The Lionsgate Limited release is a 5K scan of the original 35mm negatives, supervised by Pathe and restored by VDM laboratory in 2025 with Neil Marshall in the room. The disc is encoded on a BD-100 with a fresh Dolby Vision grade.
The grain comes through tighter and cleaner than the old Blu-ray ever managed, with depth in the cave walls and texture you can read in the rock face. The Dolby Vision pass delivers deep inky blacks that protect the limited light sources rather than crushing them, and the flashlight beams now carry the small color flourishes that the old encode washed flat.
The 7.1 DTS-HD MA mix is a sensible upgrade from the original disc’s LPCM 6.1, with tighter creature placement in the surrounds and bass that hits when the Crawlers do. There’s no Atmos which is fine because the original mix was already designed around tight surround imaging that height channels would have dispersed. Dialogue is mixed slightly under the score, though pushing center channel up a couple dB on your receiver lands it where it belongs.
If you’ve owned the old Blu-ray since 2007 the upgrade has finally landed. The Pathe-supervised restoration plus Lionsgate Limited’s encode work is what catalog horror releases should aspire to.
