Ghoul: Ghoul - All Episodes

September 7, 2018 10:43 AM - Season 1 (Full Season)

Ghoul is an Indian horror web television miniseries based on the Arab folklore monster ghoul, and the second Netflix original from India. The story is set in India in a dystopian future and deals with the interrogation of a dreaded terrorist Ali Saeed in a secret government facility and the series of horrifying and supernatural events which follow.
posted by DirtyOldTown (4 comments total)

Terrific female lead, both in terms of the written character and the actor portraying her.

I went back and watched the first Paranormal Activity not long ago and was surprised to see that it had a clear thematic through I'd all but missed the first time through: that as younger generations shrug off the legacies and spirituality of previous generations, they are willfully taking a risk. This film is sort of an Indian take on the same theme, with the oppressive totalitarian state's shirking of its people's faiths and cultures bringing about a pretty brutal comeuppance.

A person doesn't have to necessarily share the fear of letting go of spirituality to still feel the lesson resonate, to still feel the unease and fear that comes from assuming we know more than our elders but knowing we might be horribly, horribly wrong in some ways.

This is shot in a very filmic style, as you would expect from Blumhouse.

It's not an earth-shattering, best-of-genre kind of treat, but given the minimal buy-in (just three episodes) and the under-the-radar/low expectations appearance of it on Netflix, and it's a really enjoyable little find. It certainly bodes well to see Western and Indian filmmakers collaborating to bring non-Western myths/stories to the screen, but with Hollywood-level production values.

I'd also like to point out that this series has some of the best dubbing you could ever hope to see. This is not like in Dark, where the German actors were replaced with low rent English-speaking randos with underwhelming dramatic skills and a curiously flat lack of ambient noise. The English audio track seemingly features the very same actors doing their lines over again in English with their natural, Hindi accents alongside all of the original music, room tone, and sound effects. The translation was approached with care and even matches up pretty much exactly with the English subtitles.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:55 PM on September 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

Ooo thanks for the recc, I'm definitely gonna check this out!
posted by smoke at 7:58 PM on September 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

It felt really familiar for some reason, in a good way, and the performances were all great. The complex was good and claustrophobic.

I watched with the original audio with English subtitles and there were quite a few times where they actually did speak English. It was interesting to see, like a little nod that they all were bilingual. It reminded me of when I went down a Malaysian standup comedy binge because of netflix recommendations. They also intermixed English with their own languages with ease.

The dystopia felt very 1984/Fahrenheit 451 to me and I wonder how much of it is a British writer/director sort of "touring" indigenous belief for scares. The cast is legit and there are a lot of local producers listed but the driving force is a Brit director and American film company.
posted by M Edward at 9:46 PM on September 7, 2018

I’m halfway through episode 1 and intrigued! Thanks for the rec.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:36 AM on October 4, 2018