If you have read any comic written by Scott Snyder, you know he’s about horror and history, going all the way back to his Vertigo title American Vampire. You always got the sense that Snyder wants to be the comics equivalent of Stephen King, someone who has always been interested the lives of ordinary people who are eventually thrown into ferocious terror. It’s a formula that has been told time and time, and thus the quality depending on the execution of the story, so does Night of the Ghoul succeed with this approach?
Reuniting with one of his artistic collaborators from Batman: The Black Mirror, Francesco Francavilla, Snyder tells the story of Forest Inman, a horror film obsessive who digitizes old films. After stumbling across a seemingly forgotten canister of footage, which are the remnants of the lost classic “Night of the Ghoul”, Forest and his son Orson visit a retirement facility to meet the supposed director T.F. Merrit, who tells them that his film has more truth than they hope to expect.
The premise has ingredients of what you want from a Scott Snyder comic, from his aforementioned tropes to reuniting with Francavilla, who also made a name for himself on another horror title, Afterlife with Archie. The story also taps into an important period of horror cinema in the 1930s, where the Universal Monsters such as Frankenstein and Dracula thrived. Originally published online in six issues as a ComiXology Original (and eventually physically released as three oversized issues by Dark Horse), it becomes apparent that Snyder is overly serving the premise, which becomes the main fault of the series.
Along with the present-day narrative of Forest and Orson visiting the former director that leads to a night of horrors, the book contrasts with the narrative of the movie “Night of the Ghoul”, which is revealed to be autobiographical to T.F. Merrit, recounting how his father became one with the eponymous Ghoul after his time of World War I. Considering the emotional anchor that is the flawed father-son relationship that you believe between Forest and Orson, the simplicity of that narrative gets interrupted by the other narrative, which goes into great length about this history of the Ghoul, as well as the cult that worships it.
With the amount of density going on, partly contributed to Snyder’s heavy dose of dialogue, it takes a while for the horror to really sink in, no matter what striking imagery that Francavilla illustrates, including burn victim T.F. Merrit, who looks very similar to the Crypt-Keeper. Halfway through the series, the demonic horror starts to creep in, allowing Francavilla to flex his muscles through his colored art, which also experiments with cinematic tricks to visualize the two time frames.
As the first of an upcoming series of monster comics by Scott Snyder and Francesco Francavilla, Night of the Ghoul is a disappointing start that prioritizes info-dumps over scares.
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