11 Movies Like The Ritual (2017), Matched to What You Loved
Depending on what worked for you, here are three places to start:
The Ritual (2017) is a solid horror film. But the problem with finding movies like The Ritual is that generalizing it as “people have a bad time in the woods” substantially minimizes the astonishing variety of themes that make it so appealing. The Scandinavian woods, weird cult stuff, interpersonal conflict, and big monster all play a part.
The following eleven recommendations tug at those threads a bit, and I also included a few less obvious connections. I like exercises like this because sometimes, what initially drew you to a movie isn’t what you wind up actually liking about it.
Want to narrow the choice by setting, relationships or the kind of threat? Describe the horror experience you want in Midnight Repertory.
For a forest that feels alive
There’s a difference between being lost in nature and realizing nature has opinions—and those opinions are seldom good. These films take that second idea in very different directions.
The Hallow (2015)
The Hallow is the place to start if you liked the way The Ritual makes its forest menace physical. The folk stories become an immediate threat: something the characters have to survive, regardless of whether the family believed them beforehand. You get creatures to contend with, alongside the sense that the surrounding forest feels offended by their presence.
The emotional stakes change, though. These are parents protecting an infant, with danger gathering around their home. The damaged friendships of The Ritual give way to a family trying to keep itself intact.
In the Earth (2021)
In the Earth is the stranger forest option. A scientist and a guide head into the woods to find a colleague, encountering human experiments and ritual beliefs that make the environment increasingly difficult to understand.
The Ritual’s hikers want to escape the woods. Some of the people in In the Earth want to find out what the forest can do, and their experiments and rituals reveal a consistent theme: Possessing deep technical knowledge of the wilderness doesn’t necessarily mean you have practical skills. The forest itself is part of the threat, and altered perception makes it harder to tell what’s happening. It’s a different kind of discovery from following friends toward a single, tangible beast.
For an expedition that becomes a survival trap
One theoretical advantage of a group camping or hiking trip is that there’s strength in numbers, and if something goes wrong, many hands make light work. These films test those assumptions, to say the least. One adds creatures; the other makes do with (somewhat) normal humans.
The Descent (2005)
The Descent follows a group of women on a caving expedition after a devastating bereavement. The outing carries some (frankly unnecessary, IMO) emotional baggage before the physical trouble starts. Once the group is trapped underground, creatures compound the minor issue of being unable to find a way out.
This is the strongest choice here if you want grief, friendship and survival operating together. In both films, the trip cannot simply provide an escape from what happened beforehand. Old baggage travels with the group, and once getting out depends on cooperation, those relationships become practical problems as well as emotional ones.
The caves make the distinction. Claustrophobia replaces the forest’s confusing openness, and the women’s relationships have their own fractures. You’re choosing a trapped expedition with a physical creature threat, rather than another encounter with a community’s religious practices.
Rituals (1977)
If the arguments in The Ritual mattered as much to you as the creature, you’ll love these guys. Rituals sends a group of male doctors into the wilderness on a camping trip, then puts them under attack. Despite the title, this is human-threat horror. The men’s solidarity matters more than anything they might find being worshipped in the trees.
They have professional standing and presumably plenty of reasons to consider themselves capable. Being stalked puts that confidence and their friendships under pressure. Their credentials offer no guarantee that they’ll agree about what to do—or what they owe one another. If you’re a big fan of lawyers, engineers, or doctors making fools out of themselves when they make the mistake of thinking their expertise extends beyond their narrow field, this movie is for you.
It’s a different source of danger, with no supernatural explanation required. That makes it a worthwhile option: it preserves the uncomfortable question of how well you know your companions when everyone is frightened, exhausted and dependent on everyone else.
For rituals and the discovery of a hidden threat
Part of The Ritual’s appeal is (spoiler alert) discovering that the strange behavior the hikers encounter belongs to a larger system. These films approach unfamiliar practices through rescuers, investigators, tenants, professionals and former believers. The difference is who understands—or fails to understand—the danger.
Apostle (2018)
A man infiltrates an isolated island cult to rescue his abducted sister. Finding her means integrating with the community, even as he learns how dangerous its members and their practices are.
If you wanted more of the relationship between worshippers and supernatural danger in The Ritual, this has that in spades. The key is that the awful, archaic islanders causing all the bloody harm aren’t even the most dangerous thing on the island. Understanding what the inhabitants serve becomes part of understanding how anyone might get free.
The Ritual’s friends wander into a situation they never intended to investigate; Apostle’s outsider has someone to find and a reason to keep going. There’s also conflict within the cult. You spend more time with the people maintaining this world, rather than encountering them as one part of a wilderness ordeal.
Final Prayer / The Borderlands (2013)
Final Prayer, originally titled The Borderlands, follows investigators examining unusual activity at a rural church. It’s found footage, so the attempt to record and assess what’s happening is part of how you experience the place.
Part of the pull of The Ritual is trying to work out what the hikers’ discoveries mean before they understand the danger. Final Prayer gives that curiosity to people who are there specifically to investigate. Their job is to assess the evidence, which makes the failure of a familiar explanation especially unsettling.
