"There's no place to hide" when you're SCARED STIFF, on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Returning to show business after a year's absence due to a nervous breakdown, Kate Christopher (Mary Page Keller, ULTERIOR MOTIVES) is moving in with her boyfriend and former shrink Dr. David Young (Andrew Stevens, THE FURY) and her young son Jason (Josh Segal, CEASE FIRE) into an old colonial mansion in the South. Already under the strain of working on her music video "Beat of the Heart" Kate does not immediately notice the odd happenings that unsettle her son and that David tries to rationalize. When Wally (Tony Shepherd) the painter tells them that he has heard pigeons in the attic, David breaks through the walled up door and discovers a piece of sheet music that Kate recognizes as the melody to her new song, a diary from 1857, and a locked trunk containing the skeletons of a woman and child. In the diary, Kate reads of Elizabeth Masterson's (Nicole Fortier, THE UNHOLY) concerns about the monstrous changes her composer/slave trader husband George (David Ramsey) underwent after being cursed by slaves that she was harboring in the attic. While David is wary about the effect on Kate's mental state, a series of nightmarish dreams and all too real waking visions have her suspecting that David's concerns are not entirely wholesome.

A video rental shelf perennial throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Florida-lensed SCARED STIFF began life as a more conventional ghost story from a script by Mark Frost (TWIN PEAKS) before becoming an everything-but-the-kitchen sink haunted house horror entry with voodoo curses, jump scares, surrealistic nightmare sequences, and prosthetic make-up designs aplenty verging from the grotesque to the comical (including a mental patient who unzips his skull to reveal his pulsating brain and the increasingly bloated corpse still talking of a hanged man). The film is most successful during its period opening sequence and the early haunted house antics like the pigeons whose cooing disturbs the sleep of the house's inhabitants and the hallucinations conjured up by Kate playing the sheet music. At some point two-thirds of the way through the film, the film seems to make a jump from slow buildup to SHINING-esque stalk and chase through a house shifting in time and geography before the requisite final twist. Not a sleeper, but an undemanding lesser seen eighties horror effort. Director Richard Friedman would follow the film up with the lower-budgeted but more outrageous DOOM ASYLUM.

Given a small theatrical release by International Film Marketing, SCARED STIFF came to VHS and laserdisc through Republic Pictures. While most of Republic's releases went to Paramount, SCARED STIFF wound up with MGM by way of Orion through foreign sales company Manson International. Mastered from a new 2K scan, Arrow Video's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 totally obliterates the dark tape masters, revealing some elegant lighting choices, varied textures in the authentic colonial house location (at the same time betraying the artifice of some sets that are comparable to ones for Kate's music video). The higher resolution also reveals details of the prosthetic make-up effects that now look rubbery yet very much in keeping with mid-eighties effects-heavy "nightmare logic" horror offerings. The LPCM 1.0 mono track boasts clear dialogue and scoring (presumably clean enough for film fan Robert Ehlinger to do a new rip of the theme song for YouTube). Optional English SDH subtitles are included.

Extras start off with an audio commentary by director Friedman and producer Dan Bacaner (BLOOD SIMPLE), moderated by film historian Robert Ehlinger whose love of the theme song motivated him to push for the film's re-release. They discuss casting Keller at the last moment after approaching known singers like Sheena Easton and Chrissie Hynde, also finding the only colonial mansion in Florida just before the shoot, how dirty the pigeons left the sets, the reshoots and additions they made to the film back in New York after feeling that they needed to connect all the loose ends, making every character they introduced affected by the curse in some way or another), the film's effects, and their memories of the local cast and crew.