DVDs

Silver Bullet – A boy in a wheelchair stops a werewolf with his uncle and sister. From a stephen king story. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 08/22/2006 Starring: Gary Busey Megan Follows Run time: 95 minutes Rating: R Director: Daniel Attias

The Howling (Special Edition) – From the director of Gremlins and Piranha comes the ultimate masterpiece of primal terror. Filled with edge-of-your-seat suspense, “genuine thrills [and] amazing special effects”, this riveting werewolf tale sinks its teeth into your deepest fears and never lets go! Severely traumatized by a near-fatal encounter with a serial killer, TV newscaster Karen White (Dee Wallace) takes time off at a secluded retreat called “the Colony.” But when, after nights of being tormented by bestial, bloodcurdling cries, Karen ventures into the woods seeking answers, she makes a terrifying discovery. Now she must fight not only for her life but for her soul!

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Collector’s Edition) - With dizzying cinematic tricks and astonishing performances, Francis Coppola’s 1992 version of the oft-filmed Dracula story is one of the most exuberant, extravagant films of the 1990s. Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, as the Count and Mina Murray, are quite a pair of star-crossed lovers. She’s betrothed to another man; he can’t kick the habit of feeding off the living. Anthony Hopkins plays Van Helsing, the vampire slayer, with tongue firmly in cheek. Tom Waits is great fun as Renfield, the hapless slave of Dracula who craves the blood of insects and cats. Sadie Frost is a sexy Lucy Westenra. And poor Keanu Reeves, as Jonathan Harker, has the misfortune to be seduced by Dracula’s three half-naked wives. There’s a little bit of everything in this version of Dracula: gore, high-speed horseback chases, passion, and longing.

The Forsaken – A young man driving cross-country to deliver a vintage mercedes picks up a hitchhiker. From that moment on his road trip is transformed into a surreal and terrifying nightmare. H his new companion is a hunter. And his prey are a roving band of vampires led by the leader of the vampire clan. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 08/31/2004 Starring: Kerr Smith Izabella Miko Run time: 91 minutes Rating: R Director: J.s. Cardone

The Nightmare on Elm Street Collection – For two generations Freddy Krueger has scared the dickens out of movie goers. Now the most-dreamed-about name in horror history can be seen from beginning to end in this must-have collection.

Halloween – Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town’s hormonally charged youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It’s a movie much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal). Composed by Carpenter himself, the movie’s freaky music sets the tone; and his script (cowritten with Debra Hill) is laced with references to other horror pictures, especially Psycho. The baby sitter is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, the real-life daughter of Psycho victim Janet Leigh; and the obsessed policeman played by Donald Pleasence is named Sam Loomis, after John Gavin’s character in Psycho. In the end, though, Halloween stands on its own as an uncannily frightening experience–it’s one of those movies that had audiences literally jumping out of their seats and shouting at the screen. (“No! Don’t drop that knife!”) Produced on a low budget, the picture turned a monster profit, and spawned many sequels, none of which approached the 1978 original. Curtis returned for two more installments: 1981’s dismal Halloween II, which picked up the story the day after the unfortunate events, and 1998’s occasionally gripping Halloween H20, which proved the former baby sitter was still haunted after 20 years.

Dark Water (Unrated Widescreen Edition) – Far more terrifying than what was seen in theaters, this special unrated version of DARK WATER is a thoroughly absorbing, suspense-filled thriller starring Jennifer Connelly. Dahlia Williams (Connelly) and her 5-year-old daughter are ready to begin a new life together. But their new apartment — dilapidated and worn — suddenly seems to take on a life of its own. Mysterious noises, persistent leaks of dark water, and other strange happenings in the deserted apartment above send Dahlia on a haunting and mystifying pursuit — one that unleashes a torrent of living nightmares.

Friday the 13th – This splatter flick, along with John Carpenter’s Halloween, helped spawn the great horror-movie movement of the ’80s, not to mention eight sequels, many of which had nothing to do with the films that preceded them. It also gave birth to Jason Voorhees, one of the three biggest horror-movie psychos of the modern era (the other two being Halloween’s Michael Myers and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger). Forever duplicated, the original Friday the 13th popularized a number of themes and techniques that today are now clichés: the increasingly gory murders, the remote forest location, the anonymous and nubile cast, the murderer as cult hero, and, of course, the moral that if you have sex, you will die, very painfully. Still, if you have to see a Friday the 13th movie, this is the one to check out. A group of eager (and horny) teenagers decide to reopen Camp Crystal Lake, which 20 years earlier was closed after the shocking and mysterious murders of two amorous camp counselors. You can take it from there, as the teens get picked off one by one, during a dark and stormy night; of course, their car won’t start and there’s no phone. The ending stole shamelessly from Brian De Palma’s Carrie, but it still provides a slight if campy shock. Look for a young Kevin Bacon as the requisite stud–you can tell that’s what he is because when the cast appears in swimsuits, he’s wearing a Speedo–who’s the beneficiary of the film’s best murder sequence, an arrowhead to the throat. Right after having sex, of course.