With Halloween upon us, this is the season for scary movies.

Warner Archive has released Blu-ray upgrades of one of the seminal horror films from the 1930s and two from the 1940s. Criterion has released a Blu-ray upgrade of one of the best remembered science fiction horror films of the 1950s.

The early 1930s were dominated by Universal’s treasure trove of horror films beginning with Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy, all of which produced numerous sequels, remakes, and sequels to remakes that proliferate to this day. Two of them, Dracula and The Mummy, were directed by legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, Dracula in part, The Mummy in total.

Moving over to MGM, Freund’s last directed film was 1935’s Mad Love, originally released by Warner Home Video on a double-bill with Freund’s Dracula‘s co-director Tod Browning’s The Devil-Doll as part of its Hollywood Legends of Horror Collection. The Devil-Doll would be Browning’s last horror film and next-to-last film. Mad Love would be Freund’s last film as a director before devoting the remainder of his celebrated career to cinematography.

Mad Love is an adaptation of Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac, first filmed in 1924 with Conrad Veidt. The story centers around a concert pianist who loses both hands in an accident. He is unaware that the replacement hands he is given were those of a convicted murderer. This version is told from the point of view of the surgeon who performs the operation.

Peter Lorre is the surgeon. Having gained an international reputation for his performances in Fritz Lang’s 1931 German thriller M and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 British suspenser The Man Who Knew Too Much, Lorre was under contract to Columbia but loaned out to MGM for this, his first Hollywood film.

Assisted by dazzling cinematography courtesy of Chester Lyons (Sequoia) and Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane), and a rousing score by Dimitri Tiomkin (High Noon), Freund’s strong direction elicits a performance from Lorre that had no less an authority than Charlie Chaplin declaring him the screen’s best actor.

Colin Clive (Frankenstein) is the pianist and Frances Drake (1935’s Les Misérables) is his actress wife with whom the surgeon is obsessed.

The Blu-ray includes commentary by Steve Haberman.

The 1940s gave way to subtler forms of horror movies, most notably those produced by Val Lewton’s unit at RKO that included the directing debuts of Robert Wise (West Side Story) and Mark Robson (Peyton Place), who began their storied careers as editors on Lewton’s films.

With many of Lewton’s celebrated horror films, including Cat People and The Body Snatcher already released on Blu-ray, it was time for Warner to bring out The Ghost Ship and Bedlam.

Neither The Ghost Ship nor Bedlam, both of which were directed by Mark Robson, are true horror films, although they were marketed as such having come from Lewton’s production unit.

There’s no horror, but there is plenty of terror in 1943’s The Ghost Ship.

Richard Dix (Cimarron), nearing the end of his career, received sole star billing as the captain of a ship in which crew members are being injured and killed in freak accidents. The ship’s new third officer (Russell Wade) suspects that the captain is a homicidal maniac who is killing off those amongst the crew who displease him for one thing or another. No one believes him.

Highly atmospheric, the suspense-filled film holds you spellbound to the end. Dix would retire in 1947 after making a handful of minor films and die in 1949. Wade would retire from acting in 1948 and become a successful Palm Springs real estate agent.

Although Bedlam does contain some truly horrific scenes, it is more of a historical account of the end of London’s notorious insane asylum.

Bedlam was the third film Lewton made with Boris Karloff following The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead. He plays the cruel master of the asylum who imprisons reformer Anna Lee (How Green Was My Valley) to his detriment.

The film, the Lewton unit’s last, flopped in its April 1946 New York engagement and was withheld from further distribution until it was shown in Los Angeles in early 1947 where it flopped again. It wasn’t shown in England until decades later.

The dual Blu-ray includes commentary on Bedlam by Tom Weaver, imported from the DVD.

Second only to 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its intensity and believable horror in a frighteningly otherwise realistic world, 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man has been given a breathtaking 4K digital restoration with tons of extras including a brand-new audio commentary by the same Tom Weaver who provided the commentary on Bedlam.

Written by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and directed by Jack Arnold (Creature from the Black Lagoon), a suburban everyman (Grant Williams) begins to shrink six months after his exposure to a mysterious radiation cloud. He becomes so small that eventually his wife (Randy Stuart) places him in a doll house in the living room where he is attacked by his former house cat. That’s just the beginning of the terror which awaits him in this one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

Kino Lorber has opted for lighter new Blu-ray releases with the 1961 comedy Come September from director Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird), and the 1969 social drama Change of Habit, which proved to be Elvis Presley’s swan song.

The former is a beautifully photographed romantic romp filmed on location on the Italian Riviera starring Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. The latter is a rare dramatic film for Elvis as a swinging doctor who falls in love with Mary Tyler Moore as a nun who must choose between him and her vows. Both are lightweight but enjoyable.

This week’s new Blu-ray releases include Stillwater and Dinner at Eight.