
The Ritual film soundtrack will be released by Lakeshore Records and can be pre-ordered here.
I can also offer you a sneak preview from Ben Lovett’s affecting, often sinister, and atmospheric score. You can listen to ‘To Hell With This’ from the soundtrack over at Dread Central, and a second track will appear on Dread Central on February Thursday 8th too: ‘To Hell With This’
And from Ben about the composition and recording of the score:
“I wanted to make The Ritual sound like it looked. Almost every shot in the film is exterior and the landscape is such a major factor in the experience of the characters, so it seemed natural to start by saying, “I think we should play instruments made of wood for this score.” I needed exceptional orchestral players to tackle the size of complexity of what the film required.
The story is really about a guy losing friends, and how the dynamics of our relationships with our peers change as we all get older and become different people . . . The horror movie structure is just a container for that conversation — the opportunity to exaggerate these metaphors about masculinity and the male ego as a means of exploring it.
I knew the score needed to help establish the presence of something else out there with them — long before you see anything onscreen we wanted to create a clear sense of this inevitable obstacle, something in the woods aware of the guys. I started out by creating this “stalker” theme to define the core musical elements that would represent that threat for the rest of the film.
I wanted the tragedy that sets the film in motion to follow our characters into the woods. The motif related to that incident is the only area of the score where I used synths instead of the orchestra — it was simply an effective way to separate the emotional story of what was happening within the characters from everything happening around them in the physical environment of the forest.”