Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost feels quite ghostly itself, doomed to walk the earth through its many adaptations. There have been at least 14 television versions, the most recent in 2021, and it has not been long since cinemagoers encountered director Yann Samuell’s French-Belgian version, Le Fantôme de Canterville (2016).
Yet Oscar Wilde’s comic ghost story of 1887 was something of a late developer in this respect. While there was a comic opera in 1905 (Das Gespenst von Matschatsch) and a Spanish play in 1929 (El Fantasma de Canterville), no film version appeared until MGM’s loosely-adapted 1944 production.
