12/07/2025
“He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss…”
There are horror films that chill, and there are those that wound. The Ghoul (1975) does both, but quietly. It is not an Amicus production in name, yet it carries the echo of that house style: Gothic settings, moral consequence, and a theatrical intimacy. But this film is something else entirely. It is a lament.
Peter Cushing stars as a reclusive clergyman-turned-hermit, living in a decaying house on the edge of the moor. But he is not acting. His beloved wife Helen had died not long before filming began, and it shows in every moment of his performance: the sunken eyes, the restraint, the sorrow. There is a scene where he looks wistfully at a framed photograph on the mantelpiece, that is her. Helen Cushing. Not a prop. Not fiction. Just a man, in a horror film, remembering love.
The Ghoul is often dismissed for its slow pacing or unclear monster mythology. But look again. The real horror here is not the creature in the attic, it is the grief in the parlour. The film’s stillness, its fog-bound silences, and its glacial sadness all seem to mirror a kind of spiritual disintegration.
John Hurt appears too - young, volatile, and seething with class rage. It’s one of his rare ventures into horror before Alien, and he brings a nasty, desperate energy that offsets Cushing’s ghostlike fragility.
This is not a portmanteau film, but it belongs to the same world. It is haunted, not by spectres, but by Cushing's real loss.
