Fewer American movies are inspired by the life of George Washington than by that of Ed Gein. The father of our country eludes its imagination, while the only famous son of Plainfield, Wis. has fathered a cinematic genre in which murder and cannibalism coexist with transvestitism and freaky arts and crafts. Within three years of his 1957 arrest, the graying, glassy-eyed little Ed was stretched into the tall, lanky, crush-worthy Norman Bates. In 1960, the year Italy produced “La Dolce Vita” and “L’Avventura,” America delivered a homicidal mama’s boy and amateur taxidermist of undying appeal. The subsequent popularity of the Italian giallo — a stylish neo-gothic brand of slasher flick, often animated by gender confusion — showed that the Monicas and Marcellos may come and go, but a fastidiously eviscerated corpse will always fill the till.

It’s an Ed Gein world, or maybe it just feels that way because I have been making my way through the alternately macabre and campy catalog of Dark Sky Films, the DVD company that has taken the lead from Anchor Bay and others in offering a savory stew of low-budget American detritus, gialli, assorted Euro-trash, neglected television, and many altogether admirable movies with a bent disposition. What sets Dark Sky apart is the care it gives lost drive-in discards as well as respectable genre classics — care that indicates an occasional touch of corporate wit.

One pleasing Dark Sky feature is its solo interviews, averaging 15 minutes, with one or two participants in a given film. Instead of the usual featurette, in which pundits are edited into a counterpoint of predictable one-liners, Dark Sky’s stationary camera allows the interviewee to tell his or her own story, supported by illustrative clips. Dan Curtis’s 1974 television film, “Trilogy of Terror,” for example, holds a place in many hearts as a showcase for Karen Black, arguably the most inventive actress in 1970s Hollywood, and for the third segment of the “Trilogy,” a line-by-line adaptation of Richard Matheson’s story, “Prey,” turned into a hysterically kinetic tour de force involving a tiny Zuni fetish doll with big teeth.

The interview with Ms. Black, taped last year for the DVD, is no less entertaining. Rolling her eyes in recollection of the filmmaking incompetence, she recalls the spills she had to take while pretending to wrestle the doll and offers her own analysis of the film’s cult following: “Women are afraid of vaginal entry,” especially by snakes, rats, and other small things, like Zuni fetish dolls. An interview with Mr. Matheson is almost as illuminating.

The underrated “Magic” (1978), Richard Attenborough’s best effort as a director, gets a bad rap because Anthony Hopkins is bizarrely cast as a Borscht Belt ventriloquist named Corky; someone remarks that Corky’s father came from England, presumably to explain why Corky has an accent that doesn’t suit a performer born and raised in the shadow of Grossinger’s. Yet Mr. Hopkins’s performance is cannily measured and holds its own with Ann-Margret’s effulgent informality, the dummy’s masterly misdirection, and a thematic showbiz joke, expressed by Burgess Meredith as a crusty agent, about the dangers of success. The DVD does full justice to Victor Kemper’s moody cinematography, and offers, in addition to an interview with Mr. Kemper, a superb visit with the ventriloquist, Dennis Alwood, and two dummies — the one in the movie and the one that didn’t get the part. It’s film history in the guise of vaudeville.

Dark Sky also justifies revisiting Tobe Hooper’s “Eaten Alive” (1977), a mostly dismal effort, as Mr. Hooper’s detached style doesn’t allow the characters to get beyond caricature. In this case, the interviews with director and actors are less interesting than a featurette about the film’s Depression-era inspiration, Joe Ball, the owner of a Texas juke joint and a chick magnet who fed many of his lovers — along with live dogs and cats — to his five alligators. Neville Brand’s interpretation is all ranting insanity, and the rest of the cast is buried under bad makeup and mindless dialogue, but the thing is never dull.

Imagine having only one great film in you, and that film being “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974), Mr. Hooper’s ingenious variation on the Ed Gein story (made the same year as the more literal telling, “Deranged,” available on DVD from MGM). It’s as convulsively frightening as one of George Orwell’s Room 101 tortures, and a centerpiece among Dark Sky’s offerings, presented in a restored transfer with hours of documentary supplements. The film probably didn’t look this good on its initial release — the opening 70-second pullback, on rotting corpses wired to a grave, suggests a parody of Monument Valley, with its butte-like cemetery grave markers, open sky, and blowing dust.

The catalog has other notable films, including Mario Bava’s feverish, color-coded ghost story “Kill Baby, Kill” (1966), John McNaughton’s relentless “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (1990), Roy Ward Baker’s funny and giddily performed Amicus compilation, “Asylum” (1972), and Jack Hill’s winning send-up of pre-Gein horror films, “Spider Baby” (1964), with Lon Chaney barking the title song, Mantan Moreland waddling into a lethal window frame, and Carol Ohmart doing her imperiously sexy sashaying. “Spider Baby” was rediscovered on laser disc in the ’90s. In recent months, Dark Sky has made a few valiant discoveries of its own. Christian Alvart’s “Antibodies” (2005), a German film that played in New York last February and disappeared after a nearly unanimous critical drubbing, merits the second chance offered by Dark Sky’s two-disc edition, including an engaging monologue by Mr. Alvart. Although it borrows generic elements from many serial killer/pederast movies, from “M” to “Silence of the Lambs” to “The Pledge,” “Antibodies” takes a peculiarly European approach in its perverse pride in numbers, logic, accident, and religious parable — a vivid enactment of Abraham and Isaac occasioned when the film’s psychopath frames the son of a small-town cop; it would be laughable if it weren’t staged and played with Bressonian confidence. Brutal and suspenseful, handsomely photographed and acted, “Antibodies” will survive its detractors.

So will the lost film by the late Curtis Harrington, “The Killing Kind” (1973), the last of his fading-actresses trilogy — in this case, Ann Southern and Ruth Roman. Though not as inspired as Harrington’s 1971 burlesque of old Hollywood, “What’s the Matter with Helen?” (available from MGM), it has a somber deliberation that recalls his poetic debut feature, “Night Tide” (1961) — the opening under-the-boardwalk shot is an homage to the earlier film. Never actually released to theaters, “The Killing Kind” is not untouched by misogyny: Southern plays a monstrous mother, inciting Oedipal (or Geinian) confusion in her demented son (John Savage), and the son’s young targets, including a rape victim, are punished for crossing sexual boundaries. But the astute dissection of tormented families (Luana Anders is delectable as the alcoholic librarian next door), the pitiless portrait of the son, and the steady legato tempo are long overdue for proper consideration.

Later this month, Dark Sky will release two films. “Tragic Ceremony” (1972) is an inanely structured film by the Italian horror innovator Riccardo Freda about ghostly possession. But “Ricco the Mean Machine,” the inexplicable cover tag for Tulio Demicheli’s “Ricco” (1973), is well worth seeing. It’s a Mafia revenge film in which Christopher Mitchum sets out to destroy a mob with his pageboy flip and a few awkward karate chops. Notorious for Barbara Bouchet’s striptease and an on-camera castration (I’d love to hear Karen Black’s take on it), the film features an almost unrecognizable Arthur Kennedy as Don Vito, who turns enemies into bars of soap. Kennedy’s voice and gestures are inimitable: Note the look he gives Malisa Longo before consigning her to the tub of acid. He even dies while smirking.

Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”