One of the scariest reads ever, William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist made just as scary a film when released in December, 1973. Eagerly anticipated, the film was a critical sensation and a world-wide box office phenomenon. Especially when seen at night in a darkened theatre, the film haunted audiences for weeks after seeing it. The effect is somewhat muted for audiences discovering it on home video with the lights on and all the distractions that home viewing can bring. Still, audiences can’t seem to get enough and Warner Home Video can’t seem to get enough of our entertainment dollars with its various home video releases. Just in time for Halloween, 2013 comes The Exorcist: 40th Anniversary Edition on Blu-ray.

This is at least the 8th release of the original film on home video. There was the original VHS release; the original DVD release in 1998 (the 25th anniversary edition); the HD release in the early part of the new century; the “version you’ve never seen” in 2000; an extended directors’ cut in 2006; an anthology including the film’s lame sequels the same year and the extended cut and original edition together on Blu-ray in 2010. The new release is the same transfer of both versions on the 2010 along with previous extras and two brand new documentaries on the making of the film and a revisit by Blatty to the house where he wrote the film and the Washington, D.C. filming locations. Also included is an interview with the priest who first brought Blatty’s attention to the 1949 real-life exorcism on which his novel and film are based.

Nominated for ten Academy Awards, the hysteria over The Exorcist had calmed down enough for The Sting to overcome it at the Oscars, winning seven of the ten it was nominated for. The Exorcist did walk away with two – one for its still eerie sound and one for Blatty for his adapted screenplay.

The “version you’ve never seen” was the marketing slogan for the film’s highly successful 2000 re-release which included eleven minutes of footage edited out of the film’s original release. The “director’s cut” is a slight variation of that version.

Also included in the new packaging is a 38 page hardcover book on the making of the film excerpted from director William Friedkin’s The Friedkin Connection.

Horror films continue to be a staple of movie-making, but most films in the genre these days over-emphasize violence and gore at the expense of compelling narrative. As with most genres, we have to look to cable TV for our fill of quality horror entertainment. The cream of the crop is F.X.’s American Horror Story, an anthology series that tells a different story over the course of each mini-season. New to Blu-ray and standard DVD is the second season, American Horror Story: Asylum which was nominated for a whopping 17 2013 Emmys.

The story for this season centers around a former tuberculosis hospital turned into an asylum for the insane in the 1960s. The problem is that not all the inmates are crazy, but those who are in charge surely are. Heading the cast once again is the sublime Jessica Lange as a nun with a closet full of canes, and not the ones used for walking. Also registering strong characterizations are Evan Peters as a young man falsely believed to be the notorious serial killer “bloody face”; Sarah Paulson as a reporter with quite a story to tell; Lily Rabe as an impressionable young nun; James Cromwell as a doctor with a Nazi past and Zachary Quinto as a psychiatrist with a dark secret. Lange, who won an Emmy last year; Paulson, Quinto and Cromwell were all nominated this year, with Cromwell winning.

Another newly released TV series on Blu-ray and standard DVD is Glee: The Complete Fourth Season.

The show was at a crossroads at the end of Season 3 when many of the original cast members graduated from McKinley High. Unlike previous series about high school kids such as Fame in the 1980s, the series doesn’t keep the same actors in high school as they age or forget about them once they graduate. In Season 4 we get to see both the replacements for the original glee club members as well as follow last year’s graduates in their new pursuits. Although this works most of the time, there are two problems with it. One, the graduates keep coming back to their old high school a lot more than people in real life would. Two, the replacement kids are watered down copies of the originals instead of individuals with distinct new personalities. Fortunately, however, it’s the songs that count and for the most part they are put over just as well as in the first three seasons.

Another problem with the fourth season is the structure of the plot lines. It seems as if the writers decided to try one thing and if it worked, drag it out, if it didn’t, drop it without explanation. There was one particularly nasty sub-plot involving new “good” girl Melissa Benoist and new “bad” girl Becca Tobin in which the latter secretly sews the former’s stage costume tighter over the course of several weeks making the former think she is getting fatter and increasing her bulimia. All of a sudden it is dropped and the two become friends – sort of.

The bottom line is the show is still worth watching for those songs, but the writers need to up their game on the story lines.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to relate to superhero movies, but Iron Man 3 marginally restores my faith in the genre. Robert Downey, Jr. is excellent in the third film in the franchise, an intelligently written entry in which villains played by Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley are a lot more interesting than Mickey Rourke in the bash-bang-boom second entry.

Iron Man 3 is available in three versions: Blu-ray 3D; Blu-ray 2D and standard DVD.

Criterion has released the long missing on Region 1 DVD I Married a Witch on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The 1942 classic plays more like a Preston Sturges screwball comedy than the type of sophisticated comedy director René Clair, but that’s a good thing. After the failure of his first Hollywood film the year before, Clair turned to Sturges, who produced the film, for help. The result is a comic delight with Veronica Lake as the saucy witch; Fredric March as the politician who falls under her spell; Susan Hayward as “the other woman”; Robert Benchley as March’s best friend and Cecil Kellaway as Lake’s delightful warlock father. It’s great to have it back on home video in the U.S.

The Universal Vault Series is upping its game, reaching further back in time to release films on DVD never even available on VHS. A case in point: Frank Borzage’s 1934 classic, Little Man, What Now?.

Margaret Sullavan in her screen debut and Douglass Montgomery are the unhappy young couple struggling to make it in a Germany already in the grip of increasing Nazi power. This was the first of three films about the rise of Nazism that Borzage would direct with Sullavan. The others were 1938’s Three Comrades for which Sullavan received her only Oscar nomination, and 1940’s The Mortal Storm.

Think George Arliss could only play powdered and bewigged old codgers in films? Think again. In 1934’s The Working Man, Arliss is delightful as an elderly shoe magnate masquerading as a vagabond in his rival’s company. Bette Davis co-stars in the Warner Archive release of this forgotten gem.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray releases of Robert Wise’s 1963 horror classic, The Haunting and Ida Lupino’s 1953 film noir classic, The Hitch-Hiker.