Horror movies love ritual magic—but every once in a while, filmmakers dig a little deeper than pentagrams, candles and vaguely sinister Latin. From centuries-old ceremonial magic to living religious traditions, these five films got surprisingly close to practices that exist beyond the screen.
Horror movies have never had a particularly difficult time with magic.
Draw a pentagram on the floor. Light a few candles. Find somebody willing to chant something vaguely Latin-sounding. Add a goat skull if the production budget allows.
Boom. Black magic.
Except every once in a while, a horror film comes along that feels different.
The ritual has rules. The symbols seem to mean something. The participants aren’t simply waving their hands around and shouting at Satan. There are preparations, prohibitions, offerings, invocations and consequences.
It feels less like something a screenwriter dreamed up and more like something the filmmakers perhaps shouldn’t have been messing around with in the first place.
And sometimes, that’s because they weren’t entirely making it up.
To be clear, we’re not attempting to determine whether magic actually works. We’re certainly not going to settle the existence of demons, angels, spirits or supernatural forces in a horror movie list.
We’re asking a much more interesting—and answerable—question:
How much of the ritual magic we see in horror movies actually exists outside of them?
From filmmakers disappearing down occult rabbit holes to centuries-old magical operations, living shamanic traditions and an official rite of the Catholic Church, here are five horror films where Hollywood may have gotten a little closer to the real thing than you realized.
5. BRING HER BACK (2025)
The ritual isn’t real. But that doesn’t mean everything behind it is fake.
Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back is exactly the sort of movie that inspired this list.
At the center of the film is a bizarre resurrection ritual pieced together by Laura, a grieving foster mother desperately attempting to bring her dead daughter back. Much of what she knows comes from mysterious videotaped footage depicting an elaborate process involving possession, the preparation of a human vessel and ultimately the possibility of returning the dead to the living.
And the whole thing feels disturbingly specific.
So, did the Philippous uncover some obscure resurrection ceremony and put it on film?
Not exactly.
But here’s where things get interesting.
While researching the film, Danny Philippou has described disappearing down a rabbit hole involving witchcraft and resurrection beliefs, including conversations with people who sincerely believed in darker forms of resurrection.
The filmmakers ultimately took pieces of what they’d encountered and constructed their own mythology rather than reproducing a single established ritual.
In other words, the ritual in Bring Her Back isn’t real.
But the filmmakers talked to people who apparently believed things like it were.
And that may explain why the movie’s magic feels so convincing.
Because Bring Her Back understands something most cinematic magic doesn’t:
Magic has a process.
Laura isn’t an all-powerful sorceress shooting supernatural energy out of her fingertips. She’s essentially trying to reverse-engineer something she doesn’t completely understand.
There are steps. There are conditions. There are things that must happen before other things can happen.
And if any part of the process is misunderstood, the desired result may not be what comes through on the other side.
That procedural quality appears repeatedly in ritual traditions, where preparation and correct performance can be every bit as important as the intended supernatural result.
Which means the fascinating thing about Bring Her Back isn’t that its resurrection ceremony secretly exists somewhere in an ancient book.
It’s that the Philippous researched people who believe in this stuff, took what they learned, and constructed something fictional that behaves enough like ritual practice that we instinctively believe somebody, somewhere, might actually have tried it.
THE OCCULT CONNECTION: INSPIRED
The ritual belongs to the movie. The rabbit hole that inspired it apparently doesn’t.
4. THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968)
When your horror novelist actually knows occultists
There are robes. Ceremonies. Magical circles. Invocations. A gigantic goat-headed manifestation. And Christopher Lee gravely explaining the rules of black magic as only Christopher Lee possibly could.
Surely this is pure Hammer nonsense.
Not entirely.
The film was adapted from Dennis Wheatley’s 1934 novel, and Wheatley had a longstanding fascination with occultism and esoteric literature.
Most famously, he became acquainted with perhaps the most notorious occultist of the twentieth century:
Aleister Crowley.
Crowley wasn’t quite the cartoon Satanist popular culture would eventually turn him into. His system of ceremonial magic incorporated a complicated mixture of Western esotericism, mysticism and traditions associated with organizations such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
That doesn’t mean Wheatley’s fictional occultism should be mistaken for an accurate representation of Crowley’s beliefs—or ceremonial magic in general.
Far from it.
Wheatley mixed genuine occult ideas with folklore, Christianity, sensationalism and his own wonderfully lurid conception of black magic.
But underneath the Hammer spectacle are recognizable concepts from Western ceremonial magic.
One of the most obvious is the protective magical circle.
In ceremonial traditions, the circle isn’t simply spooky production design. It establishes a ritual boundary—a specially prepared space separating the practitioner from whatever forces may be involved in the operation.
That’s essentially how The Devil Rides Out treats it.
The characters are warned that regardless of what they see or hear outside their protected space:
They must not leave the circle.
Suddenly one of horror cinema’s most familiar occult tropes doesn’t seem quite so arbitrary.
