The Ritual. Image courtesy of Netflix.
I have now watched enough horror movies to know the basic contours of the genre.
1. Sympathetic characters move into a spooky house and get haunted by demons or ghosts.
2. The Devil takes over someone’s body or house.
3. Someone releases a pathogen that turns everyone into zombies. Chaos ensues.
4. A killer (supernatural or otherwise) stalks their prey basically at random.
5. Creature feature.
6. Gothic horror, where (spoiler!) the real demon is inside our own minds the whole time.
7. Dracula.
A lot of the fun of the horror genre is the skill with which these well-traveled premises are executed. We know what they are. They are well-established. But if you’re good at the craft, you can still imbue a pretty vanilla haunted house story with some truly great moments (See: The Haunting of Hill House; The Conjuring franchise).
But the moments that I live for as a horror fan are when a filmmaker comes up with some truly off-the-wall shit. They aren’t trying to re-invent the jump scare. They are trying to come up with something really crazy that you haven’t seen before.
I appreciate The Ritual for going there. It’s about a couple of middle-aged guy friends who go camping every year – their ritual. There’s a bit of unnecessary backstory involving a liquor store robbery and some lingering guilt, but it’s basically just an excuse to get some beer bellied dudes out in a medieval forest so they can start encountering increasingly disturbing evidence of pagan rituals. One by one, they are picked off. OK, that’s pretty boilerplate. We might even mistake it for a combination of #4 and #5 above.
But the ending of this film comes way out of left field. It turns out our camping party have stumbled upon some weird village-dwellers who still worship a Nordic God and make sacrifices to it. And then this God shows up in a truly bewildering form. You just don’t see creature designs like that very often, outside of maybe Japan. And for me that was so refreshing, so different from the tropes we are used to seeing in horror films, that it really endeared this film to me. Is it a great film? Not really. But it’s wild ending dares to be different and I gotta give it mad props for that.