ByJake Rossen|Jun 24, 2020, 6:00 AM EDT
Add us as a preferred source
While many movies may hold sentimental value, only a few can command a premium price on the collector’s market. Take a look at some Blu-ray discs that routinely sell for significantly more than their original retail price.
1. The Vincent Price Collection: Volume 1 (1960-1971)
This spooky collection of Vincent Price’s most macabre films—including 1961’s The Pit and the Pendulum and 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death—was issued by Shout! Factory (under their Scream Factory label) in 2013 in a limited edition that quickly sold out. Those who missed their opportunity now pay $330 or more for the set.
2. The Man Who Fell to Earth: Criterion Collection (1976)
Director Nicolas Roeg’s sci-fi fable about an alien named Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) arriving on Earth in search of water for his home planet got the Criterion Collection treatment in 2008. A sealed copy routinely sells for up to $400. Even a previously-owned version can net $90 or more.
3. Dolls: Collector’s Edition (1987)
A year before Chucky and Child’s Play arrived, director Stuart Gordon helmed this horror film about a group of strangers terrorized in a mansion by a collection of rampaging killer dolls. The 2014 Blu-ray is scarce and can go for $80 or more.
4. Our Man Flint (1966)
James Coburn stars in this riff on the James Bond films as secret agent Derek Flint, who is tasked with foiling an attempt by criminals to control the weather. A sealed copy of the Twilight Time edition from 2013 can sell for $215 or more.
5. Ultimate Jordan (2011)
This four-disc collection of basketball legend Michael Jordan’s greatest NBA moments and a look at his life off the court is highly sought after by fans. A sealed edition can fetch $100 or more.
6. Gravity: Diamond Luxe Edition (2013)
The Sandra Bullock space thriller is readily available on Blu-ray, but this special Diamond Luxe Edition offers two unique options: A Dolby Atmos soundtrack is included that’s meant for specialized surround sound systems. There’s also a feature that allows viewers to turn off the musical score and hear the film with just the dialogue and sound effects. Fans pay $150 or more for the disc.
7. Splash (1984)
This Tom Hanks comedy about an everyman who falls for a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) has yet to be officially released on Blu-ray in the United States. The Australian import version—which works on American Blu-ray players—can sell for up to $200.
8. Sharpe’s Rifles & Eagle (1993)
This set includes two feature-length episodes (Sharpe’s Rifles and Sharpe’s Eagle) of the 1990s British series starring Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, an elite soldier during the Napoleonic Wars. The hard-to-find collection can sell for $185.
9. Time Lapse (2014)
Three friends find a camera that can deliver a photograph of what will happen 24 hours into the future. This trippy sci-fi horror film is out of print and sells for $40 used.
10. Mysterious Island (1961)
This fantasy film about Civil War soldiers who wind up stranded on an island full of creatures is prized for the stop-motion effects created by the legendary Ray Harryhausen. The out-of-print Twilight Time Blu-ray can sell for $104 or more.
11. Sordid Lives: The Series (2008)
This little-seen Logo television series about a dysfunctional Texas family serves as a prequel to 2000’s Sordid Lives movie and stars Rue McClanahan and Olivia Newton-John. The complete first (and only) season can go for $99 or more.
The Real-Life Serial Killer That Might’ve Inspired ‘Dexter’s Dark Passenger
Brazil’s most notorious killer of killers has been called the real Dexter for years, but ‘Dexter’s’ creator tells a different origin story.
ByMatt Hoffman|Oct 30, 2026, 9:00 PM EDT
Back in July 2004, Jeff Lindsay introduced readers to Dexter Morgan, a Miami police blood-spatter analyst who kills only people who deserve it, egged on by a voice in his head he calls the “Dark Passenger.” Two years later, Showtime turned Darkly Dreaming Dexter into a hit series with Michael C. Hall.
Somewhere along the way, the internet decided Dexter had a real-life model: Pedro Rodrigues Filho, a Brazilian who claimed to have killed more than 100 people, most of them criminals. Entertainment sites now call him “the Brazilian Dexter,” and ScreenRant describes the show as loosely based on his crimes. No quote from Lindsay or the show’s producers backs that up, but the similarities are hard to miss.
The Boy Who Settled Scores
Filho was born in 1954 on a farm in Santa Rita do Sapucaí, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, with an injured skull: his father, he said, had kicked his pregnant mother during a fight. He told the magazine Época in 2003 that he first wanted to kill at 13, when he shoved an older cousin into a sugarcane press. A year later, after his father lost his job as a school guard over accusations that he was stealing school lunches, Filho shot the official who had fired him, then shot the guard he believed was the real thief. (Accounts disagree on who that first victim was: some Brazilian outlets say the mayor of his hometown, others the deputy mayor of Alfenas, also in Minas Gerais.)
He fled to Mogi das Cruzes, outside São Paulo, where he robbed drug dens, killed traffickers, and took over a dead drug boss’s business. When his pregnant girlfriend was shot dead, he went looking for the man who ordered it and, with four friends, hit a wedding party, leaving seven dead and 16 wounded, according to Época. He was arrested shortly after turning 18 and entered prison on May 24, 1973; in the van on the way there, he killed a fellow prisoner he said was a rapist.
