December 19, aged 77.
James E Gunn was a prominent author of science fiction who took a notable detour into supernatural horror with his 1970 anthology The Witching Hour. He passed away on December 23, aged 97.
Doris V. Sutherland 