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Saturday is Halloween, and the spirits of the dead are everywhere. Certainly they hover over The Dead , John Huston's elegiac 1987 film of a story from James Joyce's Dubliners . The movie begins at a Dublin dinner party thrown on Jan. 6, 1904, the Feast of the Epiphany, by sisters Kate and Julia Morkan. Guests include nephew Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), a journalist who regards the goings-on as amusingly provincial, and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston, daughter of John), whose memories of a long-lost love surface when a tenor at the party sings the lament The Lass of Aughrim . Gretta will make it clear that the dead exert a strong hold over the living. Gabriel will pick up the theme, in a famous passage that screenwriter Tony Huston, son of John (who collaborated but took no on-screen credit), wisely leaves in Joyce's words. Brief sample: “Yes, the newspapers were right: Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.”

Death's shadow was on the film set as well. This was John's final movie. He had suffered for years from emphysema and, though he was in full command, he wore an oxygen mask and worked from a wheelchair. The movie, which looks as if it were shot in Dublin, was filmed in a California warehouse with a mainly Irish cast imported for the occasion. John's health was so frail that insurers refused to cover the project until Karel Reisz, director of such films as Isadora , agreed to stand by in case he could not continue. John was invigorated by the filming, and talked of directing a movie based on Herman Melville's Benito Cereno . Then his health worsened. He died on Aug. 28, 1987, just before The Dead was shown at the Venice Film Festival.

Tony once said of Joyce's work that it was a bond shared by him and his father, “a reference to which we compared our experiences in the way others resort to the Bible.” John, who spent much of his life in Ireland but by then was living in Mexico, framed the film's theme this way: “The story's about a man being revealed to himself, and while we're watching that, I think we're revealed to ourselves.” A DVD release is scheduled for next Tuesday.

If mortality is the theme of The Dead , the presence of angels is the theme of Wim Wenders's great Wings of Desire (1987), out Tuesday in a Blu-ray edition on the Criterion label. The plot has to do with an angel (Bruno Ganz) who longs to be mortal in order to live with a circus performer in Berlin.

But the most impressive section is the film's opening, in which angels are seen hovering over the worried and bereft and offering invisible comfort.

An angel-in-training figures in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), also arriving on Blu-ray. Here, in a variation on A Christmas Carol , the spirit's job is to show a lost soul (James Stewart) what life would have been like if the fellow had never been born.

“Every time a bell rings,” the film says, “an angel gets his wings.” With the number of doorbells being rung tomorrow, expect a surfeit in Heaven.