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.”
The Ritual Soundtrack album, Ben Lovett