“If the spirits of the dead call out to you, swaddle yourself tight with your shawl, make the sign of the cross for protection, and walk away.” Like the spirit of the dead, DRACULA IN LOVE (coming August 10 from Doubleday) calls out to the reader—but instead of walking away, you should run to this fresh perspective on Bram Stoker’s classic novel.

Best known to fright fans as the author of PSYCHO, Robert Bloch had an enormously prolific writing career. With over 20 novels, hundreds of short stories and even a few screenplays under his belt, he received acclaim and numerous awards for his crime, science fiction and horror stories, and was at one point a protégé of H.P. Lovecraft. Many of Bloch’s short stories were published in pulp magazines such as WEIRD TALES, including one of the first examples of Jack the Ripper fiction in 1943.

Cover every orifice. Comet Press’ new collection SICK THINGS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF EXTREME CREATURE HORROR is making a beeline for the soft contents of your body—and it doesn’t care one bit where it makes its grand entrance, orbital sockets or otherwise. Rest assured this violation will be painful, given the tight confinements of our fallible frames of flesh—but anything less than a full-on ass-rape would probably seem insufficient in the eyes of editrix Cheryl Mullenax.

The British TV series BEING HUMAN, whose first season is now on DVD and Blu-ray from BBC Home Video, explores the dynamics between a ghost, a vampire and a werewolf as they seclude themselves in a house together. These supernatural beings just want to live normal lives, but unfortunately, they cannot blend in with ordinary people.

Quoted reviews on the back of NEIGHBOR’s DVD package claimed I was about to watch something gory and brutal—a promise at which I scoffed. I’ve been disappointed before.

I was wrong. I was very, very wrong.

SUCK, which plays Montreal’s Fantasia film festival this Saturday, looks and sounds like a lot of low-budget horror/comedy/rock-’n’-roll flicks of the ’80s (many of them, like this one, hailing from Canada), but with one important difference—it’s actually funny. It also respects both the horror and the rock sides of its story, avoiding spoofy condescension as it mixes the genres.

Take one part CALVAIRE/THE ORDEAL and one part HIGH TENSION, stir in some mutants and you have LA MEUTE (THE PACK), which unfortunately shapes up as one of the weakest in the past decade’s resurgence of French-language frights. While the movie (which had its North American premiere this week at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival) has the surface attributes of a gritty rural shocker, it suffers from both overfamiliarity and some serious story inconsistencies.