In the third of our bi-weekly British horror profile series, Matty Budrewicz takes a look at the first UK shocker of the sound era.
Weird happenings in a house of mystery!
An air of enchanting menace and macabre delight hangs over The Ghoul; a spooky and richly rewarding haunted house-cum-zombie weirdy starring Boris Karloff. Rocketing to scare superstardom with Universal’s jaw-dropping 1931 masterpiece Frankenstein, in 1933 the Honour Oak, London born thespian found himself back on British soil for the first time in nearly twenty-five years; a chance for Karloff to both reconnect with his family, and to provide UK producers and distributors Gaumont-British with a homegrown take-off of Universal’s beloved Hollywood horror hits.
Indeed, the debt The Ghoul owes to Universal’s two preceding Karloff terror opuses is staggering, with James Whale’s The Old Dark House and cinematographer turned director Karl Freund’s The Mummy – itself structurally influenced by Tod Browning’s Dracula – the blueprint for writers John Hastings Turner and Roland Pertwee’s script. In it, Karloff is Professor Morlant: an ailing Egyptologist whose dying wish is to be interred in a lavish, Pharaoh-like tomb with a jewel that holds the key to the untold splendour of the afterlife. Upon his death, however, the jewel is stolen and soon the undead Morlant is prowling around the grounds of his manor, intent on revenge…
Loosely adapted by Rupert Downing from Dr. Frank King’s goofy pulp crime novel and its subsequent play, The Ghoul is perhaps one of the earliest examples of Hollywood genre filmmaking being reflected in the eyes of enterprising British producers; a train of thought that would lead to Hammer’s lucrative reinterpretation of the Universal legacy during the fifties and sixties, and a similar business ethos that would result in straight-to-video specialists John Eyres and Geoff Griffiths batting out a string of Americanised, UK-lensed schlock programmers throughout the late eighties and early nineties.
While The Ghoul’s American émigré helmer, T. Hayes Hunter, possesses neither the vision or wit of comedy horror progenitor Whale, nor the compositional eye of expressionist maestro Freund (whose work includes shooting Fritz Lang’s stunning, silent sci-fi epic Metropolis, and the innovation of the now standard three camera, overhead lighting system for sitcom I Love Lucy), he’s certainly adept at sustaining a robustly spine-tingling mood and embellishing eccentric detail. Morlant’s Egyptian funeral, for instance, is a wonderfully sinister sight; a goose-pimpling and darkly delicious spectacle as a torch-bearing procession ritualistically lay his body to rest in a giant tomb deep within his woodland grounds. Soundtracked by composer Louis Levy’s gorgeously full bodied score, it’s an unheralded but completely iconic British fear flick moment.
Hunter coaxes some fabulous interplay from Karloff and – here anyway – a gloriously low-key Ernest Thesiger, as Morlant’s club foooted butler Laing. Reuniting from The Old Dark House, Karloff and the inimitable Thesiger light up the screen, their fascinatingly performed exchange across Morlant’s deathbed as much a highlight as their catacomb confab in Whale’s magnum opus, Bride Of Frankenstein, two years later. Both are so good, in fact, that The Ghoul sags greatly whenever they aren’t present; and Karloff, sadly, is absent a fair while between Morlant’s passing and resurrection, leading to twenty minutes of redundant melodrama and plenty of irksome comedy relief from Kathleen Harrison.
The sluggish stretches and a poorly rationalised ending may mute the film’s overall impact (with throwaway science and hokey plotting wiping out any previous suggestion of the supernatural), but the biggest joy of The Ghoul – and the reason it still holds up incredibly well – is Hunter’s embellishment of the film’s ghastly and surprisingly violent jolts; the director staging Morlant’s vicious attacks with an unflinchingly lurid dexterity. They’re excellently in-one’s-face, and they almost – just almost – pre-empt the grisly stalk-and-slash setpieces of the early eighties body count boom; the last fifteen minutes of Italian hack Joe D’Amato’s sloppy, 1980 video nasty Anthropophagus in particular appears to crib freely from it, as its own lumbering, craggy-looking brute trudges through a similarly eerie, moodily lit mansion.
Ranking The Ghoul alongside its contemporaries, though, its shock moments are certainly among the most graphic scenes of the period; every bit as grotesque as the flaying within Edgar G. Ulmer’s breathtaking The Black Cat, or the nightmarish finale of Browning’s monumental, MGM-backed Freaks. It’s strong stuff, and though it may not have baited the British censors to the point of banning as the latter or, even, Paramount’s stunningly sadistic Island of Lost Souls did, The Ghoul was deemed savage enough for it to be the first film stamped with the BBFC’s then brand-new ‘H For Horror’ certificate; a classification introduced specifically for the wave of American scare-pics that The Ghoul was styled after.
Interestingly, although a planned Karloff-starring Ghoul remake never happened, King’s novel and play was adapted again in 1961 as the tepid Sid James comedy creeper What A Carve Up!.
Where To Find It
Believed lost for decades (a fate that, sadly, has befallen a vast majority of director Hunter’s work, his silent supernatural drama Earthbound and his 1932, Edgar Wallace-based crime thriller double, White Face and The Frightened Lady, most notably so), a battered print of The Ghoul was located in Czechoslovakia in 1969 by influential archivist and historian William K. Everson; the Indiana Jones of lost film excavation. Shorn of eight minutes and in terrible shape, it was, alas, the version ultimately released on VHS; even though the film’s uncut nitrate negative had been discovered in a neglected vault at Shepperton Studios in the early eighties. Restored by the BFI and broadcast on a nascent Channel 4 in 1984, a quality, unabridged Ghoul finally hit home video in a beautiful Region One DVD release – now out of print – from MGM in 2003.
With distributor Network issuing a lovely UK port in 2009, the company now seem well and truly set to blow the film’s myriad of previous, cruddy public domain discs out of the water once and for all; The Ghoul making its Blu-Ray debut at the end of next month.
Network’s Ghoul Blu-ray is released on 20th April
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