The Kasturi/Files: Episode 6: Ritual Sacrifice

Hello Spec Chic fans! Welcome to Day 6 of our horror movie dissection! Now that you’re back from church, let’s discuss some wacky Scandinavian pagans (again). Here we go again with The Kasturi/Files, featuring the song stylings of Sandra Kasturi and Gemma Files! Oh, and, er, SPOILERS AHEAD.

Gemma: If you know me at all, you’ll know that two things I like very much indeed are monsters and Vikings, which probably explains why my favorite mythology is Norse and my favorite god is Loki — certainly in his MCU form, as Tom Hiddleston’s envious, sinuous, adopted brother to Chris Hemsworth’s mighty Thor Odinson, well-dressed king of the thrown knife and the snarky quip. But when I first met Loki it was as part of the D’Aulaires’ seminal children’s book Norse Gods and Giants, where he appears as a flickering, formless flame of a shapeshifting creature without apparent conscience or limitations, male or female-presenting depending on his mood, father of Hela, Fenris the Wolf and the Midgard-Serpent, mother of Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir. This version of Loki lies constantly, does awful things for sheer amusement value and is very definitely a Jotunn (not one of the Aesir) — a frost giant, a troll, born from the armpits of murdered Ymir’s kaiju-sized corpse. But while most male Jotunn are huge and ugly and most female Jotunn small and lovely, Loki (as ever) does things backwards, wielding women’s magic (seidr) and daring anybody to say shit about it. He is the cause of almost every disaster, but he will get you out of it too . . . if you force him to. (That’s what Thor is for.)

All of which may go a ways towards explaining why I think I must have watched Netflix’s The Ritual (2017, directed by David Bruckner, adapted from Adam Nevill’s novel of the same name) upwards of — oh God, twenty times? — since it first dropped onto the streaming service’s rotation. (I also own it on DVD, which I can’t actually watch, because it’s PAL.) Because yes, it’s dark as fuck and yes, it’s full of wonderful performances from British character actors like Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali and Sam Troughton, and yes, it’s set on a hiking trail in the trackless middle of an old-growth forest in Sweden full of insane pagans who worship one of the most innovatively designed creatures I’ve seen this decade. But it also contains a scene in which our hapless anti-hero Luke (Spall) asks one of the worshippers just what the fuck that thing they’re about to sacrifice his sole remaining friend to is, to which she merely shrugs, and answers: “It is ancient . . . one of the Jotunn. A bastard offspring of Loki. We do not speak its name.”

To which I reply, most conclusively: AW, HELL YEAH.

Sandra: This is where you and I have a childhood intersection. I was also obsessed with D’Aulaires’ Norse Gods and Giants, as well as D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths (so orange!) — both of which I obsessively borrowed from the library. This was back in the day when you actually wrote your name on a physical card at the school library. And I was pretty much the only person who ever took either of those books out — so the card said “Sandra Kasturi Sandra Kasturi” over and over in my third-grade early penmanship. I loved those books with that childhood fervency that brooks no mitigation or naysaying. Those brightly colored crayon-ish drawings! You wanted to bite them. And why were everyone’s nostrils so huge? Why did that sea monster look like a loaf of bread with eyes? I had a lot of questions! But what I kept coming back to was the idea that these Norse gods were not immortal — that they could be killed, and all would be killed when Ragnarok finally hit, and they’d fight each other in one final battle to the death between the Aesir and the Jotunns. And the Midgard Serpent would rise up from the sea, and at the very last, the Fenris Wolf would swallow the sun. The end of all things. Which is kind of a bleak narrative for a kid to embrace, which may explain a great deal about both Gemma and myself! AW, HELL YEAH, indeed.

