What’s The Deal With ‘The Ritual’ Monster?

SPOILERS ahead for the ending of The Ritual. This is a very good movie that deserves to be seen with minimal spoilers, so GO WATCH IT.

Last Friday, Netflix premiered the brand new horror movie The Ritual. It’s the story of four longtime friends from Britain whose annual guys’ trip takes them hiking through the hills of Sweden. When they attempt to take a shortcut through the woods, though, they encounter a strange cabin and an even stranger headless idol, and suddenly, all the guys’ fears, regrets, and tragic nightmares come bubbling up to the surface, and they all appear to be in various stages of losing it. And oh, by the way, there appears to be a gigantic monster lurking in the woods around them.

Did we say spoilers, by the way? Really, don’t read past this point if you want to come into the movie totally clean, which we highly recommend.

Okay, moving on! As I mentioned in my review of the film, The Ritual very effectively borrows from a great many horror sources:

• The lead character undergoes a traumatic real-world event in the opening 15 minutes before spending the bulk of the film on some kind of getaway … where his psychic scars suddenly get stacked up against some horrible monsters. This kind of plot device has been used in countless movies, from The Descent to The Strangers to Dead Calm to The Howling.
• The very simple but very effective signs of life and intelligence in the forest as an unsettling factor was used perhaps best in The Blair Witch Project.
• The idea of a monster whose boundaries are the woods and who can’t venture beyond them has been played with in countless movies, most recently films like The Village and The Witch.

And then there’s the issue of that monster. The creature lurking in the woods is shrouded in near-total darkness for the bulk of the movie — another tried and true practice of the horror genre. The glimpses we see are terrifying and tantalizing at once. In particular, when the lead character, Luke (Rafe Spall), peers out into the woods and sees what look like hands gripping a tree.

When The Ritual monster is revealed in full in the film’s final act, we also learn about the society of woods people who worship/cower in fear of it. As had been already suggested by the idol they found in the cabin — made up of sticks, but without a head, and clutching a pair of severed antlers — the monster is a kind of part-tree (it’s freaking gigantic, tall and spindly, like a swifter and more menacing Treebeard), part-deer, and part-human. That third part will be what haunts your nightmares, as it’s essentially a giant tree monster with human arms growing out of its head. Sleep tight, babes.

As explained by the acolytes/woods people, the creature is an ancient god, one of the Jötunn. What is a Jötunn, you ask? Great question! Grab a candy from the candy bowl. The Jötunn are contrasted with the gods in Norse mythology. There are dwarves and elves and trolls, and then kind of adjacent to the trolls are the Jötunn. They’re giants. If you remember the original Thor film in the Marvel universe, Odin wages war against the Frost Giants, who hail from Jotunheim. Loki is the bastard spawn of those creatures.

So that’s the Norse origin of the creature. But of course, this is a horror movie, not a Norse mythology class. Director David Bruckner combines all sorts of influences, from The Wicker Man to Cabin in the Woods to bear on this terrifying and well-made little film. But if you’re wondering where anyone could have possibly come up with a monster so grotesque, as always, blame Loki.

Where to stream The Ritual