(Above: The cover of the laserdisc set.)

THE VAL LEWTON COLLECTION
The Nine RKO Horror Films
Image Entertainment ID2815TU 1995
Twelve sides, extended play
Produced for laserdisc by Sergio Leemann
Playing time: 10.7 hours

(This was written before the 2005 release of the DVD Lewton set from Warner Home Video)

Though it does not include the RKO features Youth Gone Wild and Mademoiselle Fifi, this is as complete a "Lewton box set" as exists. Out of print and on a now obsolete technology (laserdisc), these sets sell used (and sometimes unopened 'new') on ebay for approximately $100.00. Besides the actual collection of films, the box includes a secondary audio track commentary by Robert Wise during Bedlam, and there is a four-page liner notes sheet with credits and film summaries.

Laserdisc has the drawback of requiring the user to flip over the disc in order to have the machine read the second side (just like a vinyl record, unless a person has a laserdisc machine with dual reading abilities). However, compared to Video, which has only an image quality of 270 lines per screen, laserdisc clearly has a better image with it's 420 lines (The newer DVD technology is 500 lines per screen, which makes for a better picture, plus those little CD-size discs do not need to be flipped.)

Besides the picture quality, the sound on these discs are very good.

UPDATE: It's worth noting that DVD, though a slightly superior image quality format, actually uses compressed audio in order to fit the entire film on a litle disk. Laserdisk doesn't use a compressed audio, therefor a Laserdisk has a technical sound advantage over the DVD format.