Friends and aspiring filmmakers Richard Blackburn and Robert Fern were UCLA film school graduates looking to make their mark on the filmmaking world. It was the early seventies and they figured that the best way to get into moviemaking was to make their own low-budget horror film. Vampires were big again, notably the lesbian-chic vampires of The Velvet Vampire and Daughters of Darkness (both 1971), and it seemed a natural. But Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) is no conventional vampire horror or sexploitation knock-off. “It fell between the cracks of art film and exploitation film,” observed Blackburn, looking back on the film in 2004.

Set in the Depression-era South, it opens like a rural gangster movie and detours into a drama of religious hypocrisy before becoming a sinister Alice in Wonderland. Cheryl Smith stars as the innocent Lila Lee, the young, virginal daughter of a vicious gangster and wife killer. Taken in by a tormented Baptist minister (director Richard Blackburn himself) who praises her innocence while fighting his desire for her, she runs away to the mysterious Lemora (Lesley Gilb), who promises to reunite her with her father. Young and trusting, fragile yet determined, this blond, freckled girl is the model of a guileless child on the verge of womanhood, Candide by way of Alice, but instead of a wonderland she wanders a corrupt world of wicked people and undead monsters.

Director Richard Blackburn and producer Robert Fern co-wrote the original screenplay together and produced the film on a tiny budget with a crew of friends, fellow film students, and a few professionals. They turn Pomona, California into a small southern town of the prohibition era with little more than carefully chosen locations, a few period cars, well-dressed sets and evocative costumes, and create an eerie, dislocated atmosphere deep in the woods, where ghouls prowl and prey upon anyone who wanders into the haunted forest. The make-up effects are often less convincing as the production stretched its resources to meet Blackburn’s ambitions. “I never told him that many of his concepts were beyond his budget,” recalls make-up artist Byrd Holland, “instead, the crew and I managed to give him what he wanted.”

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Plays on Friday, December 14 on TCM

“Wolf Lake: The Complete Series” (eOne), a supernatural melodrama of a werewolf pack living as humans in a rural Washington State town, arrived on TV between “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the current revival in fantasy / horror TV. Only nine episodes were produced before it was cancelled but the show definitely looks ahead to shows like “The Vampire Diaries” and “Teen Wolf.”

Lou Diamond Philips stars as a Seattle cop who tracks his missing girlfriend (Mia Kirshner) to a small town in the middle of Washington State, where there are definitely some strange doings: the women are extremely fertile (in fact, they seem to give birth in litters!), there are inordinate number of wolf sightings and attacks, and everyone is really cagey about their nocturnal activities. Yet cagey sheriff Tim Matheson hires him anyway because, well, he’s a pretty good cop and with the pack leader (Bruce McGill) dying of cancer and a young thug (Scott Bairstow) vying for the alpha dog spot, he’s got his hands full. Did I mention that Matheson run an AA-styled group for shapeshifters trying to keep the wild wolf at bay? The show also features early appearances by Paul Wesley (now on “The Vampire Diaries”) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and features Graham Greene as town elder with a droll sense of humor and a little coyote spirit in him and Sharon Lawrence as a den mother with a ferocious streak. I can’t say it’s a transcendent example of the genre, but it’s great fun as a rural supernatural show with noir style and a knowing sense of itself.

The three-disc set also features the documentary “Wolf Lake: The Original Werewolf Saga” and the unaired original pilot episode, which comes at the same basic concept with a radically different approach, with Lou Diamond Philips as a Forest Management agent secretly tracking the shapeshifter community, Graham Greene as his local counterpart, and no Mia Kirshner in the equation. Interesting to see how the show was radically retooled to become more of a gothic melodrama with factions fighting for power in the wolf pack and teens struggling with their legacy. DVD only.

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The Canadian fantasy series “Lost Girl: Season One” (Funimation) debuted up north in 2010 and only recently arrived stateside on SyFy, where it joined another (and better) shot-in-Toronto series of supernatural beings in the modern world, “Being Human.” This one falls into more familiar genre conventions. The lost girl of the title is Bo (Anna Silk), a beautiful succubus who feeds on humans — not blood, but energy, life force, chi, whatever you want to call it — but only discovers the truth of her legacy in the first episode, when the Fae world tries to bring her into the fold. The Fae live hidden among the humans, divided between light and dark and keeping an uneasy détente with a strict set of rules. Bo refuses to choose sides. Instead, she partners with a young human thief named Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) and becomes an independent operator, a kind of private detective for the magical world.

