All of these images were found on Keith Thompson's website, but I'm reposting them here just in case the images are lost, because you never know!
Thompson didn't just design the film's main monster, but also its undead worshippers, as well as the grisly effigy prop found in a cabin early on in the film.
Thompson also designed how the Moder's walk cycle should look like, as well its skeletal understructure, as reference for the digital VFX team animated the creature in wide shots.
Note: I would like to thank Sierra Spence of Russell FX for having kindly sent several images of the assorted gore and undead makeups, as well as the Moder head puppet and maquettes!
David Bruckner only had read Adam Neville's The Ritual after his management company sent him a screenplay based on it, with a prospective offer to direct the adaptation. Bruckner enjoyed the novel enough that it only made the project even more appealing to him.'I wasn’t familiar with Adam's work but the script was bouncing around and it came to me through my management company at the time I got hold of it. I thought it was totally lunatic in all the best ways (...) and I got talking to (executive producer) Will Tennant over at Imaginarium. I read the book and I just fell in love more and more with the project.
It really just started as a conversation. It’s always a challenge to adapt a book for screen as there are certain fundamental things that translate and some that you don’t have to carry further and having that conversation was the arena in which I got involved.'
Bruckner had previously only directed segments in anthology horror films such as V/H/S, meaning The Ritual was to be his first feature film. It was a difficult experience, as nearly the entire picture was shot on location in Romania's Carpathian Mountains.Bruckner explained, 'Coming from an independent filmmaking background I don’t always measure my ambition. You sort of strive for the impossible. We had a really great production services company in Romania and we’d looked in a few different places to shoot it but we were shown this immense range of forests in the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania which is about 7000ft high and at that elevation you get dark coniferous forest that kind of feels very Northern European. I fell in love with that look. I’d never seen woods like this.
I grew up in the South East of the United States and those wood structures felt too familiar to me and I wanted them parachuted into a bizarre nightmare so we had to shoot there. We got a lot of support but it was incredibly challenging.It’s a mountainous area so getting a steadicam on there at 40 degrees, as I’m sure you can imagine, is not an easy feat. Every day we were in a different place and we scavenged that forest and really used as much of the area as possible. The weather at that elevation is also a problem, as well as bears. (...) They just like to circle the set at night occasionally and in the morning one of the crew would have filmed them but we were well protected. It was a very remote landscape and hopefully that sense of immersion shows up on screen'.
The harsh terrain made all aspects of filmmaking difficult, but especially the effects as Bruckner remembered. 'We had a running joke on set where I’d ask, “What’s been the hardest week so far?” and the 1st A.D. would say, “Next week”. But some of the genre stuff at the end of the movie which required a lot of technical expertise, a lot of planning and dealt with prosthetics and CGI and stunts, all co-ordinated and were not on a sound stage. We’re doing it all on location and all of those things are troubled by the weather.'Despite the complicated filming, Bruckner pushed to use as much practical effects as he could, but still conceded he would have to use CG effects. The Ritual's special makeup effects were handled by Russell FX, an effects company that Bruckner had previously worked with.
'Well of course, growing up on horror films in the 80s, I wanted to do as much practical as I could, but you run into the limitations of that pretty quick, both in terms of budget, and just you know... you can have high aspirations for practical, and then realize you're in deep trouble pretty quick when it doesn't look right on camera.But I have a really wonderful SFX team that I've worked with (...) Josh and Sierra Russell. They did an incredible job on Southbound, and they're great friends as this thing was brewing, we had talked about finding a way to get them over to Romania.
Russell FX handled the film's gore, the most elaborate gag being the shot of Robert James-Collier after his character has been disembowelled by the Moder. A gored fake torso appliance, with fake legs attached was strung up to a tree.James-Collier himself would be positioned behind the fake body, wearing a greenscreen suit with his jacket; his legs would be digitally edited out in post-production. One can only imagine that the harsh weather made this even harder to shoot!
The undead congregation were designed by Keith Thompson (who also designed the Moder, which we are getting to) and sculpted by Clint Ziccoli at Russell FX.
'Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it's about masculinity in crisis, it's sort of this old Norse Viking nightmare that these modern men have wandered into. (...) So we always knew that we wanted to reveal, in one way or another, what it was. There are many movies that I admire that are withholding until the end, and like I said, we just felt that wasn't this film.
So yeah, we had to feature it and that meant that we had to kind of literalize not just how it looks, but how it chooses to present. Because the idea of these kinds of shape-shifting Norse gods is that they can kind of choose how they want to look to you. So, what you're seeing is how it desires to be interpreted, and it's part of the way it intimidates and controls.'
'We brought on Keith Thompson who has done some wonderful work and anybody's who's familiar with his work as a concept designer, I think this fits well with other stuff that he's done. He threw a bunch of images across the desk based on those conversations. One of the things we loved about this was that it, it was a difficult construction to understand at a certain glance. You know, that you could sort of build a mystery, just a very simple visual mystery around it.
