THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN inventive and moving. I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE An extraordinary version of Jane Eyre. THE BODY SNATCHER In the name of medical research?

"I wants to make your flesh creep," says Joe the Fat Boy in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. From the very beginnings of moving pictures, filmmakers saw an opportunity to do just that. After all, they had a captive audience sitting in the dark. And film could make "unnatural" things happen — startling appearances and disappearance, sudden changes of mood, uncanny changes of size. American film studios wanted to cash in on the success of such European classics as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and Vampyr. In the 1930s, Universal became the studio that specialized in horror movies — films of a particularly gothic nature, distant in time (often the 19th century), exotic in place (often Eastern Europe, especially, of course, Transylvania). And these remain some of the best horror movies ever, made by such master directors as James Whale (the subject of the 1998 Gods and Monsters) and Tod Browning.

Universal has been releasing these classics on DVD. A now out-of-print box called Universal’s Classic Monster Collection — a set of some of the most famous of these films: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, The Mummy — has been replaced with a new series of inexpensive sets that include both the signature masterpieces and the fascinating and sometimes amusing sequels. Several of these put women closer to the center of the action. Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which begins in the salon of Mary and Percy Shelley, is one of the most moving, inventive, and emotionally rich films in the genre. Dracula’s Daughter (1936), starring Gloria Holden, is a serious and unsettling film about trying to be released from a family curse. The Invisible Woman (1940), with John Barrymore as a slightly befuddled scientist, is a silly/charming comedy closer to Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit than to its more sinister progenitor, The Invisible Man.

The Bela Lugosi Collection has some of the creepiest films of the 1930s: The Raven, The Invisible Ray, Black Friday, The Black Cat, and Murders in the Rue Morgue, all but the last co-starring Lugosi’s most famous colleague and rival, Boris Karloff (billed as "Karloff"). Universal has also reissued a set of 14 remastered Alfred Hitchcock films (The Masterpiece Collection, including significantly improved "anamorphic" versions of Psycho and Vertigo), with a bonus disc of extra goodies, and the complete first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (39 episodes, all with Hitchcock’s amusing introductions and conclusions, and two of them directed by the master himself).

But the most extraordinary Halloween DVD treat is Warner Brothers’ release of nine films made by Val Lewton. These are some of the most remarkable movies of the 1940s, and we call them horror films only for want of a better word. They’re really psychological and spiritual film noirs, mysteries often dealing with the human attraction to death and the understanding that there are more realities than mere physical presence. Many of them take place in a contemporary urban setting, and all of them are photographed in glorious, multi-shaded black and white.

Part of their success owes to their low budgets. Lewton substituted imagination for special effects. These films were also a response to — and a rejection of — the ’30s gothic stereotypes of mad scientists, monsters, vampires, and mummies. Perhaps because Lewton didn’t rely on star power, though he used such eminent figures as Karloff and the exquisitely feline Simone Simon, and because RKO forced on him campy titles like Curse of the Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, the films aren’t remembered as well as they should be. Their first appearance on DVD will be a wonderful discovery for a new audience.

Born Vladimir Leventon, in Russia, Lewton was actually a producer, not a director. But he hired three very talented young directors: Jacques Tourneur and two men who had worked for him (and Orson Welles) as editors, the late Robert Wise (who later won Oscars for directing West Side Story and The Sound of Music) and Mark Robson (Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls). Roy Webb did the atmospheric, insinuating musical scores. But Lewton himself was the guiding spirit, taking an active part in every aspect of production. His films all have a similar look — elegant, shadowy, dreamlike. If you’re startled out of your wits, it’s through the power of suggestion and impeccable timing.

A number of these films have eerie and terrifying chase sequences, people who’re being followed (or think they are) through deserted streets at night — another element Lewton’s movies have in common with film noir. In Tourneur’s The Leopard Man, the second of the four films Lewton produced in 1943, a young girl is sent by her mother on an errand after dark. She’s nervous because it’s rumored a leopard has escaped. As she rushes back, she grows increasingly frightened — and so does the viewer. But when she gets home, the door is locked. From inside the house, we hear her screaming to be let in; then, suddenly, blood starts to ooze under the door. We never see what has attacked her. The next scene is her inquest.

One famous Lewton sequence is the late-night swimming-pool scene in Cat People (Tourneur, 1942), which is as scary and seductively filmed as the shower scene in Psycho. But scaring the audience isn’t Lewton’s only goal. Cat People is about sexual terror — Simone Simon believes that in the course of making love she’ll become a wild animal and tear the person she loves to bits, so she represses her sexual drive. The Curse of the Cat People (Wise, 1944), Lewton’s most misleading title, is a moving treatment of lonely children and their powerful imaginations — evidently one of his most autobiographical films.

I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943), with Frances Dee, is an extraordinary version of Jane Eyre, a journey of discovery and (of course) self-discovery, in a Caribbean setting. ("I walked with a zombie . . . does seem a strange thing to say" — Dee’s opening voiceover immediately defuses the absurdity of the title.) The Body Snatcher (Wise, 1945), with Karloff in the title role, is based on an ethically complex Robert Louis Stevenson story: the grave robber is providing bodies necessary for medical research. Bedlam (Robson, 1946), also with Karloff, as the director of the notorious 18th-century London insane asylum, deals with the appalling abuses of the system and the power men have over women. One indelible image is a shot looking down a long corridor in which we see a row of desperate arms reaching through the bars.

The Ghost Ship (Robson, 1943), with Richard Dix, is a study of a sea captain’s insane sense of his own small power. Isle of the Dead (Robson, 1945) has Karloff taking control of a group of people quarantined on a deserted island. I’m sorry Lewton’s Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), about the timely subject of patriotism during an occupation, with Simone Simon as Maupassant’s heroine, wasn’t included in this set, though it was apparently taken out of his hands before he finished it. Both the biographical documentary, Shadows in the Night, and the commentaries on the alternate soundtracks in this set are unusually intelligent and informative: I didn’t know that the great silent-film actress Alla Nazimova was Lewton’s aunt, or that Lewton, working for David O. Selznick, was responsible for the memorable scene at the end of the first part of Gone with the Wind in which the camera pans back to show the hundreds of wounded soldiers. Lewton was born in Yalta in 1904 and died of a heart attack in 1951, age 46. It’s not surprising that so many of his films are concerned with illness and disease — not only physical and mental but also spiritual.

The most upsetting film may be the least known: The Seventh Victim (Robson, 1943), with the young Kim Hunter (who later won an Oscar as Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire) in her first movie role and the beautiful Jean Brooks as Hunter’s older sister, who’s become involved with a cult of Satan worshippers; it’s the one Lewton film not available separately from the boxed set. Tracing an infernal labyrinth through upper-class and bohemian New York, the story ends with one of the most chilling moments in film, a dying woman choosing to leave her hermit lair for one last taste of life as the heroine herself gives in to her death impulse. The Seventh Victim begins and ends with a quotation from John Donne’s Holy Sonnets: "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday."

How many other movies quote great poetry? How many films are inspired by — even embody — great poetry? Val Lewton’s films are about as close as Hollywood films ever got to being poetry.