A short while ago we reported that Anchor Bay (now owned by Starz) had chosen a side in the HD format wars; Blu Ray. With this announcement also came the news of their first major release, the entire first season box set of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. Surely this was great news for all of those horror fans who’d been holding off on the individual episode dvd’s for this inevitable collection. Unfortunately, for those in the hi-def camp, Starz has taken one step backwards. Hi Def Digest reports that the season one box set plans have been slightly altered, resulting in a staggered release of four ‘Season One Volumes’ containing three to four episodes per disc. ‘Season One - Volume One’ and ‘Season One - Volume Two’ will hit stores on October 16, followed closely by ‘Season One, Volume Three’ on November 13 and ‘Season One - Volume Four’ on December 11. The retail price? $29.98 per volume. LAME. With the Blu Ray format capable of holding such massive amounts of information, I would expect nothing less than a slim two or three disc set containing the entire Masters of Horror series. Unfortunately, the opportunity to ‘milk’ outweighs the need to satisfy.

Luckily there’s also some very GOOD news coming out of the HD Anchor Bay camp this week. As an HD DVD supporter, i’ve still been waiting for a major release to get me to open my home (and wallet) up to BOTH formats. Total Recall almost had me, but it just wasn’t enough to manage two hi def collections. However, this week’s announcement of four classic horror films finding their way to hi definition for the first time is enough to send me out shopping for a PS3. On October 2nd, ‘Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn’, ‘John Carpenter’s Halloween’, George A. Romero’s original ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and ‘Day of the Dead’ will hit store shelves and send horror fanatics into a bloody frenzy. All films will recieve the 1080p treatment with extra features yet to be announced. However, Anchor Bay is usually known for stacking their dvd’s pretty well, so expect at least some recycled commentary tracks and featuretes from the original standard definition releases. Although I’m still not a loyal Blu Ray supporter, I must say these four films will sit nicely on my shelf beside my HD DVD copies of Darkman, Army of Darkness, and The Thing.