Even those with a morbid fear of costumes and candy-seeking children can rejoice when the end of October rolls around. Each year, Halloween brings with it a flood of special screenings to whet the appetites of casual horror movie fans, and enough DVDs to last serious connoisseurs the whole year round.

Tops on any aficionado's list should be the Halloween screening of The Phantom of the Opera with live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra (Mon., Oct. 31, 8 p.m., International House). Although Rupert Julian directed the 1925 feature, true possessory credit goes to Lon Chaney, who commands the screen even in silhouette as Gaston Leroux's disfigured outcast. Cheney's grotesque grace, to say nothing of his skills as a makeup artist, were never on better display, even if he did have to battle Julian every step of the way. Co-authorship credit goes to designer Ben Carré, whose towering Gothic sets lend interest to the movie's often static frames. Scores for Phantom tend to emulate the movie's operatic setting, but the Alloy trio (which includes Mission of Burma's Roger Miller) specializes in lively, percussive accompaniment that should bring out the movie's macabre overtones. Despite its classic status, Phantom exists in numerous and irreconcilable versions; the Alloy performance will feature a silent print of the 1929 sound cut, which is the best preserved of the bunch.

Among other big-screen events, the last of Exhumed Films' October triple-bills features gore and madness galore. Grindhouse Horrors (Sat., Oct. 29, 8 p.m., International House) kicks off with Night of the Bloody Apes, a 1968 cult favorite with all the ape-to-human heart transplants and Mexican wrestling you could ever wish for. It's followed by The Witchmaker, where ritualistic murders in the Louisiana bayou pique the interest of paranormal researchers, and When the Screaming Stops (aka Lorelei's Grasp), in which a scaly siren stalks unsuspecting German villagers.

At Doylestown's County Theater, archivist Lou DiCrescenzo rounds up vintage clips, cartoons and shorts for Monster Mash (Tue., Nov. 1, 7 p.m.), and the Devil Music Ensemble plays the first of three local dates providing a live score for F.W. Murnau's classic Nosferatu at the Ambler Theater (Wed., Nov. 2, 7 p.m.). The DME, whose skewed scores evoke the vaudeville clatter of Tom Waits, drops by The Rotunda at 40th and Walnut sts. on the 3rd, but film fetishists will truck out to Phoenixville on the 4th, where the Colonial Theatre has laudably booked a bonafide print for the occasion. The films of Russian "necrorealist" Yevgeny Yufit aren't technically horror movies, but fans of the grotesque and generally inscrutable won't want to miss his appearance this Thursday, Oct. 27: The Sokurov protégé lectures at Penn's Meyerson Hall (210 S. 34th St.) at 5 p.m., and will present a video screening of his new Bipedalism at The Bridge at 7.

Moving into the digital realm, DreamWorks' Ringu Anthology of Terror gathers Hideo Nakata's terrifying original and its three spotty sequels. Nanako Matsushima can't match the intensity of Naomi Watts in the American Ring remake, but in all other respects, it's clear Gore Verbinski got his (substantial) effects by studiously copying Nakata. Few directors know better how to invest empty spaces with a sense of dread, a talent put to even greater use in Nakata's masterful Dark Water, also recently released to DVD. Ringu's canny use of wide lenses and surround sound create a three-dimensional environment in which danger can come from any direction, a fear reflected in the movie's curse, which uses televisions and telephones to penetrate the boundaries of domestic safety (not to mention logic). Rasen (The Spiral), the movie's first sequel, is a bizarre, colorless cheapie that kills off Ringu's main characters and shifts the threat from a cursed videotape to a psychic virus which invades the victim's DNA. When that flopped, the producers called a do-over and brought Nakata back for the numerically challenged Ringu 2, which effectively builds on the original's ambient creepiness until its gibberish-clogged finale. (Nakata got another chance to bat cleanup with The Ring Two, the sequel to the American remake.) Ringu 0: Birthday is a prequel that explains the pale-skinned, longhaired Samara's mysterious origins, although not so coherently as to ruin the mystery.

Speaking of mystery, Other Cinema's Experiments in Terror collects a half-dozen horror-themed experimental shorts and a few archival gems. The highlight is Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space, an optical printing collage in black-and-white Cinemascope where a woman's terror of an unseen force seems to rupture the film itself. (The source footage is from 1981's The Entity, which Nakata is on tap to remake.) Using multiple exposures, frame enlargements and all manner of violent distress, Tscherkassky's approach is less deconstructive than mutational, a stance echoed by David Sherman's Tuning the Sleeping Machine, whose source images are often blurred just past the point of recognition. With its unstable, supersaturated colors, Lloyd Williams' Ursula grafts lava-lamp visuals and a theremin score to a story of childhood abuse and retribution; its wildly overlapping images culminate in what looks like the blooming of dozens of luminescent jellyfish. The elusive JX Williams (an allegedly undiscovered filmmaker who is likely an alter ego of OC curator Noel Lawrence) contributes The Virgin Sacrifice, a surreal grindhouse amalgam that's purportedly an excerpt from a 1969 feature, and L.A. outcast Damon Packard chimes in with the Z-grade fantasia Dawn of an Evil Millennium.

Traditional horror takes a similar beating in Paul Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. Image's new discs replace the out-of-print Criterions with upgraded transfers and supplemental commentary. With Udo Kier in both leading roles, Morrissey's Warhol-produced retakes present Frankenstein as a necrophiliac eugenicist and Dracula as a sallow, dirty old man lusting for the blood of young virgins. Shot in Italy with only few hours' rest between them, the films are beautifully photographed and scored, perhaps too much so: Their technical lushness saps some of the outrageousness from Morrissey's Grand Guignol comedy. (Kier's Frankenstein diddles a corpse's chest wound, and then pronounces, a la Last Tango, "To know life, you have to fuck death in the gallbladder!") Where the improvised longeurs of Morrissey's Factory films were taken up by the actors' genuine eccentricities, too many of Flesh and Blood's roles are filled by wooden soldiers speaking phonetic English, although Kier's commitment alone makes both worth watching, and Blood has the added enticement of cameos from Roman Polanski and Vittorio De Sica.

For those seeking more established classics, and looking to fill days instead of evenings, Universal's budget-priced Bela Lugosi Collection crams five extra-less movies onto a double-sided disc, and its Hammer Horror Series fits eight movies onto a mere two. The Lugosi collection, which critic Dave Kehr wittily called "the first single-disc box set," is mostly off-brand stuff, although it does include Edgar Ulmer's expressionist creeper The Black Cat. Although the Hammer films once chilled a generation, many seem threadbare and vaguely comical now (Warner's Hammer Horror Collection has a choicer assortment), but Oliver Reed fans will dig his barrel-chested performance in The Curse of the Werewolf, and the black-and-white menace of Paranoiac is a serviceable Psycho retread.

And for a reminder of the real-life horrors we watch movies to forget, turn to Paradise Lost: The Childhood Murders at Robin Hood Hills and The Staircase. The former, by Metallica: Some Kind of Monster's Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, chronicles the story of three West Memphis, Ark. teens who were railroaded for a gruesome killing based on the fact that they wore black, listened to heavy metal and read up on Satanism — activities which in larger towns would get them dates, not life sentences. Docurama's long-awaited DVD has disappointingly frugal extras, especially considering the fascinating turns the case has taken since. (See the sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, and www.wm3.com, the Web site for Free the West Memphis Three.) Staircase, Jean-Xavier Lestrade's eight-part, six-hour documentary, follows the twists and turns of a real-life trial; even at length, the intensity never wavers. A brief postscript, Death on the Staircase, airs on Sundance Channel this month.