Edgar G Ulmer’s 1934 The Black Cat (Second Sight, £15.99) has nothing to do with Poe’s original tale (Ulmer decided to ditch the planned adaptation in favour of a new story) and the Black Cat of the title is more of a Red Herring. Nevertheless, with its overwhelming morbidity and doom-laden air the movie probably gets closer to the heart of Poe’s obsessions than most others. The first of Universal’s three films teaming Lugosi and Karloff sees them as mortal enemies locked in a deathly embrace going back to World War I: Karloff the architect has built a modernist house on the mass grave of the soldiers he betrayed, embalmed psychologist Lugosi’s wife and married his daughter; now he’s planning to sacrifice a girl in a Black Mass and only barmy Lugosi can stop him. It’s all completely mad, and the plot bears little scrutiny, but the prowling camerawork, career-best performances and perverse poetry of the film’s images make it a classic of its kind.

The same can’t be said of follow-up The Raven (Second Sight, £15.99), a sporadically interesting, Ulmerless effort in which Lugosi hams it up as a Poe-obsessed torture freak and Karloff almost saves the day with a dignified performance as a deformed criminal.

Staying in the world of literary adaptations we have an 1979 ITV Playhouse production of MR James’s Casting the Runes (Network, £9.99), a story best known to screen horror buffs as the basis for Jacques Tourneur’s marvellous Night of the Demon. This version also updates James’s eerie tale to a contemporary setting, substituting a young female TV producer for the original’s hapless bibliophile. On the whole – and in spite of a limited budget – it’s a success, conjuring a sense of supernatural dread out of wintry Yorkshire landscapes and mundane urban settings in a manner reminiscent of Ramsey Campbell’s Jamesian tales. Where it falls down is in the characterisation of black magician Karswell; here, he’s an American Crowley knockoff who has you longing for the depth Niall McGinnis brought to the role in Tourneur’s film. Extras are excellent, being a 1970s TV adaptation of Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance and an hour-long documentary on MRJ himself.

Taking a far more liberal approach to its source is Korea’s The Red Shoes (Tartan, £19.99), reworking Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale into a dark probing of female rivalry and unfulfilled desire. Yong-Gyun Kim’s film works well enough on a number of levels, but there are two fundamental problems. The first is that the titular shoes are actually pink, which drains them of a good deal of their symbolic power; secondly, with the over-familiar narrative tropes at work here it’s hard to get past the idea that this is, ultimately, just Ring with high heels.

If the economics of the horror film tend toward repetition of successful formulæ, then that in itself can offer fine opportunities for comic takes on the genre. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Starz Home Entertainment, £16.99) is the latest attempt to deconstruct the slasher movie, taking the well-worn narrative implausibilities of Halloween, Friday 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street and reverse-engineering them into a mockumentary about a would-be masked killer determined to commit the perfect act of mythic terrorisation on a group of college kids. While it undeniably draws on the likes of Scream, Behind the Mask (like the far darker Man Bites Dog) is more interested in how such generic narratives play out from the killer’s point of view – meaning that we see just how much planning and logistical preparation goes into the such seemingly ‘natural’ genre staples as the horny teens slaughtered in the bedroom or the emergence of the ‘final girl’. It’s an amusing idea, and the film’s first hour milks it for all it’s worth, with frequently excellent results; but despite the genre-savvy script, Behind the Mask lets itself down with a lacklustre conclusion.

If original ‘70s exploitation movies, rather than clever pastiches, are more in your line then you’ll enjoy Grindhouse Trailer Classics (Nucleus Films, £14.99) a compilation of 55 mind-boggling trailers from the golden age of sleaze cinema, a cornucopia of sex, violence and awesomely daft voiceovers; while I’ve no quibbles with such a feast of toxic celluloid, the accompanying documentary is a pitiful affair, and anyone seeking a real attempt to contextualise these movies is pointed in the direction of Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA (see this month’s book reviews, p62).