About The Ritual
Directed by David Bruckner, The Ritual (2017) is the kind of psychological folk horror that drags grief into the woods and leaves it there to rot. Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, and Sam Troughton anchor a story about four UK mates who trek into the Swedish wilderness to honour a fallen friend – and promptly discover that the forest has its own memorial plans. When injury forces a shortcut “back to civilisation,” the route detours into pagan territory. The deeper they go, the thinner the friendship gets, until an ancient god and its adoring cult start trimming the group one by one. Grief, guilt, and godhood – served cold, under a canopy of bones.
Here’s a blood-red platter of movies like The Ritual to sink your monstrous teeth into.
15. It Lives Inside (2023)
Written and directed by Bishal Dutta, It Lives Inside threads supernatural terror through the needle of cultural identity. Megan Suri leads a stellar cast (Neeru Bajwa, Mohana Krishnan, Vik Sahay, Gage Marsh, Beatrice Kitsos, Betty Gabriel) in a story where assimilation has a body count. Sam, a first-generation Indian-American teen, keeps her heritage at arm’s length – until her estranged friend Tamira releases a Pishach, a demon that feeds on despair like it’s buffet night.
As the entity stalks the living and the lineage, Sam and her mother are forced into an uneasy alliance: protect the culture you wanted to ditch, or be devoured by it. The It Lives Inside finale – featuring Sam as a living vessel – lands like a curse and a coronation, a reminder that some inheritances come with teeth.
14. The Offering (2023)
Oliver Park’s The Offering (Nick Blood, Emm Wiseman, Allan Corduner, Paul Kaye, Daniel Ben Zenou, Jodie Jacobs) is a lock-in with Jewish folklore where the doors only open inward. Art returns to his father Saul’s funeral home to patch a frayed relationship and quietly triage his own finances. Then he mishandles an amulet and frees Abyzou, a child-hunting demon with an appetite for lineage.
The Offering binds generational guilt to spiritual warfare: father and son trying to mend the seam while a predator picks at the thread. By the time the ritual knives come out, love and faith are both on the slab – and the price of reconciliation is paid in screams.
13. Don’t Listen (2020)
Ángel Gómez Hernández weaponises grief in this Spanish chiller. Don’t Listen stars Rodolfo Sancho, Ana Fernández, Ramón Barea, Belén Fabra, Lucas Blas, and Nerea Barros. It’s a new house and a fresh start – until young Eric hears voices through the walls. Dismissed as imagination, the whispers turn lethal, and tragedy pulls the parents into the same frequency. With a parapsychologist and his daughter in tow, the family excavates a past caked with spite and ritual.
Don’t Listen is a séance with a sledgehammer: every answer opens a darker room, and the house never stops talking.
12. Apostle (2018)
Gareth Evans trades bone-crunching action for bone-grinding dread in this gothic folk horror called Apostle starring Dan Stevens, Lucy Boynton, Mark Lewis Jones, Bill Milner, Kristine Froseth, Paul Higgins, and Michael Sheen. Thomas infiltrates a remote island cult to rescue his kidnapped sister and discovers their holy secret: a shackled, bleeding goddess feeding a faith built on extraction. Masquerade becomes martyrdom as Thomas navigates sermons, skullduggery, and one of modern horror’s most brutal medieval contraptions.
Apostle is a grim communion of blood and soil where devotion is measured in litres.
11. 1922 (2017)
Zak Hilditch adapts Stephen King with a scalpel and a shovel. Thomas Jane, Neal McDonough, and Molly Parker preside over moral collapse dressed as a farm in 1922. When a wife threatens to sell, a husband enlists their son to make the problem “go away” – and plants a future haunted by rats, rot, and regret. The wife’s murder is ugly; the aftermath is uglier.
In 1922, ghosts become roommates, the house breathes like a bad memory, and the fields harvest only penance.
10. The Empty Man (2020)
David Prior’s adaptation of Cullen Bunn/Vanesa R. Del Rey’s The Empty Man graphic novel (starring James Badge Dale and Marin Ireland) is urban legend by way of cosmic nihilism. Ex-detective James Lasombra follows a missing girl into the Pontifex Institute, where belief is a weapon and thought can summon a god. Blow into a bottle on a bridge, count the nights, and wait for the void to call back.
The deeper James digs, the less reality cooperates. By the end, identity is a contagion and The Empty Man isn’t just coming – he’s already here.
9. The Silence (2019)
John R. Leonetti adapts Tim Lebbon’s novel, The Silence, into a sound-sensitive apocalypse starring Kiernan Shipka, Stanley Tucci, Miranda Otto, and John Corbett. Vesps -ancient, bat-like nightmares with sonar for souls – flood the skies after an underground breach. Ally, a deaf teenager, turns silence into survival; her family’s fluency in signing becomes their edge. Then a doomsday cult anoints Ally as a messiah, and the human threat starts screaming without making a sound.
The Silence is less A Quiet Place clone and more its feral cousin – asking whether monsters are scarier when they pray.
