Ghoul – Season 1 – review

Director: Patrick Graham

First aired: 2018

Contains spoilers

This is an Indian mini-series, made for Netflix and combines a dystopian future with the supernatural and – if we are going to be honest – a large dollop of the Thing (1982) and does so with a massive amount of style. The horror (and gore) building through the three episodes until it crescendos.

First thing, of course, is I am going to have to tackle the fact that it is based on a version of the Arabian Ghoul before someone comments and says “it’s a ghoul not a vampire”. The fact is the two creatures have been closely linked for quite some time. The ghoul as a creature from Arabic myth entered into Western consciousness as it was mentioned several times in the Arabian Nights, as translated into French by Antoine Galland in the 18th Century. The story of most interest is The History of Sidi Nu’uman, which tells of a man suspicious because his new bride never seems to eat. Long story short he follows her to a cemetery and witnesses her indulging in eating the dead with the other ghouls.

fanged teeth

Cut forward to 1821 and E.T.A. Hoffmann published a story entitled Vampirismus as part of his Die Serapions-Brüder. There is every chance that the story title was added by an editor as the story is essentially a reworking, into a modern Western setting, of The History of Sidi Nu’uman. Jump forward a century and Dudley Wright adds the same story into his reference book Vampires and Vampirism and Summers conflates ghouls and vampires in The vampire, His Kith and Kin (1928). Ghouls were used in the work of HP Lovecraft and his ghoul story Pickman’s Model (1927) was reworked by Neil Gaiman, with a vampiric twist, in his film A Short Film About John Bolton.

the squad

In this case we start with a man cutting into his own flesh so that he can gather his own blood to paint out a glyph, a blood ritual that will summon the ghoul – we’ll come back to this. We are in an India of the near future, a radically different place from now. There is a military clampdown and a rampant (and I daresay popularist) nationalism. We follow a military raid on a terrorist base, looking for terrorist leader Ali Saeed (Mahesh Balraj). A man approaches the squad, saying “they’re all dead”. When they get to where Saeed is there are bodies and he sits there. He whispers something to the squad leader.

Radhika Apte as Nida

Jumping back a month and Nida Rahim (Radhika Apte), a young Muslim woman, is in a car with her father (S.M. Zaheer). He is taking her back to the academy of the National Protection Squad, where she is being trained in interrogation techniques, but he is complaining about raids and the burning of books. He reveals he has books that he has rescued in the car and his lecture notes – he’s been teaching off-syllabus. They reach a checkpoint and he becomes defensive but Nida intervenes to get them past. However, she thinks on his actions and the propaganda she is fed, and reports him – he is sent to a re-education centre but not before she reveals she has done this to him.

torturing Saeed

Nida is pulled out of the academy early and posted to a detention centre (the one her father was sent to). There is a difference of opinion of how to treat her. Commander of the post, Colonel Sunil Dacunha (Manav Kaul), wants her put on the squad who are to interrogate Ali Saeed (who is being transported there that day), but his Lieutenant, Laxmi Das (Ratnabali Bhattacharjee), doesn’t trust her and thinks she is a terrorist/sympathiser. It soon becomes apparent that Saeed is more than he appears and this is shown at first through mind games that get his interrogators turning on each other. Quickly it is revealed that he is the ghoul.

it's behind you

So, what are its powers – having been summoned, its purpose is to reveal their guilt and eat their flesh. There seems to be some level of telepathy involved, so that it can manipulate people – causing fights and generally freaking people out. However the primary power is that the ghoul will eat the flesh of victims and take the form of the last person it bit (hence dropping the pronoun to it). This transformation can occur whether the victim is alive or dead. This leads to the Thing aspect, with the series playing with the “who is it” card a few times. The ghoul can reveal sharp teeth, talons and black eyes. It does also appear to be very physically hardy.

hunting the ghoul

I really enjoyed this. It had a dark atmosphere with the dystopian setting, the torture/detention centre, the characters who were all fatally flawed one way or another and the gore and violence that built through the three episodes. It was superbly acted and, yes, it was derivative but in a good way. Whether you’d throw this into vampire filmographies depends on how wide you cast your vampire net but this ghoul certainly eats fresh flesh and not longer dead corpses (as is the norm through a lot of ghoul material) and can shapeshift (again not a power normally put in ghoul related material, more a vampiric power). 7.5 out of 10 and recommended.

The imdb page is here.

El Misterio de Cynthia Baird – review

Director: José María Zabalza

Release date: 1985

Contains spoilers


Apparently filmed in the 70s and then languished on a shelf until 1985, the Mystery of Cynthia Baird is also known as El Retorno de los Vampiros (indeed that is what the title was on the poor video print of the film that I watched for this review). It is certainly an odd duck of a film with two principle players and suffers, I think, from not knowing what it wants to be.

There is an almost euro-psychedelia to the vampirism displayed but the film does not do enough to hold that for us as we shall see.

the lovers

It begins with a couple on the beach, Bill Moore (Simón Andreu) and Cynthia Baird (Susan Taff, the Curse of the Vampire), they chase around, fall and kiss and are clearly lovers. We cut to them in bed and they bicker over the covers, snoring and counting sheep. Eventually she gets up to run a bath and he gets a letter out. She wants to know what woman has written to him and it’s his wife (María Salerno). This ends up with her dictating a letter to write back to the spouse.

before Saturn Devouring His Son

The whole set up worked well but then went on too long as the film strayed towards almost a dialogue driven romantic comedy. Anyway, things take a funny turn when Cynthia notices the print of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. Bill explains the picture to Cynthia but she seems to go into a trance and hears someone say, “I order you in the name of all evil spirits to appear in your ghoul form.” Of course this isn’t the first time ghoul and vampire have been conflated and she sprouts fangs and tries to bite Bill.

first bite

Bill fights her off and then picks up a floor lamp and brains her with it (or brains a stand-in dummy at least). She falls dead to the floor, in a puddle of blood. He quickly dresses, gets a bag, somehow stuffs her in it and then carries her down steep stairs to the gardens below his townhouse and buries her body. He then goes back up and cleans up the blood before seeing Cynthia in bed. He gets a book out and reads that to kill a vampire one must impale or rip the heart out. He goes to the garden and digs up the bag – now empty.

going for the throat

During his sojourn to the garden we see a flashback to the pair meeting in a ruined castle – though they formally call each other by surname. He declares his love for her but she cannot reciprocate, she says, because she wont condemn him to the Hell she lives in and states that she is marked by a stigma. When he won’t take no for an answer she bears fangs and bites him – the scene hidden by a big graphic blood splat! As the film returns to him in the garden we don’t know if this is something that has happened or not.

Guillermo Méndez as Harry

Anyway, Bill gets back to his living room and gives his employee Harry (Guillermo Méndez) a ring. He asks Harry to investigate Cynthia. Cynthia comes in to the room, notices something wrong with Bill and suggests breakfast. Bill doesn’t eat (bar an egg, which he claims traditionally breaks spells) and then Cynthia – in another dialogue heavy moment – suggests that Bill’s wife is probably cheating on him. Bill gets a call back from Harry – Cynthia Baird died on April 17th 1852 and was connected to his namesake Bill Moore.

Bill's fangs

So far you might think that she is a vampire and Bill the descendent of her lover/victim. However he is looking at the Goya and goes into a trance himself where it is suggested he revert back to his true nature. He sprouts fangs and attacks her, biting her until she repeatedly brains him. She goes off to get dressed but, on her way out of the place, he grabs her ankle – his memory disturbed (he can’t remember the town house and is convinced he lived on the street where she now lives and the original Cynthia died). The two try to puzzle out what is happening – convincing themselves that they are both vampires (he even decides his wife’s illness and anaemia was his fault). But can it be that simple?

bite marks

The film drags just a little but speeds up when they reach the point I described above. I really don’t want to spoil the story by revealing what apparently is going on but, although the film’s pace improved its storytelling took a dive off the high board of disbelief leaving us scratching our heads, wondering how the filmmakers ever thought that the story would pass muster. It’s a shame because they could have done some interesting things but they needed to cut down on the banter and pitch in with more vampiric lore. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Interesting Shorts: The Black Vampyre: A Legend of Saint Domingo

Recently I was contacted by blog reader Cappy who asked me who the first American vampire was (in a literary sense). I wasn’t 100% sure, but the earliest story I could think of was Ken’s Mystery by Julian Hawthorne (1883) – for details of this story please see my reference volume The Media Vampire.

Cappy replied recently, having done some research and discovering the volume The Best Vampire Stories 1800-1849: A Classic Vampire Anthology, edited by Andrew Barger. In it is the story The Black Vampyre: A Legend of Saint Domingo. Credited to Uriah Derick D’Arcy it was published in 1819 and Barger makes the case – in an introductory piece – that the author was actually Robert C Sands. The story was republished, via a friend of the Sands’ estate, in 1844 within the Knickerboker magazine.

It is clear that the author was aware of Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale as according to Barger, the introduction mentions “The White Vampyre,” in reference to Polidori’s story. Unfortunately the original introduction, coda poem and mention of the vampire as a symbol of capitalism, which are all mentioned in Barger’s introduction, are stripped out of Barger’s volume. He does keep the stanzas from Byron’s the Giaour in place, and there is a line at the end of the substantive story that deliberately apes the last line of Polidori’s story.

Taking it at face value the story itself is a bit of a mess, indeed it seems to be more an introduction to a longer tale that never was than its own standalone story. It introduces us to a character, Mr Anthony Gibbons, through his ancestors. This ancestor, who is the primary character of this story, is never referred to by name but is one of a group of slaves taken from Guinea to St Domingo. All the slaves died, shortly after arrival, of yaws, bar one who was not deemed fit for work; and so the plantation owner, Mr Personne, “charitably knocked out his brains; and the body was thrown into the ocean.” The African resurrected – now in this scene the moon is described as “shining bright” but a direct causation between moon and vampiric resurrection is not specifically mentioned and later vampyres are dying and resurrecting under their own steam in a subterranean cavern.

Eventually, having killed him several times (and rising, at one point, “without bending a joint” in a moment of imagery that pre-dates Nosferatu), Mr Personne decides to cremate the African but ends on the pyre himself. Badly burnt, no more notice is taken of the slave, but when he gets back home he discovers that his infant son has been killed or is missing (with only skin, nails and hair in the boy’s cot). This kills Mr Personne.

Mrs Personne then remarried twice, seeing both these husbands to their graves. After the third husband passed away she meets an African Prince (yes, the very same African who was brought over as a slave) and his page, a European boy named Zembo (who we discover is actually her lost son). She is wooed by the Prince and then marries him, despite the remonstrations of the family chaplain. Now remember, this is a story from 1819 and so, to many reading the story, the idea of an interracial marriage would be shocking.

After their wedding he takes his wife, in a daze, to her family graveyard. He digs up the corpse of one of her sons. The body is somehow still fresh and “bending over the corse; he scooped out the heart, with his long and polished nails”. He squeezes blood into a chalice, mixes it with grave dirt and forces her to drink it whilst swearing not to reveal the rite she has been forced into. Having witnessed the dead being summoned from their graves, she passed out and woke again at midnight the next night and, “by a certain carnivorous craving in her maw, and by putting this and that together, she found she was a—vampyre!!!”

She causes her first husband to rise as a vampire. We see husband two and three (raised by the Prince) fight a duel and then be subsequently staked by the Prince and Zembo. Personne and his wife are then told to head for Europe but first they go to a cavern filled with vampyres and human slaves. There follows a long passage of a speech that speaks of vampirism and has the following lovely section, “immortal bloodsuckers! –To ourselves—whether Gouls,—or Afrits,—or Vampyres;—Vroucolochas,—Vardoulachos,—or Broucolokas; —To ourselves—the terror of the living and of the dead, and the participants of the nature of both,” This shows a lovely range of various names for the restless dead had transported over to the US.

The meeting moved on to a call for emancipation, which Barger suggests makes it the earliest known anti-slavery story. We discover (as well as claiming Prometheus as the first vampyre) that the only way to kill a vampire is by stake or through a vial of liquid that will cure the vampyre and comes directly from the Obeah mysteries. Attacked by soldiers (who are instructed in how to kill vampyres by Zembo) we see the slaves sneak from the cavern and all the vampyres killed bar the Personnes and Zembo, who use the liquid to become human again. Mr Personne ends up some sixteen years younger than his wife (who doesn’t mind the attentions of a younger man).

However, Mrs Personne is pregnant by the Prince and the child is both a “mulatto” (an archaic term, which is now offensive, for a person of mixed race) and of “Vampyrish propensities”. Having used all the liquid they cannot cure him of that and it is from his line Anthony Gibbons will be born – though his story remains hidden.

This story then is one of many a first and some we have already mentioned. It is the first American vampire story I am aware of, it is the first instance of a black vampire, it is apparently the first story to argue universal emancipation, it is the first story to suggest a definitive cure for the vampire (rather than destruction) and it is the second published English language vampire story. As such I was rather cynical about the authenticity of the story but whilst an online search didn’t reveal a facsimile of the original pamphlet reproduced online (though I did find one of the 1844 printing) it did reveal the title and author (D’arcy) referred to in journals from 1819.