“Oh, this is awful in almost every conceivable way.”

ZombieDog’s rating: Loki’s dream

ZombieDog’s review: Watching movies for me is really about the vibe that each movie produces. It does take a couple years for me to think that a movie has achieved cult status, and I have to watch it a few times to find out the real vibe. For me it’s not about the budget or the acting — it’s about if it fits into a certain mood I may be experiencing. Without a doubt today’s movie checks a lot of those boxes.

The Ritual is a 2017 horror movie that absolutely steals a bunch of stuff from other movies such as Blair Witch, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and maybe a little bit of The Thing. Granted, it’s all thrown into a blender where it all becomes indistinguishable except for elements of each. This is an independent film, most likely low-budget, and what you get with that is people being insanely creative. Walking around the forest for 50% of your film saves money, after all. It also provides an opportunity to develop a cool idea and is creepy from the get-go.

The Ritual starts off with a group of friends, and one of them gets brutally murdered in a crime gone wrong. Flash-forward a year, and the survivors decide to honor their fallen friend by embarking on the adventure they agreed on before the tragedy.

It’s simple enough, and everything is going fine until one of the group slips into a hole and hurts his ankle. The situation serious but not life-threatening, the group figures that the best way to continue is to go back to the lodge by the shortest means available.

Unfortunately, this means going through the scary forest.

Filmed in the Carpathian Mountains, a mountain range that covers eight countries, the viewer deftly gets the sense of isolation and remoteness, which totally works for the movie. A few hours after they enter the forest, they start to see small totems hanging from trees (à la Blair Witch) in the middle of nowhere. Their worries really set in a few minutes later when they also discover a freshly killed elk hanging from trees ten feet off the ground, still bleeding.

This is where the hand of a patient director shows itself. All movies are made to be sold, and I think a lot of directors want to show the goods early on to keep their viewers entertained. If you take the time to tell a story with some background, character development, and continue on building that eerie atmosphere it will pay off. This definitely is slow, though.

Pushing into the forest, the group finds evidence of human occupation… at least at some point. They spend the night in a dilapidated shack, and events grow extremely disturbing, to say the least. Once again, our director uses patience and doesn’t show the monster.

I can’t tell you how awesome this is. There’s nothing wrong with building tension and slowly pulling us into this movie’s vision. In fact, I wish more movies did this. When you give away the goods too soon it takes all the fun out of a movie. What we are left with is a spectacle that we’re just watching till the end. The best movies keep us interested, the best movies keep us guessing, and even the best movies can leave us without answers. All of these aspects constitute the art of directing and visual storytelling.

As the characters progress further into the forest, some of them start to disappear and it becomes more and more clear that they are not alone. Their fears are confirmed when they stumble onto a small compound with about 30 people who quickly grab them. The beauty here is that we still aren’t getting any answers and there are tiny little details for us to think about everywhere in the frame.

The real reward is when the monster finally shows up. It’s original, it’s menacing, and it immediately holds our attention. The monster alone is worth watching this movie for there’s just something kind of cool about innovative monster design. Anybody can make up some kind of animal with teeth or huge muscles. A little bit of a spoiler here, there is some mythology behind the monster, and the movie is respectful of this mythology.

As I said earlier, there’s no doubt that this movie takes ideas from other establish monster movies. I look at those ideas though as a kind of building blocks. Storms are scary, isolated sheds are scary, strange noises in the woods are scary. There’s nothing wrong with using any of these, in fact I think that The Ritual uses them with great expertise. It’s unique, and you really can’t ask much more than that.

Horror films are notoriously cheap and easy to make, which unfortunately means we have to sit through a lot of crap. I’ve never been particularly drawn to horror, but I like when I see that effort is being made. Honestly the past decade has been pretty productive in the terms of unique horror tropes. I think movies like The Void, Werewolves Within, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe are prime examples of the true creativity happening within the genre.

I have watched The Ritual several times, and it’s held up each time. Yes, there are some overused tropes, although I’d be hard-pressed to say that there’s any way around that. I wouldn’t put this movie on the same level as The Thing or American Werewolf in London, however I would definitely put it on a Halloween movie watch list. It deserves to be there, and it has the right level of creepiness for the season.