is it spooky? the ritual

the blair witch project but with british dudes

it’s halfway to halloween and i can’t stop watching horror movies. i also have put myself in self-imposed exile from letterboxd for the sake of my own sanity. if i see another film bro in a beanie give the substance two stars i’m going to drive my car through guitar center.

so instead, i’m going to review horror on substack! both movies + books, since i read a ton of horror and the goodreads app crashes my phone. btw, when i say “review” i mean the most low brow commentary you can possibly imagine. i’m calling this review segment “is it spooky?” because i want to discuss media purely in terms of scare factor. after all, that’s the best part of horror right? aside from the snacks you eat during the movies of course, which i’ll also report back on.

i hope you ghouls enjoy <3

p.s: there will be spoilers!

in honor of folk horror season, i decided to kick off my reviews with netflix original movie the ritual. it came out literal years ago (much like gollum, i live under a rock), but it’s always intrigued me!

the movie is about four friends (grumpy british dudes) who go on a hiking trip in the lush forests of sweden to grieve the loss of their friend rob, who was murdered by gas station robbers. (his name’s a bit ironic, innit?) as the chaps venture deeper into the woods, they get all kinds of creepy warnings that something sinister is watching them.

i love the blair witch project and woodland horror generally, so i went into the ritual with hopes as high as a tree one might be sacrificed on…

movie snacks

doordash sushi dinner consisting of spicy salmon roll, spicy kani roll, and one fancy crab roll with fuji apple, all washed town with a beach plum la croix. i forgot a side of spicy mayo so i’m living in hell.

the spookyverse

okay so, the atmosphere of this movie sacred me quite a lot, particularly in the beginning. i loved how the story began in a gas station with flouresent lighting (a nightmare of its own), and then dragged us deep into the pitch black woods. but given that the characters (a group of bickering british men) were there to honor their late friend who was just murdered in said gas station, neither the light nor the dark was ever a place of safety.

there was not much of a soundtrack, just a lot of silence which i think worked well. especially because the sub-plot of the film, in my opinion, was friends all having to sit in their grief together over someone they loved way more than they did each other. i would say this was a very “no frills” horror movie in terms of cinematography and overall vibe. if you’re looking for an aesthetically immsersive folk horror movie, i would recommend the witch or midsommar over the ritual.

the spookiness

admittedly i had to turn this movie off about a quarter of the way through and resume it in the morning because of how badly one scene freaked me out. so in terms of scare-factor, it started out pretty high.

after a long day of hiking, the grieving lads stumble upon an abandoned cabin. the cabin is pretty empty save for a wicker man-esque statue in the corner and a few dirty buckets. the main character luke, who witnessed the death of his friend in the gas station, keeps looking out the window into the pitch black woods and sees…exactly that. an endless sea of darkness that despite the forest’s desolate appearance, he knows full well he’s not alone. it scared me so much that i had to wolf down my salmon roll and go to bed.

(yes i love horror, yes i’m a total baby. we exist!!!)

come sunrise i resumed the movie, and it turns out the cabin scene ended up being pretty predictable as far as woodland horror goes. after one character dom (my type alert) finished crashing out over the statue and they all went to bed, the awake to find luke all scratched up from puncture wounds and other friend, phil, butt naked and praying to the statue in some kind of spirit-induced dream state.

from then on, we watch the friends bicker, freak out, get more lost because of their stereotypically masculine aversion to problem solving, and have one of their friends go missing. very blair witch vibes, except they soon find him hanging from a tree, human sacrifice style. this of course causes everyone to freak out even more and disagree on what to do. at this point, i became increasingly less invested in the film and the scare factor started to decline due to an onslaught of formulaic horror tropes. sure enough another friend dies, courtesy of the forest creature that’s been stalking them, and we’re down to our final two chaps: luke and dom. the men that, you guessed it, have the most beef with each other.

the next scene i’m going to describe is the last point in the movie that successfully gave me the creeps and perked my interest back up…before the somewhat abrupt ending tamped it back down.

eventually luke and dom make it to a small settlement they see in the distance and enter a small cabin in the hopes of finding help. what they come across instead is a goosebump-inducing eerie outline of a faceless woman in a black cloak and a fuck ass anna wintour bob sitting silently in front of the fire. luke and dom are then knocked unconscious, and when they wake up they’re prepped for sacrifice by the townspeople to please the ancient creature that’s been roaming around the woods.

the townspeople are easily the second scariest part of the film. they say very little, are eerily dressed, and have a passive wickedness about them. i really wanted to know more about them and how the town came to be. as they prep luke and dom for the most predictable human sacrifice in film history, we learn a bit about how the creature that’s been stalking our friends in the woods is an ancient entity (“moder”). i did some digging after the film and the creature is more generally known as a jötunn, originating from Norse mythology. it requires human sacrifice in exchange for the immortality of its worshippers. if there’s one takeaway from this film, it’s that jötunns stand on business.

is it spooky?

yes…until it’s not. sadly the ritual was not the bone-chilling folk horror flick that the first twenty five minutes lead me to believe it would be. the plot was far too predictable and the dialogue between friends was just redundant bickering that lacked substance or comic relief. i guess if you ever meet someone who has never seen any sort of woodland horror, or even monster horror films before, the ritual might be a decent option to recommend as an approachable foray into the genre.

i won’t completely butcher the ending in case any of you want to see it. but i would say that if you were drawn to the ritual for its dark cottagecore vibes, just watch (or re-watch) the witch instead. you still get to watch people bicker with british accents, but with much more delicious scares!

thanks for reading ghouls <3

-rachel elizz