By Terry Sherwood
There are horror films that frighten, and then there are those that transfigure. Manu Herrera’s Spanish film Lilys Ritual or El ritual de Lily belongs squarely in the latter category a slow, solemn, and sensually charged masterwork that feels as if it has stepped out of another dimension of cinematic history. This is not simply a throwback to 1980s and 1990s horror; it is a resurrection on par with William Friedkin’s film The Exorcist.
The picture begins in familiar territory: four young women retreat to a weather-worn house in the Spanish woods to perform a witchcraft initiation ritual. We have seen many teen genre films, Ouija board launching the creature and slashers, The newcomer, Lily, is chosen to embody the element of air, completing the circle of earth, water, fire, and air. What begins with candles, chants, and friendship and a lick of eroticism soon curdles into something predatory. The rite, we learn, has a purpose far darker than spiritual awakening.
Manu Herrera’s most radical act is not in his use of blood or occult imagery, but in his inversion of gendered power within horror’s traditional framework. Every figure of authority, cruelty, compassion, and corruption in the film is female. The only male presence who is Adam, first glimpsed as a young boy and later as a grown man watching a brutal debasing porn film functions almost as a spectral memory, a witness to the ritual rather than a participant. In a genre so often defined by male predation, this reversal electrifies the narrative. Not because the woman carries a gun, uses a weapon and demonically destroys because the male presence even the Law Enforcement is female. You would not know the difference is it was the reverse.
The women here commit the cruelties that men have performed for decades in cinema’s dark canon. They dominate, deceive, and sacrifice each other with the same ritualistic precision once reserved for patriarchal villains. Yet Lilys Ritual never lets this become mere gimmickry. The camera observes their transgressions with tenderness, curiosity, and an almost theological reverence. The film becomes an exploration of what happens when sacred and profane female energy consumes itself when empowerment folds back into the ancient hunger for control.
While many contemporary horror films wield religion as metaphor or mockery, Lilys Ritual wades straight into theology. Its ritual scenes — shot in hushed amber tones and punctuated by the sound of breath, not screams — feel dangerous the witch’s circle as a church, its invocations echoing both Mass and sacrifice.
The result is a film about faith turned inward: belief as obsession, sanctity as self-destruction precisely like The Exorcist. Lily’s dawning realization that she is the offering, not the initiate, unfolds less like a plot twist and more like revelation. The camera lingers on her eyes, her trembling hands, her breath fogging in candlelight with the iconography of martyrdom reimagining in feminine form.
The devotion to practical effects gives work a body and texture rare in modern horror. Flesh tears, wax drips, wood creaks, and the blood looks viscous, not digital except for the outside bonfire. Monstrous gore not the level of Terrifier yet close to A Serbian Film all deliciously delivered.
The cinematography channels the chiaroscuro of Suspiria and The Craft yet feels rooted in its own soil: more mist than neon, more prayer than pop. It’s horror by candlelight, not spotlight. The editing flows like ritual chant with a reoccurring vocal that sounds very close to the brilliant theme for Hammer Films, The Gorgon. It begins as slasher, becomes folk horror, and descends into demonic possession. But beneath these masks lies something rarer: a meditation on the human need to ritualize power.
Every act in the film, the drawing of symbols, the whisper of vows, the shedding of blood reflects the cost of belonging. By its final act, Lilys Ritual achieves the horror of early Ken Russell. The screen trembles with color and sound as the circle collapses, leaving Lily or what remains of her in a state that is neither life nor death, purity nor sin. The apocalypse suggested is personal and interior; the destruction of self-disguised as salvation as meeting Adam again to right a wrong
The performances uniformly female, fearless, and haunting draw power from the body rather than dialogue. Even Adam’s presence as a young boy, and later is silent and peripheral, feels mythic: the remnant of a fallen Eden observing Eve’s revenge.
Lilys Ritual or El ritual de Lily is not just a film; it’s an initiation a rite into the lost language of horror’s sacred feminine presence without the “Final Girl’ . or being helped by a male presence by reclaiming the genre’s old symbols and turning them inside out, the film delivers something both timeless and dangerous: a horror movie that believes in its own theology. A Sacred Reversal of Horror’s Oldest Sins It’s beautiful, terrifying, and, in the truest sense, Brilliant.
Lily’s Ritual screened as part of Grimmfest 2025.
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