Vampires for Halloween horror

There are plenty of vampire flicks on DVD this Halloween, but the best films feature the unlikeliest of all monsters: children.

Writer-director Paul Solet's feature debut, Grace, from Anchor Bay (www.anchorbayentertainment.com/; $26.97; rated R) is a doozy: The villain is a newborn baby who also happens to be a vampire.

Jordan Ladd stars as Madeline Matheson, a beautiful, pregnant young woman whose husband dies in a car crash. Refusing to believe the crash also killed her unborn child, Madeline decides to carry it to term.

In a strange turn of events, the baby girl springs back to life shortly after her birth. She seems a normal child at first, but soon Madeline discovers that the newborn would rather drink her blood than formula.

Deadgirl: Unrated Director's Cut from Dark Sky Films ($24.98; www.darkskyfilms.com/; not rated) is an equally creepy film about teenagers' capacity for evil. Codirected by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel, it is about two teens who discover what appears to be a dead body in an abandoned mental asylum. But the girl, chained to a table, is alive, and as the boys discover after they beat and shoot her, she cannot die.

The film explores how much people will give in to their most sadistic impulses when given the opportunity. The answer isn't pretty.

Vampire fans looking for something, um, more vampiric than Twilight can turn to two releases based on the brilliant 2000 Japanese feature-length anime, Blood: The Last Vampire.

The English-language live-action film, Blood: The Last Vampire, from Sony (www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/; $24.96 DVD; $34.95 Blu-ray; Rated R), stars Gianna Jun as Saya, a half-demon, half-human vampire hunter who looks like a cute teenage girl. The film relies too heavily on CGI effects, but it's a hoot.

Saya fans will love the five-disc box set, Blood+: Part Two, also from Sony ($119.95; not rated), a collection of 25 episodes from the animated TV show inspired by the original anime.

Looking for unique, innovative fare? Ghost House Underground, a series of four from Lionsgate (www.lionsgateshop.com/;    $19.98 each; rated R), is a must-see. Children, by Bri Tom Shankland, is an intense shocker about prepubescent kids who catch a virus that turns them into vicious killers.

There are more crazy kids - cannibal kids, this time! - in Offspring, an adaptation of the Jack Ketchum novel.

Val Kilmer stars in the environmental thriller The Thaw, as a scientist who discovers a deadly species of parasite deep in the Arctic ice.

Director Eduardo Sánchez, of Blair Witch Project fame, explores Asian horror styles in the deeply felt horror-tragedy Seventh Moon, a ghost story set in a remote region of China.

It took nearly 20 years, but the sci-fi/horror classic Hardware: 2-Disc Limited Edition from legendary South African indie filmmaker Richard Stanley is finally out on DVD from Severin Films (www.severin-films.com/;    $29.95 DVD; $34.95 Blu-ray; not rated).

Released in 1990, two years before Dust Devil (Stanley's other cult classic), Hardware is set in a postapocalyptic urban hell ruled by a tyrannical, fascistic government. It stars a very young Dylan McDermott and the terrific Stacey Travis as lovers whose flat is besieged by a malfunctioning RoboCop-esque killer 'bot.

Criterion Collection (www.criterion.com) has released two international classics. Repulsion ($39.95; not rated), the claustrophobic 1965 psychological thriller from Roman Polanski, stars Catherine Deneuve as a deeply repressed young woman who undergoes a total psychological breakdown when she is left alone over a weekend by her sister.

Empire of Passion ($29.95; not rated) is the 1978 follow-up to Japanese auteur Nagisa Oshima's controversial exploration of the politics of sex, In the Realm of the Senses. Empire, which is equally explicit, combines erotica and horror in a tale of an adulterous woman who conspires with her lover to murder her husband.