DVD

Once upon a time the BBC used to delight in terrifying Christmas audiences with adaptations of classic ghost stories – several based on the work of M.R. James. These two volumes celebrate this with four James adaptations. The first houses 1968 and 2010 takes on Whistle and I’ll Come to You, while the second offers up 1971’s The Stalls of Barchester and 1972’s A Warning to the Curious – each a masterpiece of small-screen supernatural scares.

The Incredible Hulk is a film made for those who felt cheated by Ang Lee’s cerebral (not to mention underrated) take on Marvel’s not-so-jolly green giant.

Harvey Spector is a charismatic high-flying lawyer. Mike Ross, his new junior associate, is a college drop-out who has never even studied law, but has helped a lot of people cheat their way through the exams. How’s that for a high concept? Well, while Suits is sometimes a little too smug for its own good, for the most part it’s a well-written show with excellent performances. It certainly left this reviewer interested to see how the concept develops across a second season.

Obviously created to cash-in on the Twilight-inspired trend for supernatural romance, this MTV-produced show should be awful. And for its first few episodes it teeters on the brink of failure. But then something unexpected happens – as the central mystery hits high-gear it starts to really embrace its horror roots and becomes downright enjoyable.

The animated adventures of CIA agent Stan Smith and his extended family may have been running since 2005, but based on this seventh DVD volume (confusingly, home to the entirety of the show's sixth season) it's showing no signs of slowing down. Indeed, for my money, the 19 episodes in this three-disc set include some of the very best in the show's history - proving that American Dad! is just at confident in exploring the psychology of its characters as it is in making jokes about farts.

Scream queens are the bread and butter of the horror genre, dating back at least as far as Fay Wray’s iconic performance in the 1933 smash King Kong. All an actress needs to do to qualify for the title is become associated with the genre through a notable appearance in a major horror movie or through a series of appearances in a variety of movies. Thanks to films like Halloween, The Fog and Friday the 13th, the late ‘70s/early ‘80s saw the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau and Betsy Palmer all being crowned scream queens.

Spin-off shows are difficult things to get right. For every Angel that comes along there seems to be about 10 Joeys - and nobody wants any more of them. All of which means that things didn't look too promising when Seth MacFarlane announced that Cleveland Brown would be leaving Family Guy and getting his own animated series.