Writer: Scott Snyder / Penciller & Colour Artist: Francesco Francavilla / Letterer: Andword Design / Best Jackett Press Team Editors: Will Dennis, Tyler Jennes / Graphic Design: Emma Price / Dark Horse Editors: Daniel Chabon, Chuck Howitt-Lease, Misha Gehr / Designer: Patrick Satterfield / Digital Art Technician: Jason Rickerd
Collects: Night Of The Ghoul #1- #3 / Dark Horse Comics / TP
Review by Paul Dunne
Review Date 13th July (Released: 5th July 2023)
The Pitch: A dazzling work of horror, intercutting between the present-day narrative and the story of a lost horror film. Director T.F. Merrit has spent decades confined in a retirement facility, which he claims is run by the Order of the Fly, a cult organization from his very own movie. And as the night goes on, Forest Inmann and his son Orson find themselves falling deeper into his cinematic nightmare. The writer and artist behind Batman: The Black Mirror reunite to shed light on a celluloid artifact once thought forever missing, perhaps with good reason…
Movies and comics. People love to connect the mediums. It's easy to see why. One frame of film, a moment held in time, looks a lot like one comic panel. They're both visual mediums... but honestly, that's where the similarities end. Film conveys time passing, but comics must convince you that time has passed. Film can show you movement. Comics can only suggest it. I was trying to convey to a friend what a strange medium it is. One that you read and use imagination for like a novel, yet look at like a film, yet that is essentially motionless, apart from those page turns... But one place the mediums do connect, especially now, is the fact that they're art that eats itself. Both film and comics consume and regurgitate their history for the audience. I say this as neither positive nor negative, merely as a simple fact. But sometimes... sometimes the art EATS you.
The strange medium at work
Consumption is at the black heart of Night of The Ghoul. It eats both cinema and comics. The title feels like it’s been on a thousand old horror films (it hasn't, but there's an Ed Wood movie of nearly the same name). Its incidents have shades of Jacques Touneur and Alien. It features an ancient evil that enters through the mouth and lies in wait, inside a host. It's the comic that embodies the term 'creepy crawly' and runs with it on many black legs. Ghoul features many unsettling characters and ideas. But perhaps the most unsettling is that art imitates life. Even if that life is horrific and monstrous. The book exploits the ick factor we feel from old people, from cults, and secret societies. Merrit is a hideous, decaying creation At first, we have sympathy for him, but the disgust remains. And he's not the only one. Inmann seems off, weird, in the way that American suburbanites always seem like they're hiding bodies in the basement. Even his son is hiding something. Everyone in the book seems to have a monster inside.
The sinister, steady pace.
But what's most interesting about it is the way the story is told. The film at the center of the plot informs the present-day story. Vast chunks of the book are an old man, infirm, stuck in a bed, telling a story to another man. It should be dull... it's anything but. It moves at a sinister but steady pace, with energetic bursts of weirdness punctuating the gloomy, gothic feel... before becoming a psychedelic trip to a garden of unearthly delights for a spell. Trippy, too is its use of the film as a device, then the making of that film as a further layer of the horror. Old wounds are healed in Night of The Ghoul. And some new ones carved into – and under - the skin of its protagonists. Obsessiveness is the key that opens the door to the horrors of Night of The Ghoul, and you can't help but feel seen as a movie fan. We all want that extended cut of a film, the rest of The Magnificent Ambersons to be restored, the director's cut of this or that... It's the wanting to know that gets you. Most of all, Night of The Ghoul does what all good horror should do... it unsettles.
Where fingernails scrape on old wooden doors.
Snyder's digital first comics are showing what he can do within genre and also just how skilled he is at this genre. Horror has tinged so much of his work. Look at characters like Dr. Death from his Batman run. The Court of Owls... both with their roots in horror. Not to mention Nocterra and We Have Demons. Snyder's subconscious is a place where fingernails scrape the wood of cellar doors and things move out there in the dark, just in your peripheral vision. He gives a thick comic (in size, not intellect), making sure you get your money's worth in fear. Francavilla has inherited the mantle of all those artists who toiled away spreading the ten-cent plague in books like Creepy and Weird. Is pages ooze an intoxicating, nauseating colour that makes your stomach churn and your head swim. His images are not about the use of light, but the absence of it. He likes inky blacks and burning reds and the stark contrast they create. There's a nostalgic feel to his art, which is why he is so perfect for the dearly departed Afterlife With Archie, which one has to sadly assume won't be back from dead anytime soon. His splashes are big pages with just the right dose of creep. Andworld's letters convey the horrid voices of creepy old men whose throats have burned, juxtaposing them with resonant tones of all-American heroes who will be shattered by the terrible things they're going to see. A masterful horror, one we've been waiting for, out there in the dark.
Night of The Ghoul TP is available at your local comic shop now.