The show follows a familiar formula, borrowing from such shows as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” “True Blood,” and Canada’s own “Forever Knight,” without adding anything distinctive of its own. Anna Silk makes for a striking and charismatic leading lady and her playful partnership with Kenzi provides the show’s defining relationship (their loyalty contrasts with the politics and conflicts within the Fae community). The rest plays like a police procedural / detective show with magical creatures and supernatural conspiracies, something the “Grimm” does much more creatively, on a budget that makes it look quite generic.

13 episodes on Blu-ray and DVD, with extended versions featuring footage not seen on American TV, plus brief interview and behind-the-scenes clips (some running under 30 seconds, which makes it quite inconvenient to manually go through them all; hey guys, ever heard of editing?).

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“Rosemary’s Baby” (Criterion), Roman Polanski’s American directing debut and one of the most celebrated American horror films of all time, debuts in a newly remastered, director approved edition form Criterion.

But horror isn’t really the right description for this film. Yes, it is about a cabal of devil worshippers in modern day (circa late 1960s) and an innocent served up to bear Satan’s child, but Polanski is less interested in terror and shock than in creating a mood of paranoia and instability.

He finds the eerie in the mundane, often just by unsettling viewers with images slightly out of off-balance or framing characters just outside of our vision, or by distorting the soundtrack in conversations, phone calls, or simply the muffled sounds from the other side of the wall. Polanksi also wrote the screenplay, faithfully adapting Ira Levin’s novel, and he proves to have a great ear for American dialogue that is at once banal, blackly comic, and intimidating.

Polanski’s casting and direction of actors is superb. Mia Farrow is frail and pixie-ish as Rosemary, deteriorating into a ghoulish pallor as her pregnancy progresses, while John Cassavetes becomes uncomfortably hectoring, dominating, and dismissive of her growing anxiety. Ruth Gordon earned an Oscar playing a caricature of a nosy old lady with a curdled soul behind her motherly façade.

But for all the bleary, drug-smeared visions of the beast, the most terrifying monsters here are human. He finds the banal face of evil in the eccentric American gargoyles that populate the funky old apartment building (the real-life New York landmark The Dakota stood in for the exteriors), hiding their brutal conspiracy behind a mask of neighborly affection.

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The Penalty (Kino), a 1920 crime thriller with elements of horror, presents Lon Chaney as San Francisco underworld despot Blizzard, an embittered criminal mastermind driven to vengeance after incompetent doctor amputates his legs as a youth. Chaney strapped his legs into a painful leather harness to play a double-amputee and he scrambles through the city on stubs of legs and crutches like a human spider, weaving his criminal web across San Francisco. The busy plot involves the doctor’s daughter, a young sculptress who hires Blizzard as her model for a statue of Satan, and an undercover female police agent who infiltrates the gang and falls in love with Blizzard. Meanwhile he terrorizes his underlings, murders traitors, and concocts a double-barreled plot that will bring both the city and the doctor (now an honored physician) to their knees.

Director Wallace Worsley (who later directed Chaney in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) drives the film with rapid pace and an energetic crosscutting style and creates a wicked atmosphere of corruption and murder with his bizarre touches of sexual menace and sadism. But it’s Lon Chaney who contributes the most to the atmosphere with his defining physical incarnation of Blizzard, scrambling up walls and down secret tunnels on elaborate handholds and chains and leering at potential victims with the vicious grin of a human demon.

Previously available on DVD, the Blu-ray features a newly-remastered edition of the film from a 35mm restoration by the George Eastman House with terrific sharpness and detail, with tints (which are a little too rich, but that’s a minor quibble) and a new compilation score by Rodney Sauer performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Supplements include the 1914 one reel western “The Miracle Man,” surviving footage of Chaney’s lost 1919 film “The Miracle Man,” a video tour of Chaney’s makeup case and the “double amputee” costume worn in “The Penalty,” and trailers from Chaney’s “The Big City” and “While the City Sleeps.”

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Little Shop Of Horrors: The Director’s Cut (Warner), the first non-Muppet film directed by Frank Oz, is the big-screen adaptation of the doo-wop Broadway musical about a baritone man-eating plant spun from Roger Corman’s comic horror quickie. In other words, a glossy big budget remake of a zero-budget programmer. You’d think with such a legacy it just wouldn’t work, but the mix of bouncy music, over-saturated color, gee-whiz 1950s parodies and a gloriously phony set recalling the glory days of MGM musicals all comes together into a sly little production that hits all the right notes.

