From the Thousand and One Nights to the Modern Undead

The ghul appears repeatedly across the Thousand and One Nights, most often as a wilderness threat encountered by travellers rather than an urban menace, and this collection was the primary conduit through which the figure reached European readers once Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French translation began circulating widely. English horror and fantasy fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressively detached the ghoul from its Arabian desert setting and jinn classification, recasting it as a generic grave-dwelling, corpse-eating creature more closely aligned with the European revenant and, later, with the modern zombie of film, a transformation with no clear single point of origin but well documented across the development of English-language weird fiction.

Comparative folklore treats this trajectory as a case study in how a culturally specific supernatural predator can be stripped of its original theological context, in this instance its place within the Islamic understanding of the unseen world and jinn, while its name and basic predatory function are retained and repurposed for an audience with no connection to the source tradition, a pattern that recurs across several entries in this class of folklore figures once they cross into globally circulated popular fiction.