8. Incantation (2022)
Kevin Ko’s Taiwanese folk horror aka Incantation (Tsai Hsuan-yen, Huang Sin-ting, Kao Ying-hsuan, Sean Lin, RQ/Wen Ching-yu) turns a found-footage curse into an interactive dare. Years after violating a sacred ritual on camera, Li Ronan tries to protect her daughter Dodo from the backlash of belief. Symbols repeat, prayers fracture, and the audience is enlisted as confessor and accomplice.
Incantation is a dizzying collision of superstition and screen culture where breaking taboos isn’t just a plot point – it’s a participatory sin.
7. The Influence (2019)
Denis Rovira van Boekholt steeps a family home in formaldehyde and folklore. Manuela Vellés, Alain Hernández, Maggie Civantos, and Claudia Placer star in The Influence where nurse Alicia returns to care for her comatose mother, Victoria – an occult enthusiast whose legacy refuses to stay sedated. The house sulks, the past prowls, and Alicia’s daughter Nora starts answering to shadows.
The Influence is a slow, icy slide into generational doom. If the emotional bond between grandmother and granddaughter is undercooked, the atmosphere still clings like old perfume in a locked room.
6. The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
Bryan Bertino writes and directs a grief vortex in The Dark and the Wicked starring Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr., and Xander Berkeley. Two siblings return to their isolated family farm to sit vigil – and find the devil already in the chair. Apparitions, intrusions, and escalating violence turn caregiving into a contact sport. There’s no safety here, only surrender.
The Dark and the Wicked tightens like barbed wire and ends with the kind of hopelessness that’s almost a relief. Some evil doesn’t want converts – it wants quiet.
5. No One Gets Out Alive (2021)
Santiago Menghini crafts a migrant nightmare in No One Gets Out Alive starring Cristina Rodlo and Marc Menchaca. Ambar, an undocumented immigrant, takes a room in a crumbling boarding house where the walls are hungry and the tenants are already halfway gone. The house history peels back to reveal an ancient god that feasts on the worst traits of its offerings – bad news in a building where cruelty is currency.
Highlights (read: the parts that will haunt your sleep) include the first encounter with the old god, the drip-feed discoveries that everyone “just vanished,” and a fever-dream climax invoking the Aztec goddess Ītzpāpālōtl: a moth-winged terror cradling Ambar’s head as sacrifice looms. In the vision, Ambar strangles the memory of her mother – agency as exorcism – and the goddess recoils into the box she came from.
No One Gets Out Alive is f***ed up in all the right ways, and it never stops tightening the screws.
4. Lamb (2021)
Valdimar Jóhannsson’s pastoral oddity (Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) is folk horror by lullaby. Lamb follows a grief-stricken couple on a remote farm, María and Ingvar, who adopt a human-lamb hybrid they name Ada and try to pretend the universe won’t notice. Nature does. The sheep mother stalks, the mountains brood, and the film waltzes toward an ending that feels both mythic and inevitable.
Lamb is tender, uncanny, and devastating – like a bedtime story that leaves hoofprints on your heart.
3. Malevolent (2018)
Olaf de Fleur Johannesson adapts Eva Konstantopoulos’ Hush into a scam-turned-seance in Malevolent starring Florence Pugh, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Scott Chambers, Georgina Bevan, James Cosmo, and Celia Imrie. Angela and her brother Jackson fake ghost investigations for cash—until a job in a mansion with real sins and restless victims exposes their grift to something that doesn’t care about invoices. Familiar scaffolding, yes, but the house runs on dread and Pugh sells the spiral.
Malevolent is a ghost story with a mean streak and a conscience.
2. The Wretched (2020)
Brett and Drew Pierce remix the witch myth into a body-snatching summer nightmare with The Wretched. John-Paul Howard, Piper Curda, Zarah Mahler, Kevin Bigley, Gabriela Quezada Bloomgarden, Richard Ellis, Blane Crockarell, Jamison Jones, and Azie Tesfai populate a coastal town where teen Ben notices the neighbour isn’t herself – because she isn’t. An ancient hag in borrowed skin is hunting children, and disbelief is her favourite camouflage.
The Wretched‘s secret sauce is its teen-thriller energy welded to folklore teeth; by the time the truth surfaces, the tide is already red.
1. Eli (2019)
Ciarán Foy corrals inverted crosses and medical malpractice in the movie Eli which ends with a devilish twist. Kelly Reilly, Sadie Sink, Lili Taylor, Max Martini, and Charlie Shotwell star in a story about a boy with a brutal autoimmune condition brought to a private clinic promising a cure. Each “treatment” opens more doors to ghosts and less room to trust anyone – including his parents. Then the floor drops out: paperwork proves the other kids died horribly, the nuns aren’t right-side up, and the climactic stigmata turns the facility into a bonfire.
Eli is an underrated possession yarn with a final twist that asks not who is possessed, but what if possession was the point?
Have you tangled with any of these horror movies?
Do they scratch that Ritual itch – forests that judge, cults that kneel, gods that never blink? Light up the comments and tell us which one dragged you deepest into the dark.