I read Adam Nevill’s novel The Ritual before I saw the movie, but there was enough of a gap between that I didn’t get caught up in the differences between the two, as I often do. As you say, Gemma, a group of great character actors, and all working together so well that you believe their friendship (with all its benefits and emotional issues and traps) is real. And the creature! That was a total what-the-actual-fuckity-fuck IS THAT THING??! moment. The Ritual, much like Midsommar, makes the landscape/setting itself a character in the film — those imposing Scandinavian woods that seemingly go on forever, the stillness, the strange sounds, the sense of isolation which feels so terrible, until the realization comes that they are not alone in the woods, which is infinitely worse. It all comes together into some abyss-looking existential angst that stems just as much from what is going on internally in these men’s . . . souls, perhaps, (part mid-life crisis, part trauma because of their past tragedy), and the very real horrors they are currently experiencing. It’s man versus nature, or rather, man versus supernatural, bloody, vicious, old nature, at its best. And they’re all pretending to be good guys. But . . . are they, really?

Gemma: Luke’s not a good guy, by any stretch of the imagination, though he’s a bit better than he tends to think. His main problem is that he had the bad taste to survive when his friend Rob didn’t, after they walked in on a robbery in progress; Luke sussed the situation faster and ducked behind a shelf, assuming prey position, while Rob stood tall and got his head cracked open for his troubles. And while Rob (acclaimed by their friend Hutch as “the best of us,” in an impromptu memorial service at the start of the film) probably wouldn’t begrudge Luke his survival, all the rest of their tight-knit little group pretty much feel the same way Luke feels about himself: that he’s a coward, an asshole, someone who utterly deserves to doubt his every thought and action, someone who can never hope to off-load the excoriating load of guilt he’s presently carrying around. And I gotta say, guilt looks good on Spall, who manages to make Luke fairly unbearable during the film’s first five minutes, but a hang-dog delight for the rest of it; he’s a chav with a uni degree, full of the type of perverse strength that only comes out now that he thinks he’s already failed as badly as he can, and the fact that some of his friends don’t think he’s capable of doing anything but cutting and running just makes him increasingly willing to do anything but.

Since Rob’s literal last request before dying was that Luke, Hutch, Phil and Dom join him on hiking the King’s Trail in Sweden, that’s how the group decides to honor him. Things start going wrong pretty much immediately: Dom steps in a hole and twists his knee; Hutch decides to take an off-trail short-cut that leads them into the forest where they take refuge overnight in a cabin so creepy the cast of The Evil Dead would say “Oh shit no, skip it”; Phil wakes up naked in the attic, knelt in prayer to what looks like a statue of a headless guy with antlers for hands made out of twigs, as his friends scream and piss themselves in their sleep downstairs. And Luke? He wakes up outside, barefoot in the trees, a weird five-pointed wound clawed across his chest. “And on the second day things did not get better,” as Nevill writes; though the screenplay definitely differs on several points, that isn’t one of them.

Luke, like the rest of his friends, has been chosen. They’ve stepped off the path, blundered where they shouldn’t, into something far too old to be easily recognizable: a cycle of sacrifice which has already repeated itself so many times, it might well go on forever. They are hunted and harried, driven like animals to the slaughter by something old and sly, chaotic, with more than a hint of its supposed parent’s nasty sense of humor. Until, at last — as in all folk horror narratives — they come to the place where even the vaguest hint of a road runs out.

Sandra: You can also kind of look at this as a Red Riding Hood narrative — stepping off the path never leads anywhere good. And as I tend to say (often enough that everyone is tired of hearing it), horror is about the domestic, about ordinary life gone wrong. About transgression, and the crossing of boundaries, and what happens when you bend or break the rules. The most awful part, of course, is that you often don’t even know there were rules that would be broken. Which is why you will never find me wandering off the main road in Sweden, thank you very much. Or, as Frasier Crane once said, when asked if he would visit Woody’s home town in . . . Nebraska? I think?: “And get sacrificed to the corn god? I don’t think so!”

The idea, too, that there are forces in the universe that are so wildly out of our ken, but can still work their will on us, is terrifying. That, even if there is some sort of benevolent, all-seeing, capital-G God out there, he or she becomes completely irrelevant. By stepping off the path, you have stepped right out of the known universe. (Themes also present in The Descent — The Ritual being kind of the gender-swapped version of that film.)

