Movie Monsters

Recently, I’ve been exploring the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park franchise and the creatures inhabiting the Star Wars galaxy to see what inspired them and how the filmmakers brought them to life through a combination of puppets, animatronics, and CGI. But why stop there? There are hundreds of other ‘movie monsters’, many of which have fascinating designs and origins, from fantasy creatures seen in The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to terrifying horror monsters that represent emotions such as grief and trauma. I will get to those in time, but I’m going to start this new series with one of my favourite horror movies, a somewhat unappreciated gem called The Ritual, which features one of the creepiest and most unique monsters ever seen on screen.

Based on the book of the same name by Adam Nevill, The Ritual features four pals – Luke, Phil, Hutch, and Dom – reuniting after the tragic death of their friend, Rob, during an armed robbery. They embark on a hiking holiday through the mountainous Scandinavian wilderness, but a so-called shortcut leads them into a dense, mysterious forest straight out of Norse legend – a place of odd, unsettling silence and desolation that is imbued with an ancient, ominous, oppressive presence. Delving into creepy, uncharted territory, the foursome encounter strange carvings and mutilated animal carcasses, and they soon begin experiencing disorienting hallucinations. Luke, in particular, keeps re-living distortions of the night when he was too paralysed by fear to intervene when Rob was killed, clearly still wracked with the guilt of his cowardice.

The friends find an abandoned cabin to take shelter from a torrential downpour, but inside they discover a disturbing headless effigy made of twigs and antlers. In the morning, Luke finds that he is bleeding from small, round punctures in his chest, and Phil is found praying to the effigy in a trance. The next night, still wandering aimlessly through the forest, Hutch goes missing – and when the others finally find him, he’s been gruesomely impaled on the branch of a tree.

Something is clearly hunting the men through the ancient, seemingly endless forest, but the occasional half-glimpses through the trees are all the characters – and we, the audience – are afforded. It isn’t long before Phil, too, is dragged off into the woods to his demise by an unseen entity. Luke and Dom eventually find what looks like a small community in the middle of the forest – one that has clearly been isolated from the rest of the world for many decades, if not centuries. The two surviving men try to hide in a building, but they are knocked unconscious by an assailant. When they wake up, an elderly woman, who has the same strange circular wounds as Luke, informs the two friends that one of them is to be sacrificed. Dom is tied to a post outside, and the mysterious beast that has been stalking them arrives to kill him, revealing itself in all its glory as a hulking, terrifying fusion of man, elk, and tree.

The monster in the film is not a demon or a cryptid, but an ancient being called a jötunn. The jötnar (to use the plural term) were considered demigods in Norse mythology and often represented the primal and destructive forces of nature, such as storms, earthquakes, and winter. They were in stark contrast to the gods themselves, who symbolised order and culture. The monstrous creature in The Ritual personifies this perfectly – a terrifying embodiment of the wild, untamed aspects of nature; a dark guardian deity of the forest.

There are lots of jötnar in real-world Norse mythology, and most of them were primordial giants rivalled only by the gods in power. The one we see in The Ritual has no precedent in ‘real life’, so, in-universe, it may be one of the more obscure jötnar, about which historians know virtually nothing. One of the villagers living in the forgotten community describes this particular jötunn as the bastard offspring of the Norse god Loki. Although it isn’t named in the movie adaptation, the monster is identified as a female entity in the novel and is called Moder. For the sake of ease, I’m going to assume that that is her name in the film as well. Moder comes from the Old Norse word Móðr, which can mean ‘mother’ or ‘grief’. This fits the jötunn‘s modus operandi in swaying potential devotees by exploiting their emotional pain. Her abilities seem closely tied to psychological manipulation – her presence warps the forest, and she can use people’s deepest fears and regrets against them to induce vivid, terrifying hallucinations and blur the line between reality and nightmare.

‘The way [Moder] kind of operates [is] by getting inside these guys’ heads,’ director David Bruckner explains. ‘[She brings] their fears to the surface, giving us the ability to see a reflection of who they were back in the world.’ Moder ‘marks’ those she perceives as suffering from great emotional pain, such as Luke, and forces them to relive traumatic moments from their lives. Perhaps these people are deemed ideal candidates to join the submissive cult that worships her? Maybe the guilt-ridden dreams that the marked ones are plagued with are designed to cause the victim to submit to her promise of eternal life? Certainly, those who are not marked by her are ultimately killed.

In exchange for praying and sacrificing to her, Moder grants her followers immortality. But in an attic within the village, Luke discovers the hideous truth. There, he finds emaciated, mummy-like bodies, still gasping and breathing – helpless vassals that exist only to forever continue their worship of Moder. These acolytes – possibly some of Moder’s very first followers – have persisted through the centuries, living long beyond their time. But it is a cruel form of immortality; their ageing hasn’t halted, and they have become little more than desiccated husks. Luke sets them all on fire, freeing them from their eternal prisons.  

