Gaumont British Picture Corporation of America released The Ghoul on 25 November 1933 in the United States. Woolf & Freedman Film Service distributed the film in the UK, where it was first released the previous August.
It is effectively another dark house film like the previous year’s The Old Dark House. And it features two of the stars of that film: Boris Karloff and Ernest Thesiger. But The Ghoul actually has a better plot.
An Egyptologist dies. He claims he will come back from the dead if anyone steals his special jewel. Someone steals it and he comes back to get it. The rest of the film is an dark house film with ghoulish Borish Karloff hunting for the jewel.
The Ghoul is not a well-known film. There is a reason for this. For a long time, everyone thought the film lost. In 1969, a film collector discovered a badly cut copy with mangled audio in Czechoslovakia. It was more a curiosity than anything. But in the early 1980s, staff at the iconic Shepperton Studios found a blocked film vault with the original negative of the film. As a result, we can enjoy it today.
T Hayes Hunter directed the film. He was primarily a silent film director. But this often works out well. Silent film directors tend to be more focused on the visuals. (This is why the Spanish language version of Dracula is arguably better than the Lugosi version that most people know.)
So let’s celebrate the 92nd anniversary of the release of The Ghoul. This means it will soon be in the public domain. It does highlight how uncontrolled our copyright system is. This film is from another universe. It should have been placed in the public domain decades ago.
But that doesn’t stop us from enjoying it today!
The Ghoul (1933) poster via Wikipedia under Fair Use.