Where the Comparison Holds
Like Dexter, Filho had a code, or said he did. He told Época he killed only people who were no good, and that he never killed children, women, or family men. He also had a father story to rival Harry Morgan’s, though a much darker one: Filho claimed he killed his own father in prison, in revenge for his mother’s stabbing, and chewed a piece of his heart. (Época noted that he gave a psychiatrist a completely different account of how his father died.)
The resemblance mostly ends there. Dexter’s code, as Mental Floss has laid out before, includes “don’t get caught,” and Filho spent roughly four decades behind bars, much of it bragging. He had “Mato por prazer” (“I kill for pleasure”) tattooed on his left arm. He claimed 47 victims inside prison alone, though Época found just 18 charges against him on file in 2003; by his death, Brazilian outlets counted 71 homicides on his record.
What Dexter’s Creator Actually Said
Lindsay has told his origin story many times, and it starts nowhere near Brazil: at a Kiwanis Club lunch where he sat at the head table waiting to speak and, as he told BookPage in 2005, “the idea just popped into my head that sometimes serial murder isn’t a bad thing.” He then built the character out of research: he collected books on sociopaths and murderers, interviewed psychologists and crime scene investigators, and got cop friends to turn him loose in their dead-files room. He also rejects the very label that made Filho famous: “Dexter’s not a vigilante,” he told Middlebury Magazine in 2011. “Vigilantes are trying to perform an act of justice. Dexter just likes to kill people.”
The Ending Dexter Survived
Filho walked out of prison in 2007, went back in 2011 for crimes committed during his sentence, and was released for good in 2018. Within months, he had reinvented himself as a YouTube personality who commented on crimes in the news and lectured about his past. On the morning of March 5, 2023, he was on a sidewalk in Mogi das Cruzes holding a small child when men in a black car opened fire, according to the news site G1. The child was unhurt, but according to the police report, one of the attackers stabbed Filho in the throat as he lay on the ground. He was 68.
Read More:
•
•
Dexter: New Blood: 7 Things We Know
Every Season of ‘The Twilight Zone’ Ranked From Best to Worst by Rotten Tomatoes
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man, and it holds a ranking of every ‘Twilight Zone’ season.
ByLogan DeLoye|Oct 31, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT
You unlock this door with the key of imagination; beyond it is another dimension where Rotten Tomatoes has ranked all five original Twilight Zone seasons.
The Twilight Zone took over television screens from 1959 to 1964, inviting the people of Earth into “a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind,” of “both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.”
The science-fiction series, hosted by Rod Serling, spanned 156 episodes, each with different characters and plots that drew you deeper into The Twilight Zone. Just when viewers thought they had the story figured out, a supernatural (sometimes horrific and psychological) plot twist transpired, leaving you with a moral lesson.
The series as a whole received a 92 % on Rotten Tomatoes, earning top praise from the review site. They also ranked each season individually, with a few scoring higher than others. But which season was the best, and which fell short on the Tomatometer?
SEASON 1 – 100%
The first episode of The Twilight Zone premiered in October 1959 and immediately captivated viewers with a storyline they would never forget, though not the case for the main character. Mike Ferris wanders into the small town of Oakwood, with no idea who he is or why he is there. Hours go by, and he realizes he is entirely alone, but is it all just a simulation?
The season continues with favorites like “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” “The Four of Us Are Dying,” “The Fever,” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “Mr. Bevis,” and “A World of His Own.”
Rotten Tomatoes gave Season 1 of The Twilight Zone a perfect rating.
SEASON 2 – 100%
Rotten Tomatoes also gave Season 2 a perfect score, which upheld the horror and speculative appeal of the first season.
The second season of The Twilight Zone opens with “King Nine Will Not Return,” in which World War II pilot James Embry is on a plane that crashes into the desert. When he wakes up, his crew is gone. Wandering through the desert and seeing strange visions in the sky, he wakes up in a hospital 17 years later, triggered by news headlines of the incident. Was Embry experiencing PTSD, or was there actually something supernatural occurring in his hospital room?
The season proceeds with “Eye of the Beholder,” “A Most Unusual Camera,” “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?,” and the finale, “The Obsolete Man.”
SEASON 3 – 90%
Premiering in 1961, the third season of The Twilight Zone begins with an episode about an apocalyptic battle and two enemy soldiers. Throughout the episode, the soldiers, a man and a woman, learn to like each other despite being on opposing sides. With no one left on Earth, they must work together to survive, though hostile and tense.
Other episodes from this season include “The Shelter,” “The Mirror,” “It’s a Good Life,” “To Serve Man,” “Little Girl Lost,” “Nothing in the Dark,” and “The Changing of the Guard.”
Rotten Tomatoes gave the third season a 90%, with the Critics Consensus being that the season “manages to overturn an uneven structure with some superb writing that borders on profound and some of the finest half hours in the series’ history.”