So is Moder really a pagan demigod – a bastard offspring of Loki, as her followers claim? Or is that just part of the legend that’s built up around this primal, ancient creature over time? Given that she can grant immortality and delve into people’s minds to dredge up their fears and desires, she certainly has supernatural powers. She is curating a cult, selecting devotees and arranging sacrifices, so perhaps she subsists on the worship of her followers. Perhaps, as hinted by her name, she was once a fertility figure from a bygone age that has been corrupted into a grotesque monstrosity. Or maybe she is the living embodiment of the forest itself. After all, when Luke escapes the woods at the end of the movie, Moder seemingly cannot follow him any further. The forest may be her hunting ground, but perhaps it is also her prison.

When it came to designing the look of Moder, concept artist Keith Thompson was hired early in pre-production, primarily for his ability to conjure nightmarish visions through his illustrations. ‘There’s one way of thinking about monsters in the movies,’ director David Bruckner says. ‘You can start with the pre-existing myth and then you service that myth in some way. Some are metaphors, and you choose what path you want to go down. There’s no concrete idea that you’re trying to bring to life necessarily. The other approach is that the monsters are fabricated nightmares, and you design this creature both visually and archetypically as a counterpoint to a character’s journey, and it gives you license to explore. In The Ritual, I wanted this monster to not only be the physical manifestation of the emotionless, faceless nature that surrounds Luke, but also his own grief and PTSD brought to life. There should be something refreshing about it, kind of, ‘I’ve never seen that before and I can never unsee that!’ and so for that reason we were very interested in Keith.’

In the novel, Moder is described as a nightmarish, goat-like creature with certain human qualities – an image that unwinds as the book progresses. While reading the descriptions, Bruckner conjured contrasting images in his mind and wanted to represent that thought process in the creature design for the film adaptation. He was keen to preserve his own experience of reading the book, wherein the creature’s appearance is somewhat shifting. After digging into Norse mythology, the filmmakers learned that the jötnar were known as shapeshifters and would sometimes present themselves with combined human and animal qualities. To Bruckner, it felt close enough to what the book described, while also giving him and his team room to experiment.

‘We had to literalise not just how [Moder] looks, but how it chooses to present,’ David Bruckner says. ‘Because the idea of these kinds of shape-shifting Norse gods is that they can kind of choose how they want to look to you.’ So, potentially, what we are seeing in the film is not Moder’s true form, but instead how she desires to be interpreted, which is, in Bruckner’s words, ‘part of the way [she] intimidates and controls.’

David Bruckner and Keith Thompson discussed various influences in Norse mythology. ‘We knew that it was gonna be some sort of animal god,’ Bruckner says, ‘but we also talked a lot about whether it would have a sentience, and how you would give it a human quality. How would you obfuscate the difference between animal and human, and how could an animal form read with a human intelligence?’

Keith Thompson devised several different iterations of Moder. The final creature was actually one of his original designs, inspired by Yhoundeh, the Elk Goddess, and Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods, two malign entities from the Cthulhu Mythos. Once the design was chosen, a small-scale sculpture of the creature – a maquette – was created. That served as a reference for the visual effects team to build the digital version.

The result looks a bit like a scarred, hairless, and hideously enlarged elk. Long, peg-like vertebrae protrude from the flesh on its back, its rotten skin is pulled tight against its huge ribcage, and tufts of filthy, matted fur cling sparsely to its veiny limbs. Its much longer forelegs give it a stance closer to that of a hunched humanoid than a natural quadruped.

Most striking, of course, is the oversized, faceless head, which resembles an entire bloated, mutilated humanoid body. The arms of this ‘face-torso’ extend into a pair of antlers that resemble twisted trees, while another pair of long, pale human arms and hands dangle where the torso’s ‘legs’ should be. Between these arms is a hollow cavity, inside of which are small, luminous eyes. A pair of disconnected mandibles also flank this opening, similar to the jaws of an insect, while another set of jawbones can be seen emerging from the sides of the whole ‘head’. It’s a very rare example of a movie monster that is clearly shown to the audience, yet becomes more effective the longer you look.

Moder was brought to life in the film primarily using CGI. However, in addition to the digital effects, a practical head section of the monster was also built, used for a couple of shots requiring close-up interaction with the weird human hands that form part of the jötunn‘s face. Inside the head was a stunt performer, who wore prosthetic arm and hand pieces to interact with the actor. The shots were completed with the digital removal of the performer’s head and the compositing of the rest of the huge god-monster’s body into the picture.

Overall, David Bruckner was very satisfied with the results. ‘The beast design we finally settled on was simply the one I couldn’t take my eyes off of,’ he says. ‘I think anyone who’s familiar with [Thompson’s] work can tell through and through that this is one of his uncanny creations.’ He concludes: ‘[Thompson] had literalised, if this makes sense, some of the expressions that I felt were coming across in conversation. It was the idea that it had a human quality about it, despite the fact that it was very much an animal, and [Thompson] just presented us with something that I felt I could never unsee again.’

And I think many people would agree with him.