It is the roaring 20’s and Billy (Stewart Bevan) is having a party. Everyone is dancing and drinking champagne. During the festivities, Daphne (Veronica Carlson), a spoiled and tenacious young woman, goads Billy and another guest, Geoffrey (Ian McCulloch) into having a road race to Land’s End, a destination approximately two hundred miles away. Daphne maneuvers the situation where she is driving Billy’s souped-up roadster with Billy as passenger and Geoffrey is driving his car with Billy’s sister Angela (Alexandra Bastedo) as passenger.
The two cars take off with Daphne in the lead. Eventually Geoffrey manages to pass her. When Angela feels sick, Geoffrey is forced to pull over. At that point Daphne and Billy race ahead and leave the other two behind. Eventually Daphne and Billy become lost in a thick fog. Then they find that the car is out of gas. Billy heads off, with an empty gas can, to look for a gas station.
After a while Daphne decides to wander off on her own looking for Billy. She finds a mansion in the fog but is waylaid by the gardener, Tom Rawlings (John Hurt). She eventually manages to escape his clutches and runs to the house where she meets Doctor Lawrence (Peter Cushing), the owner of the mansion, and his housekeeper, and Indian named Ayah (Gwen Watford).
As Daphne is entertained, Tom returns to the car. Billy has returned and is waiting for Daphne. Tom kills him by pushing him and his car over a cliff. Daphne, now stuck in the house, is offered as a sacrifice to something the lives in the attic of the mansion. Something that, once human, now craves the flesh of other humans.
“The Ghoul” AKA "Night of the Ghoul" AKA "The Thing in the Attic" was released in 1975 and was directed by Freddie Francis. It is a British horror film produced by Tyburn Film Productions Limited.
Performances by Cushing and Hurt are good. They both, as well as Watford, portray a quasi-family that is held together by a dark secret that over the years has made all of them slightly mad. The insanity doesn’t stop at the attic door, it permeates throughout the house. Even the mansion itself feels a bit psychotic.
There is a sort of jump scare in the very beginning of the film. After that the movie was a little bland, and it took a while to get going, but the longer I watched, the better it got. There is a Hammer-esque vibe and look to the film that adds some spooky atmosphere. There isn’t as much blood and gore as you would see in the standard slasher films that began cropping up at the time but there is some.
The photograph of Dr. Lawrence's wife is a photograph of Peter Cushing's own wife.