The film was released with a new, happy ending, after terrible audience response to the hilariously apocalyptic original finale that killed off the heroes and set the plants on a rampage over the Earth right out of “King Kong,” “Godzilla,” “The Day of the Triffids,” and dozens of classic invasion films and giant monster romps. This new edition presents both the theatrical version and the original director’s cut, which is wilder than you ever imagined. (That ending was briefly available in a B&W workprint version on a rare disc that was pulled from stores almost immediately; this is in full color and mastered for this release.)

Also includes the new featurette “Frank Oz and Little Shop of Horrors: Director’s Cut,” featuring interviews with Oz and special effects supervisor Richard Conway, and new commentary by Frank Oz on the 20-minute alternate ending, in addition to the supplements carried over from the earlier DVD release: commentary by Frank Oz on the theatrical cut, a light making-of featurette, and outtakes and deleted scenes with optional commentary. Blu-ray and DVD, with a 36-page booklet packaging for the Blu-ray edition.

Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection (Universal) presents the long-awaited Blu-ray debuts of the most famous Universal monster movies from the thirties through the fifties: Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi, Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with Boris Karloff, The Invisible Man (1933) with Claude Rains, and The Wolf Man (1941) with Lon Chaney Jr., plus the Technicolor Phantom of the Opera (1943) with Claude Rains and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) from the fifties era of Universal monster movies, a ninth feature — the 1931 Spanish language Dracula — and the 3D version of Creature (requires a full HD 3D TV, compatible 3D glasses, and a Blu-ray 3D player).

You can argue the definition of “essential” (and clearly the 1943 “Phantom” is an outlier here) and cite more worthy titles missing from the collection (“The Black Cat” is a masterpiece equal to anything in this set, though not actually a monster movie, while “Son of Frankenstein” is a minor piece of filmmaking with major pleasures, including the final appearance of Karloff as The Monster). But it does present magnificent new HD masters of each film, all with a significant leap in detail, sharpness, and contrast from the previous (superb) DVD editions. Universal does this one up right, at least from the handful of film’s I’ve had a chance to watch (or at least sample). The earlier films are the most impressive, given their age and the results on screen. Great care was lavished in the sets, lighting, and make-up of these films and these editions preserve the depth and detail and texture of this era’s studio filmmaking. I love the richness of black and white on a well-mastered Blu-ray and these are superb.

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American Horror Story (Fox) is a TV rarity: an interesting, creepy, at times gruesome, and increasingly compelling horror story told over the course of a cable TV season.

Created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, this FX original series (the same network where they unleashed “Nip/Tuck”) isn’t the bright musical world of “Glee.” Though set in Los Angeles, where Boston family has moved to start over again after a marital affair has almost  torn them apart, this is a gloomy world, mostly set in a grand yet oppressive old home in a tree-lined neighborhood. And oh yeah, there was a murder committed here. Actually a bunch of murders. In fact, the home is a star attraction on the L.A. Murder Bus Tour route.

This isn’t, however, simply an innocent family beset by the trapped spirits of murders past. They dead just bring out the worst in the living, and there’s plenty to draw out of the bitter father Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott), a psychiatrist who needs to heal himself, resentful mother Vivien (Connie Britton), who still hasn’t forgiven him for his affair, and angry teenage daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga), who has plenty to rebel against.

Jessica Lange, who just won an Emmy for her performance, is the displaced southern belle next door, a cross between Blanche DuBois and J.R. Ewing and played with a relish for theatrical flair. Her life is a performance, and she delivers the show’s best line with a mix of threat and delight: “Don’t make me kill you again.” The rest of the neighborhood slowly introduces itself, and as we discover, most of them actually reside in the Harmon home, trapped by death to replay their terrible stories with every new living resident.

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Mario Bava essentially created the genre of baroque horror known as “giallo,” a distinctly Italian twist on stalk and kill horror film. Under his direction, grand guignol gore is transformed into lush, visually elegant cinematic spectacle, a waking nightmare with the poetic grace of a musical and a demented edge of sexual perversity. Three of his classics — Black Sunday (1960), Lisa and the Devil (1973), and Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1968) — get new DVD releases and make their respective Blu-ray debuts in newly remastered editions from Kino in partnership with International Media and the British genre label Redemption.

