The Ghoul: Voyage of a Word and an Idea

Countless are the words appropriated by English and twisted to suit the language throughout the ages. “Ghoul,” one of the most elusive and often used in horror, is one of these. From origins in Arabic hinting at a specific kind of spirit—a demon or “Jinn” prone to corpse-eating—today the word stands in modern dictionaries, like the American Heritage Dictionary, as a descriptor of the following:

Ghoul:

1. One who delights in the revolting, morbid, or loathsome.
2. A grave robber.
3. An evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore believed to plunder graves and feed on corpses.

Interestingly, it is the word’s great flexibility that continues to endear it to the weird, artists and admirers alike. Unlike zombies or vampires, for instance, the name does not hint at a single creature popularly recognizable to most people. This oddity remains, despite its use as a stand in for the monstrosities noted above, and in the face of its ability to conjure up unpleasant features: decadence, evil, and ghastly acts in an often charnel environment (harkening back to the corpse-eating connotations of the Arabic meaning).

Literature from the last two centuries teems with ghouls. HG Wells’ Morlocks in his novel The Time Machine have been considered ghouls. Not surprisingly, HP Lovecraft made one of the earliest efforts to consciously turn the ghoul into a specific type of uncanny being. And that he did, as in the eerie role played by these dog-like monsters as artistic subjects in his tale “Pickman’s Model.” The ghouls appear again as an unwholesome race in his Dreamlands, this time with more positive connotations, and an entire culture or way of life in the dreamy world traversed by Randolph Carter. Moving onward through time and supernatural literature, ghoul has been applied to Richard Matheson’s epic novel I Am Legend, concerning Robert Neville’s battle against the monsters and insanity in a world where he is the last survivor. This instance is an excellent example of the word’s malleability, since the creatures here are ostensibly vampires. Finally, in Brian Keene’s recent novel Ghoul, the thing rebels against its own nature as carrion-eater and becomes a nastier threat, confronting a young boy on the edge of manhood in a modernized coming of age story.

 
So far, so good. It isn’t difficult to observer the word’s strength and lasting appeal lies in its ability to spur innovation—in both defined instances like Lovecraft’s, and in others like Matheson’s, where purely ghoulish aspects are left more to the imagination. Also, the ghoul—as a cannibal or otherwise—became thoroughly connected to the consumption of flesh. This makes the hellish thing an active terror or part of an underground ‘ecosystem’ man is not meant to see, depending on the ghoul’s taste and habits. Yet again, it helps connect the word back through time to its archaic Arab roots, as the corpse-devouring aspects of the Jinn are easily transferable to any modern beasties with a hunger for flesh.

As one might expect, this lust allows the ghoul to intersect with another well defined cohort in the realm of horror covered by newer modes of art. In film, the undead revenants of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead were immediately labeled ghouls, a shotgun marriage sticking ghoul with zombie in countless instances ever since. At first glance, this may seem a natural and uninteresting development, except for etymology. And yet, there is something more: hitching ghoul to zombie is not just another chain of interchangeable words, but actually jerks the very idea of ghoul in a new, specified direction.

Where ghoul formerly clung to flesh-consuming creatures, it now becomes mixed up with nightmarish things often holding no remarkable features, except for being undead. Wells’ Morlocks, Lovecraft’s canine-like ghouls, and Matheson’s vampiric ghouls not only have a taste for flesh and blood in common, but hold identifiable monstrous traits distinguishing them from human beings. Not so in the case of zombies. Regardless of cause, the zombie since Romero is a corpse raised after death, with no new abilities (in fact, often a deterioration of physical and mental strength) or significant changes in appearance apart from natural decay. While it’s debatable whether or not the ghoulish creatures by Wells, Lovecraft, and Matheson are “alive” in the sense we understand, the reanimated zombie is certainly dead. Thus, when correlated with zombies, ghouls became not just hungry for death and flesh, but lifeless, decaying things themselves. Further, once paired with zombies, the idea of the ghoul lost some of the edge and cunning granted by Lovecraft and Matheson. Instead, it partook in the imbecile malevolence of the zombie which, with some exceptions, usually functions on base instinct, and certainly creates no culture like the Pickman ghouls.

Overall, ghouls have come and gone as both separate, independent entities, and as mere shadows cast by hungry brutes called zombies, vampires, or Morlocks. Even with focused attempts to conjure up a monster deemed “ghoul” with detailed features, as Lovecraft attempted, the term continues to bounce around. However, the fragmentary idea of the ghoul as a morbid being with unnatural features and a hunger for viscera—lively or carrion—lingers. The idea represented by the word seems to be like an amoeba, capable of worming into more definite creatures of horror, but retaining a separate existence. In this sense, “ghoul” is not just a slavish synonym for zombie, vampire, or other tangible monstrosities. Rather, it seems an overarching term for a class of freakish, flesh-hungry things, of which zombies, vampires, and others are mere sub-castes.

-Grim Blogger