Hello!

It’s time to circulate welcome good news for horror fans … Severin Films announced about three days back that their latest restoration will be in the spotlight at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals.

The first part of the news is that they’ve remastered, in 4K from original materials, Riccardo Freda’s follow-up to  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock,  1963’s  Lo spettro, aka The Ghost. It’s a haunted murder mystery again starring Barbara Steele, but decent copies were even harder to see … and we’ve never been impressed by the ‘remnant’ quality of discs such as Retromedia’s  old DVD.

Now maybe we’ll be able to appreciate why Lo spettro has such a high reputation. Severin says that the 4K remaster came from newly-located original film materials, with a few replacement shots taken from a print held in the collection of film producer Jon Davison.

Even more impressive, the restoration of Lo spettro will re-premiere in September at the Venice International Film Festival, where Severin Films honcho David Gregory will appear in person with Barbara Steele. Lo spettro will then proceed to Spain in October, to open the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia. These sound like major film events to us; I hope Severin covers the re-premiere on video.

Meanwhile, both The Criterion Collection and The Warner Archive Collection made impressive release announcements.

Criterion for October will give us a stack of impressive titles, some seemingly chosen for the Halloween season:

Altered States  4K : Ken Russell’s fantastic visual feast;
David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me  4K
Georges Franju’s incomparable Eyes Without a Face  4K
Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley  4K
Deep Crimson  4K by Arturo Ripstein;
And two by David Cronenberg — A History of Violence  4K
and Cronenberg’s newest, The Shrouds.

And just a few weeks away at the end of August, The Warner Archive has some special items too:

John Ford’s final film 7 Women starring Anne Bancroft;
Clarence Brown’s searing Intruder in the Dust with Juano Hernandez;
Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way by Vincent Sherman;
Mario Lanza in That Midnight Kiss, heaven protect us;
Hanna-Barbera’s The Huckleberry Hound Show
and Mike Hodges’ Get Carter in  4K, starring Michael Caine.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson