Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

Starring Boris Karloff and featuring a plot derived from “The Cat and the Canary,” this British Gaumont production seems like an attempt to mimic the success of Universal’s monster series. It’s only half-way successful. Karloff’s ghoul, a combination of his mummy and Frankenstein’s monster, lacks the creepy charisma of the Universal fiends, and the production has some of the creakiness of a theatrical spook show. (Like so many early horror films, it was adapted from a stage play.) But in visual terms “The Ghoul” is just about in a class by itself. Shot by Gunther Krampf, who’d worked in Germany with the likes of Pabst, Wiene, and Murnau, the film looks both expressionistic and unfussy, deep shadows and strategically placed pools of light combining to create a velvety, charcoal look that in some ways anticipates film noir — the work of John Alton for instance. So often in these “old dark house” movies the interiors feel divorced from the fog-strewn exterior scenes: they’re afflicted with a squareness that stinks of the proscenium. But Krampf and director T. Hayes Hunter are careful to make their settings overlap. They use windows and filtered shadows to bring movement and visual interest indoors, creating the impression of a nighttime world that is continuous in both space and tone. Look for a very young Ralph Richardson giving what is probably the best performance in the picture.

Related:

• “The Ghoul” looks so good in part because the DVD was mastered from the original  nitrate camera negative, which was rediscovered in the ’80s. For many years the picture was believed to be lost. More here.
• A nice write-up of the movie.
• John Willard’s 1922 play “The Cat and the Canary” must be one of the most influential pop culture things of its era. A great many early horror films stole from either it or one of the many similar stage plays that followed in its wake. The 1927 movie version, directed by Paul Leni, inaugurated the Universal cycle of horror films.
• Though it doesn’t discuss “The Ghoul,” probably because the film was out of circulation for many years, Carlos Clarens’ “An Illustrated History of Horror and Science-Fiction Films” is one of the great books ever devoted to a single movie genre. Buyable here.