Review by Ian Keogh

There was once a film titled Night of the Ghoul. Few have seen scraps of it, and even fewer were present for the one and only screening hosted by its creator T. F. Meritt, a man who later slipped from public view. It has legendary status, and there are those who voraciously track down fragments of information, piecing them together. Among them is Forest Innman, which is why he and his teenage son have turned up at an old people’s home in the middle of nowhere late at night.

Scott Snyder certainly knows how to spin a tale, and he’s a far better writer of straightforward horror than when attempting to combine it with another genre. Add in the visual mastery of Francesco Francavilla and the anticipation is of a grisly treat.

Snyder certainly cranks that up from the start, laying a sense of foreboding over the arrival at the nursing home, filtering in sequences from the film that suddenly end, and almost casually noting Innman’s theory of the movie concerning the supernatural entity from whom all others spawned. Those fragments are interspersed with Innman questioning an old man without really listening to the answers he’s getting and Innman’s son gradually realising something’s up.

So much of Night of the Ghoul concerns atmosphere, and Francavilla provides that by the skip load. He draws astonished faces illuminated in close-up by a spotlight, people who naturally look sinister, the horrors of World War I, and don’t miss those little details slipped into panels where the attention is focussed elsewhere. Meritt is horrific from his first appearance, yet a man to be pitied, showing the horrendous burn scars he’s lived with for decades. The ghoul aspect is very much underplayed initially, and Francavilla achieves wonders with very limited colour.

That’s because the early chapters can be read as conversations between delusional men. While the film scraps definitely tell a horror story, is there one in the ‘real’ world? And how far into his cheek has Snyder planted his tongue? He funnels in the absurdities of horror cinema with a straight enough face, but however stylishly handed, there are an awful lot of them, and in this respect Snyder overplays his hand. You’re not going to have to be a genius to predict the twist ending.

Night of the Ghoul is a lot of fun very nicely drawn, but it’s no more than that.