It's always fun trying to watch a DVD while small human beings frocked in striking plumage ring your doorbell one after the other after the other, demanding wrapped confections from you, who has, once again, hit pause, extracted yourself from the sofa and shuffled to the door. Not a treat.

But if you wait until about 9 p.m., when the munchkins return to Oz, you might be able to watch a good Halloween flick unperturbed, save for the sounds of pumpkin-smashing teenagers pillaging neighborhood porches. In the weeks winding up to Halloween, DVD makers release a flood of scary titles, both new and classic and often in spiffy deluxe editions riddled with bonus features.

We've received mounds of them and have winnowed the cache to a digestible sum featuring some of the most notable titles. For those staying in tonight, here's your treat.

Horror proved a cash cow for Universal in the 1930s and '40s, with its classic "Frankenstein" franchise, "The Wolfman," "The Mummy" and more. Mighty mite studio RKO sought easy profits, too, launching a B-movie unit focused expressly on horror pictures. Headed by visionary producer Val Lewton, the unit cranked out taut, sleek flicks that ran less than 75 minutes, allowing two movies to be squeezed on one bill.

The Val Lewton Horror Collection, finally on DVD, follows suit, pairing atmospheric spookers over three discs: "Cat People" and "Curse of the Cat People"; "I Walked with a Zombie" and "The Body Snatcher"; and "Isle of the Dead" and "Bedlam." Audio commentaries accompany the films. Available separately are the double features "The Leopard Man" with "The Ghost Ship" and "The 7th Victim" with the documentary "Shadows in the Dark," a superb introduction to Lewton's mind, his talented crews and the films themselves, as well as a fine dish of cinema history.

Low-budget horror also took off in Britain, with the monstrously successful Hammer films, which glistened in lollipop colors. Sexual heat and liquid gore were emphasized in these stylish '60s movies featuring character pros Peter Cushing and Oliver Reed. The new DVD set includes eight franchise films: "Brides of Dracula," "The Curse of the Werewolf," "Phantom of the Opera," "Paranoiac," "The Kiss of the Vampire," "Nightmare," "Night Creatures" and "The Evil of Frankenstein."

At times too stagey to scare -- Reed's werewolf makeup could find friends in community theater -- the movies hit an intriguing note of the classy and tawdry.

David Cronenberg's 1986 "Fly" remake remains an utterly disturbing, emotionally destroying experience. The Canadian auteur marked his Hollywood breakout with this masterwork, a deft whorl of sci-fi horror and romantic tragedy. The new collector's DVD illuminates Cronenberg's thematic intentions -- it's more about bodily erosion from age than from disease -- and the extensive changes he made to the original script. There's much about the film's disgusting, puppet-driven effects and behind-the-scenes revelations.

In the witless 1989 sequel, "The Fly II," Eric Stoltz returns to the hideous makeup he endured in "Mask." Next to the movie's clumpy, gloppy gore, the only worthy bit on the DVD is the essential documentary "The Fly Papers: The Buzz on Hollywood's Scariest Insect," a fascinating history of "The Fly."

Universal's dual horror kings, Bela Lugosi ("Dracula") and Boris Karloff ("Frankenstein"), collaborated on many B horror movies, four of which dominate this five-film box. It's just the movies, no extras, but all facets of Lugosi's limited persona show in "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Black Cat," "The Raven," "The Invisible Ray" and "Black Friday." Lugosi exudes Slavic mystery, a gloomy rapacity, but it is Karloff who transcends camp and attains a sad, sympathetic humanity.

Unspeakable acts of culinary carnage splat this new uncensored DVD of "the most controversial film ever made," the exploitation flick that "goes all the way" and is "so intense, so graphic and so unflinching in its realism that the director and producer were arrested upon its original release and the film seized." Great box copy, right? Well, "Cannibal Holocaust" almost lives up to its self-aggrandizement. A favorite at the Alamo Drafthouse's Cannibal Film Festival, the Italian cult darling from 1980 has been banned and butchered around the world. Here it is, in all its stomach-churning glory, raw.

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