Coming on the heels of George A. Romero’s 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead,” the second movie in the undead bible was an Italian production, shot by a Spanish director and set in the bucolic British countryside. Though it has been known by dozens of titles — from “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie” to “Don’t Open the Window” (the inspiration for Edgar Wright’s “Don’t” trailer in Quentin Tarantino’s “Grindhouse”) — Blue Underground finally releases the definitive version of “The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue” today in a print so beautifully restored you’d think it was shot last week instead of in 1974.

Ray Lovelock, sounding like he’s been dubbed by Dick Van Dyke doing his “Mary Poppins” accent, plays George, an antiques dealer heading for his country house when a fragile young woman named Edna (Cristina Galbo) backs over his motorbike in a service station. She’s on her way to see her photographer brother-in-law, who’s holed up in a remote cottage trying to dry out his drug-addicted wife. George bullies Edna into giving him a ride, but their detour sends them crashing into a rapidly growing gaggle of corpses re-animated by an ultrasonic pest control machine and a fascist police inspector (the legendary character actor Arthur Kennedy).

It all sounds about as ridiculous as Mr. Lovelock’s plummy accent, but director Jorge Grau turns it into the most Hitchcockian zombie film ever made, complete with a “wrong man” subplot, vividly sketched supporting characters, and some claustrophobic set pieces that steal the breath from your lungs. Ace photography, a solid script, a nails-on-the-blackboard electronic soundtrack, and a nihilistic ending put this 1974 effort right up alongside Mr. Romero’s “Living Dead” trilogy as a zombie classic.

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The DVD cover of the 2007 Japanese horror movie “Nightmare Detective” looks like the kind of lurid sleaze that most of us would be too embarrassed to take to the cashier. That’s a shame, because if you can ignore the naked woman, the knife, the grasping ghostly hands, and the pool of blood on the front of the DVD, you’ll find that this is one of the best movies of last year. So if you’re reluctant to buy it in the store, then at least order it online.

“Nightmare Detective” is the work of Shinya Tsukamoto, one of cinema’s most distinctive voices, who directs, writes, edits, designs, shoots, produces, and acts in his visionary, personal films such as “Tetsuo: The Iron Man,” “A Snake in June,” and “Vital.” With “Nightmare Detective,” Mr. Tsukamoto made a play for the mainstream by casting three hot young actors in a horror movie about a killer stalking the dreams of sleeping Tokyo. But rather than being a sellout, it’s one of his best films.

People are killing themselves in their sleep, and the police assigned to the investigating team send their newest addition (pop starlet Hitomi) on a fool’s errand: There’s a guy who says he can enter dreams, and they want his insight on the case. It turns out that the psychic in question, played by Ryuhei Matsuda, is a suicidal sad sack who hates his psychic abilities so much he’d rather stay in bed.

Rather than a rehash of “Nightmare on Elm Street,” this movie becomes an exploration of true horror: Confronted with the insignificance of their lives, the movie’s characters are all too eager to end their suffering. The box art would have you believe that this is just another sleazy scare movie, but “Nightmare Detective” is a class act in which the boogeyman is the existential void.

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Also out on DVD this week is the world’s strangest “Deliverance” remake. Korea’s “A Bloody Aria” (written and directed by Shinyeon Won) begins with a music professor making a pit stop to assault his prize student and ends with a series of bloody games being played by a posse of local hillbilly lunatics. Swerving wildly from Grand Guignol to torture flick to black comedy, “A Bloody Aria” is completely out of control, but the mess it makes is so intensely gory that you can’t help but stare.