The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Northrop Frye, 78, was an influential literary critic, one of the leading proponents of the symbolist movement in literary criticism. Among his major works were the 1947 study of William Blake’s works, Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism. Chad Walsh, 76, was a noted academic, a poet and a writer, justly respected for his C. S. Lewis scholarship in such works as The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (1979). He wrote many book reviews and several volumes of children’s fantasy.

Many actors associated in one way or another with the field died last year, including stars of stage, film and television. Joan Bennett, 80, starred in many films, and late in her career was a featured player in television’s dark fantasy soap opera, Dark Shadows. Gene Tierney, 70, was a charming romantic comedienne in Heaven Can Wait (1943), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and many other films. Jean Rogers, 74, was best known for playing Dale Arden to Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon. Michael Landon, 54, was successful in a string of television series, and never escaped the notoriety of his early stint in the low-budget film I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Keye Luke, 86, played Charlie Chan s Number 1 Son in the film series; he was a fine character actor for decades on big screen and small, bringing dignity to the TV series Kung Fu.

A number of people involved in the creative process of film and television production left us last year. Milton Subotsky, 70, while never an award-caliber producer, was responsible for the production of a great number of horror films in the sixties and seventies. Starting as a screenwriter, he formed Amicus Productions, which made the very successful film Tales from the Crypt in 1971, among many other features. David Lean, 83, was a fine producer and director, best known for Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai, both of which won him Oscars. Don Siegel, 78, is best remembered for his classic chiller, the original production of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also directed a number of adventure films and thrillers, including Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and War of the Worlds. Irwin Allen, 75, was a writer, producer and director who became famous in the 1970s for making big-scale disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. In 1960 he produced The Lost World, based on the Conan Doyle novel. In 1961 he made a film, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which he followed up with a television series of the same title. William Dozier, 83, produced the Batman television series as well as other shows.

French artist and author Jean Bruller, 89, wrote fiction under the name Vercors, starting when he wrote for the French resistance during World War II. His best-known work was Les Animaux Denatures, (1952), translated as You Shall Know Them. It was given the title Borderline in the U.K., then reprinted as The Murder of the Missing Link in the U.S. His works were sophisticated fantasies, including a novel about the transformation of a vixen into a human woman, Sylva, which was a 1963 nominee for the Hugo Award for best SF novel. Roger Stine, 39, was an artist who did a number of paintings for Cinefantastique, and for various science fiction and fantasy books and magazines. Rick Griffin, 47, was a noted artist whose work was famous in the underground comix of the sixties and seventies. He also did numerous psychedelic rock posters, and album covers for bands such as The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. British animator Joy Batchelor, 77, was best known for her collaboration with her husband, John Halas, on the 1954 feature, Animal Farm, based on the George Orwell novel.