The Ritual

The Ritual was adapted into a film by Imaginarium in 2017. Writer Joe Barton transformed Adam Nevill’s novel into a screenplay. The film stars Rafe Spall, Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughtton, and Arsher Ali as Luke, Hutch, Dom, and Phil, respectively. It also adds a fifth friend, Robert, who is killed at the beginning of the film by people holding up a liquor store. In the book, the impetus for camping in the woods is Luke’s limited finances; in the film, the men travel to the woods to honor their deceased friend’s final wish to go there. They scatter Robert’s ashes along the trail before heading into the virgin forest.

Luke is far more violent and is more severely injured in the novel. In the film, he is unable to confront the men who kill his friend Robert. Dom and the others resent Luke for not intervening in the liquor store, and the liquor store imagery bleeds into the forest, highlighting how both the civilized and uncivilized world are violent. In the novel, Luke punches someone who pushes past him on a train in London and alludes to other violent outbursts that occur previous to the vacation in the forest. He struggles with anger management, not with hesitation and fear.

Additionally, the film switches the dreams of the characters. In the novel, Hutch is the one who ends up kneeling before the stuffed goat/human hybrid in the attic of the black house. In the film, Phil is the one who sleepwalks to, and kneels in, the attic.

The second part of the novel is quite different from the film. In the film, Luke and Dom are imprisoned by a small community of people who worship the creature, including several old people. In the novel, Dom is killed before Luke is imprisoned by two teenagers in a black metal band, their teenage groupie, and one old woman. The community in the film resides in the forest, like the old woman in the novel. However, the teenagers, Loki, Fenris, and Surtr, are from Norwegian cities. The old woman wants Luke to kill the teens who have taken over her house because they are outsiders who don’t honor her traditions. Furthermore, in the novel, the old woman is probably one of the creature’s children, as she has hooves instead of feet.

Nevill alludes to horror filmmaking in his novel. Luke thinks, “This was not some horror film; he would actually have to smash a knife through human skin into the density of a body” (370). In movie productions, the knives are fake and the body parts being stabbed are fake; they don’t have the density of real steel and flesh. Luke also mentions how seeing the mutilated animal corpse in the Scandinavian forest leads him to no longer want “a cabin in the woods” (53). This alludes to the film of the same name that came out the same year as Nevill’s novel. The 2011 Cabin in the Woods film plays on the long-standing horror trope of people getting massacred when they leave the city and travel to isolated places.