Night of the Ghouls, I like to think that even as a child I would have opined, is a bit silly. It does show improvement over some of Ed Wood’s other films and the plot is really no more harebrained than some movies I did watch as a kid. I’ve been trying to figure Wood out. He was apparently incompetent, but he had no formal training and that could explain things a bit. He was also creative. This film is broadly a sequel to the worse Bride of the Monster. Although only a couple of characters appear in both films, there is quite a bit of reference to the earlier story. There was a mad scientist who made monsters. The house burned down (actually an atomic explosion in the former), but someone—no-one knows who—rebuilt on the same location.
In a typically convoluted Wood plot (he wrote as well as directed the film), a bogus necromancer (who is actually, without knowing it, a really powerful necromancer) bilks clients out of their money by raising their dead loved ones for a few minutes. He keeps the police and others away by having his young female assistant pretend to be a ghost outside the house. But then she runs into an actual vampiric ghost who’s killing people who wander onto the property. The police eventually decide to investigate and prove themselves as incompetent as the writing for the film. They do manage to put an end to the fraudulent seances but it’s up to the real raised dead to put an end to Dr. Acula and his assistant. At least there’s no atomic explosion at the finish.
The film, in Wood style, is black-and-white and the props are cheap and not really convincing. A bit of the movie seems to have been intentional comic relief. It doesn’t really work as a horror film because there’s nothing really scary about it. Wood was a lifelong fan of horror movies, but fandom doesn’t always equal the ability to replicate the object of desire. There are several possible horror atmospheres—Poe horror is quite different from Lovecraft horror, for example. Wood seems to have been unable to strike a vein, however, that was close to an authentic horror feel. The Scooby-Dooesque role of the necromancer doesn’t really help, I’m afraid. Still, for fans this is vintage Ed Wood work. I can’t claim to have figured him out, but if you’ve a hankering for a bad movie, this isn’t a horrible choice.