After rising through the ranks of the Italian film industry as a cameramen (Bava disdained the term “cinematographer”) and special effects artist, contributing to Pietro Francisci’s genre-defining muscleman movies “Hercules” and “Hercules Unchained” and completing (uncredited) Riccardo Freda’s minor horror classic “I Vampiri,” Bava made his official directorial debut at age 46 with an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Viy.” The film was called “The Mask of Satan,” which was renamed “Black Sunday” (Kino) for U.S. release.

From the opening frames, Bava proved that he knew how grab an audience’s attention. Barbara Steele, her eyes glaring hate even as her face registers terror, is bound to a stake, spitting curses with hellfire to the robed and masked judges who pronounce her death sentence. A spiked mask is slowly placed over her face and a massive wooden mallet pounds the iron mask with a startling finality as the credits explode in fire (this final shot was excised from the American release). Even as the film eases into an eerie gothic atmosphere of a ghost story, where centuries later the corpse is revived by the innocent descendant (also played by Steele) with a single drop of blood, Bava never eases up on the tension. His vivid style – gliding camerawork, dramatic lighting, striking compositions, and atmospheric sets cobbled together from limited resources – set the standard for Italian gothic horror, and his magnificent photography of the weirdly beautiful Steele made her an icon of the genre. Equally good as the devilishly wicked witch, with eyes blazing and evil smile set off by feral teeth, and the haunted innocent, she plays both in this moody, macabre cult classic of cruelty.

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The Cabin in the Woods (Lionsgate) – There’s more knowing horror comedy and meta-horror commentary than actual tension and thrills in the self-aware, awfully clever love letter to the horror movie fandom from Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon. That’s fair, because scares or not, I had more fun watching “Cabin” than almost any other film this year.

Whedon, producer and co-writer, first established his fan credentials with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” a self-aware, pop-culture strewn horror show in weekly installments, but he and co-writer Goddard, a “Buffy” writer making his directorial debut, take a different approach here. No spoilers, just in case you’ve managed to steer clear of them so far, but the first scene isn’t about the five kids headed off for a weekend in the haunted woods. It begins with the quip-laden banter of lab-coat technicians (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) as they head to work in their quasi corporate bunker culture. That work has something to do with the kids’ weekend plans, and the rest of the film shows us just what and why that is.

As far as the fresh meat college kids go, keep an eye out for the handsome young guy playing Curt, the smarter-than-he-lets​-on football player. Back in 2009, when the film was made (release was delayed by the bankruptcy of MGM, which produced the film), Chris Hemsworth was an up and coming actor with a lot of promise. Now he’s Thor. And he’s still upstaged by Fran Kranz as the twitch stoner Marty, who makes the case that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

Unabashed horror movie fans Whedon and Goddard let their monster mash impulses go wild, riffing on every “kids in the woods tormented by supernatural killers” film ever made (with special affection for the “Evil Dead” films) before launching into a pulp rumination on our need for scary stories as a kind of ritual.

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Re-Animator (Image), Stuart Gordon’s cult horror classic from the gory eighties, is a mix of metaphysics, medicine, zombies, and “Frankenstein” loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West: Re-Animator.”

Bruce Abbot is ostensibly the hero, a nice-guy medical graduate student in love with the dean’s daughter (the frequently naked Barbara Crampton), but Jeffrey Combs steals the film as Abbott’s humorless roommate, medical rebel Herbert West. Brow furrowed in a state of perpetual intensity, West is perfecting the answer to life after death, but it’s still a work in progress. His resurrected “patients” have a tendency to revive as brain damaged zombies, though his has no such luck when it comes to his arrogant nemesis, a scheming surgeon played by a cadaverous David Gale who doesn’t let something as simple as losing his noggin stop his appetite for attention (“Who’d believe you, a talking head? Get a job in a side-show!”).

Full of black humor and startling shocks, the feature film debut of experimental theater director Gordon is arguably his best, and easily his most fun (a kinky, sick sort of fun, mind you) and the unrated version has arguably the most inspired freaky sex scene ever suggested on film.

The Blu-ray is packed with all supplements of the previous two-disc special edition, toplined by the 70-minute documentary “Re-Animator Resurrectus,” a lively and affectionate autopsy of “the film that wouldn’t die” (to borrow a phrase from Combs) that offers a portrait of the creative madhouse of the set where no idea was too outrageous.

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