Spirit Entertainment is delighted to bring you The Criterion Collection UK releases for October 2024
Directed by horror master George A. Romero, the box office smash, Night of the Living Dead, arrives on 4K UHD on 7th October. Shot on a shoestring budget the movie is a great story of independent cinema and became one of the most influential films of all time.
Following on 14th October comes I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim on 4K UHD and Blu-ray™ . Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread.
Night of the Living Dead – out on 7th October
New 4K Restoration
Shot outside Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, Night of the Living Dead, directed by horror master George A. Romero, is a great story of independent cinema: a midnight hit turned box-office smash that became one of the most influential films of all time. A deceptively simple tale of a group of strangers trapped in a farmhouse who find themselves fending off a horde of recently dead, flesh-eating ghouls, Romero’s claustrophobic vision of a late-1960s America literally tearing itself apart rewrote the rules of the horror genre, combining gruesome gore with acute social commentary and quietly breaking ground by casting a Black actor (Duane Jones) in its lead role.
Night of the Living Dead was restored by the Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation and the Celeste Bartos Preservation Fund.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY™ SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director George A. Romero, coscreenwriter John A. Russo, sound engineer Gary R. Streiner, and producer Russell W. Streiner
New restoration of the monaural soundtrack, supervised by Romero and Gary Streiner and presented uncompressed
One 4K UHD disc of the film and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
Night of Anubis, a work-print edit of the film
Program featuring filmmakers Frank Darabont, Guillermo del Toro, and Robert Rodriguez
Sixteen-millimeter dailies reel
Program featuring Russo on the commercial and industrial film production company where key Night of the Living Dead participants got their starts
Two audio commentaries from 1994 featuring Romero, Russo, producer Karl Hardman, actor Judith O’Dea, and others
Archival interviews with Romero and actors Duane Jones and Judith Ridley
Programs about the film’s style and score
Interview program about the direction of ghouls, featuring members of the cast and crew
Interviews with Gary Streiner and Russell Streiner
Newsreels from 1967
Trailer, radio spots, and TV spots
PLUS: An essay by critic Stuart Klawans
Illustration by Sean Phillips
I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim – out on 14th October
4K Digital Restorations of both films
Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread. As head of RKO’s B-horror-movie unit during the 1940s, Lewton, working with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, brought a new sophistication to the genre by wringing chills not from conventional movie monsters but from brooding atmosphere, suggestion, and psychosexual unease. Suffused with ritual, mysticism, and the occult, the poetically hypnotic I Walked with a Zombie and the shockingly subversive The Seventh Victim are still-tantalizing dreams of death that dare to embrace the darkness.
I Walked with a Zombie
Producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur elevated the horror film to new heights of poetic abstraction with this entrancing journey into the realm between life and death. When she takes a job caring for a comatose woman on a Caribbean island, a young nurse (Frances Dee) finds herself plunged into a mysterious world where the ghosts of slavery haunt the present and witch doctors have the power to summon the living dead. Sugarcane swaying in a moonlit field, the hypnotic beat of voodoo drums, the relentless pull toward death—the otherworldly atmosphere of this bold reimagining of Jane Eyre is as close as studio-era Hollywood ever came to pure dream-state surrealism.
The Seventh Victim
“Death is good” is how producer Val Lewton summarized the message of his films, a credo that received its most explicit expression in this strikingly nihilistic shocker, the first film directed by regular Lewton editor Mark Robson. Kim Hunter makes her film debut as a young boarding-school student who, in search of her missing sister (proto-goth icon Jean Brooks), travels to New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village, where she uncovers a sinister shadow world of devil worshippers and murder. And what about that mysterious room furnished with nothing but a chair and a hangman’s noose? With its daring treatment of depression and queerness, The Seventh Victim has haunted the margins of cinema for decades, its radical bleakness undiminished by time.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY™ SPECIAL FEATURES
New 4K digital restorations of both films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions
In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the films and one Blu-ray with the films and special features
Audio commentary on I Walked with a Zombie featuring authors Kim Newman and Stephen Jones
Audio commentary on The Seventh Victim featuring film historian Steve Haberman
Interview with film critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith
Audio essays from Adam Roche’s podcast The Secret History of Hollywood
Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005), a documentary featuring Newman; Val E. Lewton, son of producer Val Lewton; filmmakers William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero, John Landis, and Robert Wise; author Neil Gaiman; actor Sara Karloff; and others
Trailers
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: Essays by critics Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante
New illustration by Katherine Lam