Ghouls Underground

In a previous blog I focused on the figure of the ghoul in a couple of horror films and discussed the origin of this flesh eating fiend in the mythological east. It is fair to say however than in more recent times the ghoul has become incorporated into a more western coterie of supernatural beings. The writer perhaps most responsible for the assimilation of the ghoul into the western gothic tradition is H.P. Lovecraft whose influence continues to shape much contemporary horror and fantasy.  It is in his 1927 story (published of course in Weird Tales) Pickman’s Model, that Lovecraft first discusses in any great detail the shadowy figure of the ghoul. There are several nods and winks to the ghoul in earlier Lovecraft stories such as The Rats in the Walls (1924) and The Outsider (1926) but it was not until he published his story about the shunned Salem Painter Robert Upton Pickman that explicitly discusses and describes the figure of the ghoul.

Whilst investigating the mysterious disappearance of the artist of such unsettling works as ‘Ghoul Feeding’, the narrator of this story discovers that Pickman has not been working from figures of his imagination but from real models he has discovered living in the subterranean tunnels in the sinister North End of town. Lovecraft’s description of the “dog-like features” of such creatures undoubtedly draws upon the post-Arabian Nights tradition of ghoul tales (such as Edward Lucas White’s Amina) but without explicit references to the East. Lovecraft’s vivid imagining of the ghoul was immediately influential on writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch who both published ghoul stories in the following decade. Bloch’s The Grinning Ghoul was published in Weird Tales in 1936 and as recounted in my previous blog, Ashton Smith’s description of a ghoul in The Nameless Offspring owes much to Lovecraft’s influence.

Lovecraft goes beyond mere description in Pickman’s Model and speculates on the possible origins of this sub-human beast. In one of Pickman’s secret works, ‘The Lesson’ a terrifying link to humankind is revealed as the painting depicts:

….a squatting circle of nameless doglike things in a churchyard teaching a child how to feed like themselves…I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly nonhuman and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!

In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath Lovecraft goes so far as to describe the eventual fate of Pickman to this strange evolutionary process. As the narrator reveals: “There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat the ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure”.

Both Pickman’s Model and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath establish a broad subterranean milieu for the ghoul allowing the flesh eating sub-human to roam beyond the confines of the graveyard. One of the most effective tales to develop this idea is Robert Barbour Johnson’s Far Below (1939), a story inspired by the description of one of Pickman’s paintings, Subway Accident.

Depicting an attack by a horde of ghouls on a crowd of commuters on the Boston underground, the painting illustrates the horrific potential of the wide-ranging ghoul suggested by Lovecraft. Barbour’s tale describes the activities of a covert police squad assigned to contain the activities of a race of ghouls discovered living in a stretch of New York’s subway system. Barbour’s tale brings the figure of the ghoul firmly into the modern metropolis of the twentieth century, mixing the traditional image of the Eastern ghoul with elements of traditional gothic and contemporary urban myths of strange creatures living ‘far below’ in the tunnels and sewers of our cities. This tale was adapted (somewhat half-heartedly it has to be said) as an episode of the TV series Monsters which aired in 1990. For a much more effective televisual tongue-in-cheek ghoulish tale, I would suggest you check out the Tales From the Crypt episode ‘Mournin’ Mess’ (1991).  Adapted from Graham Ingel’s classic EC strip, this tells the story of a bunch of corporate ghouls who take over the running of a municipal cemetery in order to save the local council a bit of money whilst ensuring a steady food supply of corpses drawn from the city’s homeless citizens.

There are further references to subterranean ghouls in the Amicus portmanteau horror film The Monster Club (1981). The final story features Stuart Whitman as a location-scouting movie director trapped in a village full of ghouls, helped to escape by the inn-keeper’s daughter Luna (Lesley Dunlop)  who turns out to be a ‘Humghoul’ (half-human, half-ghoul).  This segment contains some effective and haunting moments, particularly in the illustrated back-story that explains the coming of the ghouls to the village. The images of ghouls spotted ‘squatting behind tombstones’ or ‘gnawing on bones’ as they feed on the corpses of the dead neatly epitomizes all of the familiar characteristics of the gothic ghoul.There are some tantalising references made by Luna to underground feeding grounds of the city that Whitman hopes to return to. She talks longingly of ‘good feeding’ to be had on the underground railways of the city which seems a clear nod to Johnson’s Far Below  or perhaps even to the subterranean cannibals found living in the London tube network in Gary Sherman’s film underrated Death Line (1973). Hmmm, now there’s a film worth writing about….