Blu-ray & DVD: The Digital Dread Report for August 11th!

With titles like Dead Silence, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The People Under the Stairs, Hell on Wheels, and Unfriended seeing release, the 2nd Tuesday in August is primed to take the money from our wallets... at least a little bit of it, anyhow.

*Be sure to click the pics to get your Horror fix!

 There is an old ghost story in the sleepy town of Ravens Fair about Mary Shaw, a ventriloquist who went mad. Accused of the murder of a young boy, she was hunted down by vengeful townspeople who cut out her tongue and killed her. They buried her along with her children, a hand-made collection of vaudeville dolls. Since that time, Ravens Fair has been plagued by death. The ghastly dolls from Mary Shaws collection have gone missing from the grave and reappeared over the decades. In the dead of night-wherever they are glimpsed-families are found gruesomely murdered with their tongues torn out.

Few things are creepier than dolls, and few American Horror movies of the aughts were as genuinely creepy as was Dead Silence. It looks like this is the first time that the movie will be available on Blu-ray in its Unrated form (from what we can gather, anyhow), and with a price tag of around $15, adding this one to the collection is a no-brainer.

James Wan & Leigh Whannell know their Horror.

• Unrated Cut.
• Alternate Opening.
• Alternate Ending.
• Deleted Scenes.
• The Making of Dead Silence.
• Mary Shaw's Secrets.
• Evolution of a Visual FX.
• Aiden's "We Sleep Forever" Music Video.

Producer John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) presents Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the third chilling installment in the shocking Halloween franchise. When a petrified toy salesman is mysteriously attacked and brought to the hospital, babbling and clutching the year’s most popular Halloween costume, an eerie pumpkin mask, Dr. Daniel Challis is thrust into a terrifying Halloween nightmare. Working with the salesman’s daughter, Ellie, Daniel traces the mask to the Silver Shamrock Novelties company and its founder, Conal Cochran. Ellie and Daniel uncover Cochran’s shocking Halloween plan and must stop him before trick-or-treaters across the country never come home.

We almost didn't include this one on August's list, because we don't see how this bare-bones release can even come close to comparing with the Scream Factory Special Edition Blu-ray release that came out back in 2012, but for anyone who wants to see this underrated movie, and doesn't care that much about Special Features, this is a great buy.

*We still recommend that you buy the Scream Factory version though.

Wes Craven, the director of The Serpent and the Rainbow and Shocker, locks you inside the most terrifying house on the street. Trapped inside a fortified home owned by a mysterious couple, a young boy is suddenly thrust into a nightmare. The boy quickly learns the true nature of the house's homicidal inhabitants and the secret creatures hidden deep within the house.

One of our favorite Wes Craven flicks, and certainly one of his most fun efforts, The People Under the Stairs hinted at the director's ability to make and effective Horror Comedy years before he did Scream. This one was a big part of our formative years, and we can't wait to see what Scream Factory has done with the transfer.

• NEW Audio Commentary with writer/director Wes Craven.
• NEW Audio Commentary with actors Brandon Adams, A.J. Langer, Sean Whalen, and Yan Birch
• House Mother – NEW interview with actress Wendy Robie.
• What Lies Beneath – NEW interviews with special make-up effects Artists Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger and Robert Kurtzman.
• House of Horrors – NEW interview with director of photography Sandi Sissel.
• Settling The Score – NEW interview with composer Don Peake.
• Behind-The-Scenes Footage.
• Vintage "Making of" Featurette.
• Theatrical Trailer.
• TV Spots.
• Still Galleries. 

What starts as a seemingly innocent online prank produces a sequence of events that spirals out of control. During a routine group video chat, high-school friends are terrorized by an unseen figure. The anonymous intruder implicates each of them in the death of an acquaintance, revealing damning secrets and transforming trusted allies into wary adversaries. Forced into a sordid "game," the teens try to figure out who is behind the mysterious threat, but all signs point to a power from beyond the grave.

We didn't dig it all that much, but Unfriended is still going to be a massively popular Blu-ray come release day.

• Although we only caught the first few episodes of Dig, it kept us intrigued and entertained enough to want to keep watching it. Of course we got sidetracked, and didn't keep watching it, but we'll finish it up eventually. We promise.
• Hell on Wheels has quietly been one of the best shows on TV over the past four years, and it's one that we'd happily own to be able to re-watch it again at our leisure. A definite buy for us.
• Still of the Night is a movie that terrified me as a kid; I can still remember the ending being creepy as hell, and making me turn the channel because it freaked me out so much. Will it still have that same effect on me? Probably not, but I'm curious to find out. 

On the DVD Front this week...

• The Multi-Packs look like they could be a decent value.
• I-Lived has gotten some fair reviews, but we'll probably wait to catch it when it hits Netflix. 
• The Rain Killer is an early-90's Thriller that stars a pre-The Shield Michael Chiklis, so that's fun.
• Everything else, as always, is a crap-shoot.