We talked a lot about different influences in Norse mythology. We knew that it was gonna be some sort of animal god, and, but we also talked a lot about it would have a sentience, and how would you give it a human quality How would you obfuscate the difference between animal and human, and how could an animal form read with a human intelligence?And so Keith had many variations on those kinds of conversations, and this was one that he would kind of do an initial design on a few different things, and then I would have some notes. And this was one of his original designs based on our conversations that he had passed across and I loved it instantly, but kind of put it on the wall as one of those things that you can't possibly do. And then you kind of come in the office every day and you keep thinking oh man, but that! And then there are all kinds of questions like, what kind of movie do you want to make? And maybe that's what you have to do, in a sense, and if you're inspired by something or intrigued by it, or you can't take your eyes off of it, or if it's something that can't be unseen in whatever way, that felt like something to follow, so we ran with it.'
Bruckner elaborated in another interview about how Thompson's Moder design fitted the themes of the film, as well as its basis in the original Adam Neville novel.
'There’s one way of thinking about monsters in the movies. You can start with the pre-existing myth and then you service that myth in some way. I did a movie with a Succubus so it was a case of how do you bring that to screen? So some are metaphors and you choose what path you want to go down. There’s no concrete idea that you’re trying to bring to life necessarily.
The other approach is that the monsters are fabricated nightmares and part of their fears and you design this creatures both visually and archetypically as a counter point to a characters journey and it gives you licence to explore and in the movies there should be something refreshing about it, you know, kind of, ‘I’ve never seen that before and I can never unsee that!’ and so for that reason we were very interested in Keith.In the book you get impressions of the beast and it’s a nightmare version of it unwinding in the men’s mind of what it could be and because of his prose and the language he uses you never get a firm concept of its size and there are certain attributes that I could kind of literalise. It’s always kind of changing in my experience of reading the book. You may not conjure a characters specific look when you read a book just an idea of their face if that makes sense.
So it very much grew out of a conversation between Keith and I based on the book and the impression we had. But there’s something so human about it that we wanted to bring it together and Keith would sketch something and send it to me and he came up with some really incredible ideas and when he slipped one idea by us it took me a second. He had literalised, if this makes sense, some of the expression that I felt were coming across in conversation. It was the idea that it had a human quality about it despite the fact that it was very much an animal and just presented us with something that I felt I could never unsee again.'
Bruckner knew that the Moder would need to be realized in many shots as a digital creation, but pushed to have Russell FX realize it as a physical prop in close-up shots, especially when it caresses its victims faces or when it smashes the cabin's door in.
'(Russell FX) built in LA a life-sized model of the head, and the head actually has a stunt performer inside of it that is wearing prosthetic arms, and then we would go into the computer and paint out her head basically, because it was kind of visible in the front.And the prosthetic head was used both for wire work, and we had it on kind of unit jib out in the woods, and a lot of that is what Rafe is interacting with.'
Bruckner had to rely on CGI for wide shots. 'Originally, we wanted to diffuse images of the prosthetic head in wide shots with the digital body itself, under the assumption that the brain knows on some primordial level that it's looking at light on real objects (...) but we found that was increasingly hard to fuse those things together visually.
And usually, once a shot becomes digital, most of what you're seeing becomes digital. It just makes more sense from a cost perspective. But yeah, Josh and Sierra brought a lot to the table where that head was concerned, and it was not an easy construction.
It's really great to have on set too, because everybody was looking at some concept drawing and getting a sense of what they're dealing with, and then you wheel that thing out and it just, you can feel the energy on set change. Suddenly everybody has a greater sense of what they're dealing with, and it's something else to look at. It's incredible.'
Sources:
Dorka Nieradzik's makeup career was mostly doing 'straight makeups', from assorted BBC period dramas to Clive Owens' makeup on Children of Men and Shoot 'Em Up.
It was Nieradzik's work on Doctor Who however, where she did some of her most elaborate makeup designs, working with prosthetic appliances to create strange aliens and mutants; in short, this was Nieradzik going into 'special makeup effects' territory.This is not a complete collection of Nieradzik's makeup work, just what I've either been sent by Aurora Adams, or otherwise found online.
Nieradzik's first Doctor Who serial was 'The Leisure Hive', with her main duties being the Argolin aliens who had evolved from plants; her design drawings show clearly that she was thinking how to reflect the 'sentient plant' angle.
However, given a notable actor like Stratford Johns was to play the Urbankan leader, Monarch, then the makeup design couldn't totally obscure his face. Viewers still had to know it was Stratford Johns under there! Nieradzik revised the makeup design.
On 'The Happiness Patrol', Nieradzik designed the serial's infamous Kandyman; a psychotic robot designed to look like he was made of sweets, like a monstrous Bertie Bassett.
Her Kandyman design was far beyond the capabilities of either the BBC's Make-Up Department or the BBC's Costume Department, so instead she went to freelance costume & prop maker Robert Allsopp to construct the Kandyman suit.
