Mar 231932
 
three reels

Professor Morlant (Boris Karloff) dies with a final instruction to his servant (Ernest Thesiger), for a mystical gem to be left in his hand when he is put in his crypt, that way when he rises from the dead, he can go straight to paradise. But the gem is stolen. Days later, the heirs, Ralph Morlant (Anthony Bushell) & Betty Harlow (Dorothy Hyson), along with her flatmate (Kathleen Harrison), a grumpy lawyer (Cedric Hardwicke), a parson (Ralph Richardson), and an Arab looking to take the gem back to the Middle East (Harold Huth), all end up in the darkened mansion of the dead man.

Long thought lost, The Ghoul is the first British horror picture. While the description makes it seem we are dealing with an undead monster movie, the film is better classified as an old dark house film (such as The Cat and the Canary, The Ghost Breakers, and The Old Dark House). Like others in the sub-genre, it has a group of eccentric characters thrown together in a spooky house with multiple mysterious things going on around them. There are real horror elements, but they are mixed with sometimes wacky comedy and a lot of drawing room chatting. These sorts of films were of a time, and faded at the end of the ‘30s.

As a monster movie, The Ghoul is slow and talky. As an old dark house film, it’s pretty good. Expectations have a lot to do with how much someone enjoys a film and too many critics, having heard about this film for nearly a century without being able to see it, were expecting British Frankenstein.

It certainly has its horrific moments. Karloff’s Professor looks like an undead creature (with excessive eyebrows) before he’s even dead. Once returned, I’d place him as one of Karloff’s better creations. His ritual scene is as ghastly as anything Universal cooked up and had the censors quite upset.

Hardwicke and Richardson (in his first film role) are a welcome part of the ensemble. I found the comic flatmate to be overdone, but Ernest Thesiger (from The Bride of Frankenstein and The Old Dark House) has the perfect amount of quirk.

The Ghoul isn’t a great film, but it is a good film, and would be my first choice if you wanted something for a double feature with The Old Dark House.