A hearty heap of horror awaits Halloween viewers

The movies range from campy ones to masterpieces. SCRIPPS HOWARD "Dig the music, kids!" says a swinging satanist during an unholy ritual in "Dracula A.D. 1972," the movie that introduces Christopher Lee's bloodthirsty count to the bell-bottomed kicks-just-keep-getting-harder-to-find rebellious youth of post-Beatles London. Now available on DVD from Warner Home Video, this Hammer Films production is just one of many monster, vampire, ghoul and, um, killer bunny movies resurrected on digital disk just in time for Halloween viewing. Thankfully, many of these chillders aren't just campy delights but masterpieces of the genre -- and of filmmaking in general. Of particular interest this Hallo-season are several box sets, the most notable of which may be "The Val Lewton Horror Collection" from Warner Home Video, which places the nine shuddery, atmospheric films Lewton produced at RKO in the 1940s onto five disks. Worthwhile These psychologically complex works belie the silliness of their lurid, studio-imposed titles. "Cat People" (1942) and "I Walked with a Zombie" (1943), both directed by Jacques Tourneur, are generally regarded as the key masterworks of the group. But the other Lewtons are almost as worthwhile, including "The Leopard Man" (1943), "The Ghost Ship" (1943), the morbid "The Seventh Victim" (1943), "The Curse of the Cat People" (1944) and three of Boris Karloff's best: "The Body Snatcher" (1945), "Isle of the Dead" (1945) and "Bedlam" (1946). Karloff also appears in the rarely seen mad doctor flick "The Man with Nine Lives" (1940), available from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and in four of the five movies collected on the rather misleadingly titled "The Bela Lugosi Collection" from Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Universal also has released the two-disk "Hammer Horror Series" set, which includes eight of the neo-Gothic supernatural chillers and post-"Psycho" thrillers produced by England's Hammer Films during the 1960s. The lineup includes the must-see "The Curse of the Werewolf" and "Paranoiac," both with Oliver Reed; "The Evil of Frankenstein" and "Night Creatures," both with Peter Cushing; and what may be Hammer director Terence Fisher's finest film, "The Brides of Dracula," a Freudian fairy tale in which a virginal school teacher frees an incestuous vampire from the umbilical silver chain that keeps him tied to his mother's castle.