October is looking to be pretty monsterrific. As part of the Halloween-oriented month, today Universal Studios Home Entertainment has released Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection in an eight film Blu-ray set that will feature films ranging from the 1931 Dracula to 1943’s Phantom of the Opera. Each of the films have gone through painstaking restoration and put into High Definition, and the set as a whole will come with over 12 hours of bonus features, as well as a 48-page book. You can learn more about the collection in the trailer, below, or get a taste of the bonus features in the Dracula segment, courtesy of Universal.
The trailer highlights the list of films and the actors and makeup artists involved with the production. The eight films in the set are Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Wolf Man (1941), and Phantom of the Opera (1943). Toward the end of the clip, there’s a pretty nice section that shows how the resolution has changed during the process of getting it up to HD quality, which the trailer notes is “6X the resolution as DVD.”
If you enjoyed the latter part of the trailer, the “Dracula: The Restoration” bonus clip takes a look at the behind-the-scenes work done to make the films look as crisp as possible. The restoration of the audio quality is also looked at, and the crew had their hands full getting rid of sound blips and a horrible hissing sound present throughout the film. Both aspects are fascinating, especially if you are a novice with these sorts of processes.