The church’s familiar religious purpose gives the investigators a starting point, but doesn’t settle what is happening there. Choose this if you want to follow an investigation deeper into one place, with the cameras recording its uncertainties, rather than accompany a hiking party trying to escape. I’ll also be honest here: I did not like this movie nearly as much as everyone else seems to.
No One Gets Out Alive (2021)
The Cleveland boardinghouse in No One Gets Out Alive is a long way from a Swedish hiking trail. An undocumented Mexican woman rents a room there and begins experiencing disturbing visions. Money and limited options make leaving more complicated than the sensible advice to go literally anywhere else.
The Ritual traps people geographically; this film makes vulnerability and dependence part of the trap. In both, the characters have to work out what their surroundings conceal while those same surroundings restrict their choices. The boardinghouse story opens onto a supernatural danger that calls for more than explaining away a haunting.
You lose the ensemble of old friends and their shared history. The focus is a newcomer trying to establish a life with very little room for error. Try it if the discovery of a hidden threat interested you more than the specific landscape in which it happened.
Exhuma (2024)
Exhuma gives you characters who might actually know what an ominous ritual means. Shamans, a geomancer and a mortician investigate an affliction connected to a family grave. The problem is the burial site and the practices surrounding it.
Maybe the coolest part is watching the characters put their knowledge to work. Each ritual becomes something people do to address a threat, rather than something bewildered visitors merely witness.
Eventually the investigation widens beyond its initial grave, so choose it for the work of interpreting place, burial and supernatural danger. It moves away from a continuous forest escape, and its Korean setting and beliefs deserve to be encountered on their own terms.
The Endless (2017)
Two brothers return to the cult they left, carrying rather different memories of it. Before they can agree on what’s happening now, they have to reckon with whether they understood it in the first place (they did not). As in The Ritual, the people who seem the most deluded may understand the danger better than their cynical counterparts.
The mystery of what the cult knows drives this one. Expect a cosmic puzzle, rather than a woodland pursuit built around a visible central creature.
For grief and mistrust that make the danger personal
The Ritual’s friends bring their problems into the forest with them. As Bruckner has discussed, the relationships and nightmares are essential to the ordeal. These last two choices follow that emotional pressure into very different settings.
The Witch (2015)
People looking for answers become people looking for someone to blame. The Witch places an isolated Puritan family near the woods, then lets loss and suspicion work on the household. There is supernatural danger, but the family’s responses give it something to latch onto.
The Ritual’s resentments affect how the friends respond to danger; in The Witch, accusations damage the relationships the family needs to survive its isolation. Shared faith doesn’t produce a shared understanding of what’s happening. If anything, it gives the arguments higher stakes.
The period setting, religious convictions and authority within a family replace the compromises among adult friends. There’s no expedition to keep moving. Choose it if you want to watch a close group become less capable of protecting itself as its members turn on one another, with the forest waiting outside.
A Dark Song (2016)
A grieving mother hires an abrasive occultist to help her undertake a prolonged ritual in an isolated house. Her purpose, as the distributor describes it, is to make contact with her dead son. The promise of contact is enough to make her accept an extraordinary arrangement with a man who is difficult to trust, and genuinely not all that interested in helping her out.
Where The Ritual makes grief part of an unwanted encounter, A Dark Song makes it the reason someone seeks the supernatural. You’re watching someone choose the ordeal and then have to live with that choice. The ritual requires commitment and effort, while her dependence on the man conducting it leaves her little respite from their difficult relationship.
This is the most specific choice here for bereavement and deliberate occult work. A confined relationship between two people replaces the hiking party, while staying in the house is part of the undertaking. Watch it if you’re a big fan of spending an hour+ saying “oh my god why are you doing this?!?!?”
Frequently asked questions
What movie is most similar to The Ritual?
The Descent (2005) is a strong starting point if you liked friends embarking on an expedition after a tragedy. It combines strained relationships with an increasingly dangerous escape problem. The main difference is the setting: enclosed caves replace The Ritual’s sprawling forest. BFI
What movies like The Ritual have a creepy forest setting?
Try The Hallow (2015) for woodland creatures threatening a family at an isolated home, or The Blair Witch Project (1999) for people becoming lost while investigating a local legend. Choose The Hallow for physical creature danger; choose Blair Witch for disorientation and an unseen presence.
What should I watch if I liked The Ritual’s cult and ritual elements?
Apostle (2018) is a strong choice for an outsider entering an isolated religious community: its protagonist infiltrates an island cult to rescue his sister. For ritual investigation from a different perspective, try Exhuma (2024), which follows knowledgeable practitioners investigating a supernatural illness connected to a family grave.
Which movies like The Ritual focus on grief and strained relationships?
A Dark Song (2016) follows a grieving mother who hires an occultist to help her contact her deceased son. Its emotional pressure comes from a deliberately undertaken ritual and a difficult partnership. The Witch (2015) offers another approach, following an isolated family whose mounting suspicion tests its relationships and faith. Both shift the emphasis away from a hiking expedition.