Gemma: Part of what I love most about The Ritual is the main monster’s essential unknowability. It’s worshiped as a god, but is it one? Maybe the fact that it conforms to Norse traditions has nothing to with anything. But it does seem to have supernatural power, and it really does seem to like being prayed to, sacrificed to. It feeds on the fear of its prey and the love of its cultists, and in that, it definitely calls back to the petty, extremely human sore of inhumanity the Norse gods (and giants) typified, real enough to hurt, and to be hurt in turn. The sequence in which the creature tries over and over to force Luke to kneel to it — by grabbing him up into the air and slamming him back down, essentially, sticking its hoof on top of him for extra emphasis — reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston talking about how all gods who demand worship are cruel, a bit like toddlers. And whatever it is, in the end, it acts a lot like an abandoned child who may have spent centuries wondering what it did, to be left here alone. There’s the place where she and Luke meet, maybe.

But the other thing I love about The Ritual is that, in the end, these men are still friends. It makes total sense that the guy Luke ends up going through the worst part of this journey with is Dom, his chief accuser, the same person who never lets him forget that what happened to Rob is his fault — Dom, the physically weakest member of the group, who keeps pressing on Luke’s hidden wounds in order to make him look equally weak in front of the others, less of a man. Yet it’s their shared weaknesses that both single Luke and Dom out and bind them together, and it’s in Dom’s example that Luke finds his deepest strength, his will to reject the acceptance of a community of people bound by similarly great pain. To say, guilt aside: “I am not like you. And I will not live like this.”

Sandra: I am always fascinated by films that delve into the mechanics of friendship, particular same-gender friendships. And I’m doubly fascinated by writers and movie-makers who can telegraph the nature of such friendships with a gesture, a line of dialogue, a look. I know he’s woefully out of fashion now, and yes, misogyny and all that — but, but . . . there was no one who could convey an entire relationship the way Hemingway could, in just three or four lines of dialogue. And you get that feeling here, where the lives of these men, and their backstory feel absolutely real. But without having it all spoon-fed to you, which is so nice. Which makes the stakes that much realer, amidst all the supernatural, pagan unreality going on.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: STAY ON THE PATH.

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Cocktails: Trolls and Nordic Nonsense

Sandra: Darlings, I am at a convention this weekend selling books, and simply cannot be arsed to make cocktails in my hotel room. Happily, I’m with some of our authors, who have strong-armed a bottle of wine open; otherwise I just couldn’t even. So I am going to refer you to these appropriately Nordic cocktails, which all sound difficult but interesting, and I am absolutely going to try them out when I get home and want to spend time infusing honey with ginger. I swear to Loki.

Nordic-Inspired Winter Cocktails From Curfew In Copenhagen

Oooh! I just hunted around for a Troll Cocktail, and look what I found! More Scandi fabulousness.

Good Luck Gonk

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Book Recommendations

Sandra: The Ritual by Adam Nevill, obviously. And you can still find D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods and Giants! Maybe battered ex-library copies (taken out by me from the P.S. 99 library in Queens, New York, no doubt), but still worth it.

It may seem almost trite to mention, but I really do think John Ajvide Lindqvist should be mentioned here, because, well, he’s just so good. There’s Let the Right One In, which is just great (and the Swedish film version is terrific too). But I really loved Harbor, which is just classic icy Nordic horror, though perhaps not exactly on point with The Ritual, but its thematic sister.

Gemma: My book rec for The Ritual would also be, oddly enough, Adam Nevill’s The Ritual! Not only is it great on its own, but like I mentioned, it differs strikingly in certain sections from the film; if you were looking forward to a True Norwegian Black Metal band joining the fun, for example, this is pretty much the only place you’ll get it. For more folk horror weirdness, meanwhile, almost any other Nevill will do . . . it’s a bit of a stock in trade, particularly when it comes to No One Gets Out Alive and the desperately odd House of Small Shadows. But you might also want to check out his short story, “The Original Occupant,” reprinted in Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors.

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Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.

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Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).