What Is The Monster In 'The Ritual' - A Horror Movie God, Explained

Some of the best folk horror movies of all time base their scares on the slow-burn creepiness of the rural setting. Others are terrifying movies about cults. David Bruckner's 2017 horror film "The Ritual" dabbles in both, and adds in a haunted house aspect with a strange settlement in the middle of a Swedish forest. Then, it becomes something else altogether.

As a group of hikers finds out to their detriment, all the folk horror elements in the movie come courtesy of a single entity: A supernatural beast known as Moder, which is both terrifying to behold and so utterly powerful that it might be able to go toe to toe with just about any other horror movie monster out there. Let's find out more about Moder, the animalistic horror movie god lurking at the center of "The Ritual."

"The Ritual" is essentially the main characters' consistent march from bad to worse. The film starts as a fun hike, but progresses with a series of increasingly horrible events that lure them deeper in the woods — and in the clutches of a mythological monster deity and its worshippers.

Rob (Paul Reid) is planning a long hike in Sweden with Luke (Rafe Spall), Dom (Sam Troughton), Phil (Arsher Ali), and Hutch (Robert James-Collier), but becomes a collateral victim of violent robbers. The remaining quartet mourn their fallen friend and dedicate the hike to him, but they soon get lost from the trail and encounter trouble in a strange forest. After a series of eerie discoveries from creepy pagan symbols to mysteriously abandoned camping equipment from the 1980s, the plot's supernatural elements kick in. The movie ups the ante by revealing what it has stealthily hinted at all along — the woods are the stomping ground of a terrifying entity that goes unnamed in the movie, but is actually called Moder. 

Just like that, the wilderness survival story and disappearance mystery becomes a full-on supernatural horror movie. Without venturing into spoiler territory, you can expect strange cultists, gory deaths, and a terrifying final confrontation — as well as a truly unique monster creature that will haunt your dreams.

Moder comes from a pedigree that would make most other horror monsters pale with envy. According to the movie's lore, it's a Jötun — one of the gigantic creatures that oppose the Asgardian gods in Norse lore. What's more, Moder's father is none other than the trickster god Loki. This makes it a terribly powerful being that is truly horrifying to look at.

Moder's complicated appearance makes it very difficult to know what you're looking at until you see it in an open space. A four-legged creature that resembles a gigantic elk, Moder's head is a strange mass that resembles a decapitated human torso, with arms that extend into antler-like structures. Under the torso is the creature's true face, from which two bright yellow eyes stare at its worshippers and prey. On both sides of the glowing eyes, there's a pair of human arms that are fully functional. They're far stronger than normal arms, and Moder often uses them like mandibles. 

Combine this with assorted furry, spiny, and dangly design elements, and Moder is tricky to comprehend even before it busts out a completely different stance by rising onto its hind legs and flexing its various appendages. When it crouches to explore a cabin and you see it directly from the front, it seems like a humanoid creature with glowing eyes. Before you figure out its true design, it's easy to just focus on the torso structure without fully understanding the whole. It's a thoroughly animalistic beast that nevertheless has eerily human traits, which makes it a perfect monster for a folk horror movie. 

Moder is a powerful creature. Apart from its considerable size, animalistic appearance, and physical might, it has a large array of outright supernatural abilities that it gets to put on display in the movie to various degrees. 

The key thing to understand Moder is that it's utterly magical. While its eerie body is all too real and able to interact with the physical world, it looks like that simply because it wants to. What's more, the way it briefly poses as Dom's wife at one point suggests that it can take many different forms, including ones that are fully human. Moder has built its sacrifice cult with its ability to bestow a form of immortality to those who follow it, which is an impressive ability even though it effectively traps the worshippers in the Jötun creature's forest and seems to turn them into desiccated mummy monsters over time. 

However, Moder has one key weakness. While it's incredibly powerful and borderline omniscient in the forest, it's strictly a home advantage situation. As the climactic moments of "The Ritual" reveal, the Jötun is either unable or unwilling to leave the forest, which means that those who can escape its place of power are free from its clutches.

Looking for more spooky movies to watch? Here are 12 haunted house movies that'll scare your socks off.