The Ghoul (1975)

directed by Freddie Francis

UK

90 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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A friend described this movie to me recently, and I thought "Surely, I have to have seen this already?" but could not recall a single thing about it. As it turns out, I had watched it at some point, since it was on the list I keep of every horror movie I've ever seen, but for whatever reason my brain decided not to retain any memory of it whatsoever. I'm thinking that may have been for the best, honestly.

The movie is set somewhere around the roaring '20s, and begins during a house party full of very contrived faux-flappers and their beaus. Everybody gets sauced and decides to have the world's most boring drag race using those new-fangled things they're calling "motorcars", but along the way, the couple in the lead run out of petrol and are stranded in a moor. After the man goes off to get more fuel, the woman wanders off, encountering a random creeper (played by a very young John Hurt) who smokes her in the nog with a rock and then brings her back to his weird shed full of caged animals. That's only the start, though: from there, the woman is "taken in" by a man (Peter Cushing) living alone in a large house with his Indian maid (played by Gwen Watford, a white lady with the whitest white lady name you could imagine). Mysteries and secrets abound!

...but does any of that actually make for an interesting movie? No, it does not.

This whole thing has such an odd vibe to it, and I'm sure it didn't help that I watched it as a VHS rip on YouTube (although I have to say it was a surprisingly decent-quality VHS rip). I would describe it as "dingy and sad". The wigs and costuming look cheap, the set decoration is okay but feels recycled from other movies, and there are only a handful of actors in the main cast, so the whole thing feels kind of desolate and unpopulated. For a horror movie, all of that could add up into a net positive: a movie set in a rambling old house on a fog-shrouded moor should be eerie and claustrophobic. But instead everything just feels like an obvious façade.

And then there's the racism. Oh, boy, is there ever. The movie treats Hinduism as some scary, evil "foreign" religion, and frames India as a whole in terms that make it sound like some terrifying wasteland full of depraved extremists that no one ever returns from alive. I kept hoping that the movie's deep-rooted xenophobia might get turned on its head, or at least that it would be commented upon at some point, but it's not. It's not just the characters who are suspicious of non-white people and their mysterious religious rites; it feels like it's the movie itself.

If there's any one redeeming feature to this thing, it's something that the movie may not even have been doing on purpose: its lack of explanation for the titular ghoul. I'm going to spoil it fully, because who cares? not I: Cushing's character had a son while living in India who, for totally unclear reasons, was some kind of obligate cannibal. There is absolutely no elaboration on why the son turned out this way or what exactly his nature was. How often did he have to eat human flesh? Why could he only eat human flesh? What made him this way? Was he under some kind of weird curse? We don't know. We just know that he is a ghoul who Cushing keeps locked up in a room due to a promise he made to his late wife. That mystery is the only vaguely intriguing thing about this otherwise severely boring and somewhat offensive film.

Fun if you want to see a very young John Hurt (who puts in a decent performance alongside Cushing among a cast of over-actors) but I wouldn't recommend it, at least not sober.