Ghost Story
Blu-ray
Director: John Irvin
Screenwriter: Lawrence D. Cohen
Cast: Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Houseman, Craig Wasson, Patricia Neal, Alice Krige
Scream Factory
Rated R | 110 Minutes
Release Date: November 24, 2015

“I will take you places you’ve never been. I will show you things that you have never seen and I will see the life run out of you.”

Written by Lawrence D. Cohen (Carrie) and directed by John Irvin (Hamburger Hill), 1981’s Ghost Story is based on the best-selling 1979 novel by author Peter Straub.

In a quiet New England town, four old friends – Ricky Hawthorne (Fred Astaire), Sears James (John Houseman), Dr. John Jaffrey (Melvyn Douglas), and Edward Wanderley (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) – comprise the Chowder Society, a social club dedicated to the telling of ghastly tales.

Scary stories become reality after a bizarre family tragedy. In New York City, Edward’s son, David (Craig Wasson, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), dies under unusual circumstances. After witnessing his fiancé (Alice Krige) transform into a living, rotting corpse, David plummets to his death from a high-rise window.

The Day the Earth Stood Still
Blu-ray Edition (1951)
Directed by Robert Wise
Starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Lock Martin, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray
Fox Home Entertainment
Release date: December 2, 2008

While it may not have the walloping humor of Dr. Strangelove or the technicality of 2001, The Day the Earth Stood Still is every bit as interested about atomic bombs, violence, and our galaxies infinite amount of possibilities. The movie is one of science fiction’s only films, certainly one of its great ones, that conceals a Biblical meaning of such heightened velocity. 2001 dealt with every nuance that life itself had to offer to the universe, where as The Day The Earth Stood Still deals with the coming of a life form from a distant planet and what he has to offer us. Here is an almost accurate testimony that mirrors what the Biblical book of the future — the book of Revelation — has in store for the entire world.

Robert Wise directed the movie and had guts to go after every single nation on planet Earth as he did it. Making the movie during the height of the Cold War in 1951 and with all the paranoia surrounding McCarthyism, Wise goes the cold route by not siding with any country. He makes planet Earth look like the extraterrestrials, and singles the planet out as being deaf, dumb, and blind. It’s one of the rare science fiction films that sympathizes with the visitors from the other planet rather than with the humans.