Wheatley exaggerated almost everything surrounding it, but he’d done enough homework to give his supernatural universe something incredibly important:
Rules.
And rules make cinematic magic frightening.
Because rules can be broken.
THE OCCULT CONNECTION: ADAPTED / HEAVILY FICTIONALIZED
The movie’s Satanism belongs firmly to pulp horror, but some of the ceremonial language underneath it has much older roots.
3. THE EXORCIST (1973)
What happens when “magic” becomes religion?
Nobody watches The Exorcist and describes Father Merrin as a ceremonial magician.
He’s a Catholic priest.
But strip away those labels for a moment and consider what actually happens.
A specially authorized practitioner enters a space containing someone believed to be inhabited by a supernatural entity. He wears prescribed garments. He uses sacred objects. He recites established prayers. He invokes a higher spiritual authority.
And through a ritualized sequence of actions and words, he attempts to compel a nonphysical entity to leave a human body.
Encounter that description in an occult manuscript rather than a Catholic text and we’d probably have little hesitation calling it ritual magic.
More importantly for our purposes:
The ritual exists.
Catholicism has maintained formal rites of exorcism for centuries, historically including the rite contained within the Rituale Romanum, or Roman Ritual.
That puts The Exorcist in a fascinating position.
Father Merrin isn’t simply reciting spooky dialogue William Peter Blatty invented. The framework surrounding what he’s doing belongs to an established religious tradition.
And the rabbit hole goes considerably deeper.
In 1949, while studying at Georgetown University, Blatty encountered newspaper coverage of an alleged exorcism involving a 14-year-old Maryland boy.
The story stuck with him.
More than two decades later, it would become the inspiration for The Exorcist.
Contemporary accounts claimed that priests repeatedly performed an exorcism ritual before the boy was eventually considered free of possession. Later investigations have raised considerable questions about what actually occurred—and whether anything supernatural occurred at all.
But that’s not really our question.
The case existed. The priests existed. The ritual tradition existed.
And decades later, Blatty transformed those ingredients into one of the most famous horror stories ever written.
Regan MacNeil may be fictional.
The idea of priests standing beside a supposedly possessed child and repeatedly performing a prescribed ceremony intended to drive out a spiritual entity wasn’t.
THE OCCULT CONNECTION: DOCUMENTED RELIGIOUS PRACTICE
Call it religion. Call it ritual. Call it magic. Whatever terminology you choose, Father Merrin didn’t invent the playbook.
2. THE WAILING (2016)
They didn’t just recreate a ritual. They brought the ritual into the movie.
One of the movie’s most unforgettable sequences involves shaman Il-gwang conducting a frantic ritual intended to help the increasingly desperate Jong-goo.
There are drums. Dancing. Offerings. Knives. Fire. Repetitive movements. Music builds into an almost unbearable frenzy as the film cuts between Il-gwang’s ceremony and the mysterious Japanese stranger apparently conducting a ritual of his own.
It’s an extraordinary piece of filmmaking.
And considerably less of it was invented than you might expect.
While researching The Wailing, Na traveled through several Asian countries, including Korea, seeking out surviving religious practices and observing rituals firsthand.
When it came time to create the film’s remarkable ceremony, he went considerably further than simply telling the production designer to make something that looked suitably mystical.
According to Na, the music heard during the sequence was performed by actual shamans, and the ritual actions depicted correspond to actions performed during real-life exorcistic ceremonies.
Think about that for a moment.
We’re no longer talking about filmmakers finding something in an old book and borrowing the cool parts.
We’re watching a horror film incorporate elements of a living ritual tradition.
The broader tradition is associated with Korean shamanism, often called Muism, in which shamans perform ceremonies generally known as gut. Depending upon the particular ceremony and tradition, these can involve music, dance, offerings and interactions between the human and spiritual worlds.
That makes The Wailing fundamentally different from something like Bring Her Back.
The Philippous researched occult beliefs and constructed a fictional system.
Na researched a living tradition and incorporated recognizable elements of that tradition into his fictional supernatural narrative.
And there’s an important distinction worth making here.
Simply calling what we’re seeing “black magic” would be misleading. These practices exist within complex religious and cultural traditions that don’t neatly fit the Western horror categories of good magic and evil magic.
Then the story gets even stranger.
Na has said members of the production experienced disturbing nightmares during filming and eventually underwent a ritual performed by a shaman themselves.
Did making The Wailing unleash something supernatural?
Probably not.
Did the people making it apparently become uncomfortable enough to seek out the very ritual tradition they were depicting?
Yep.
Make of that what you will.
THE OCCULT CONNECTION: LIVING RITUAL TRADITION
The supernatural story is fiction. Some of the ritual behind its most unforgettable imagery isn’t.
1. A DARK SONG (2016)
Okay. This one is actually based on a real magical operation.
If you’ve never seen Liam Gavin’s extraordinary slow-burn occult film, knowing what inspired it arguably makes the whole thing even more unsettling.
Sophia rents an isolated house and hires occultist Joseph Solomon to guide her through an extraordinarily demanding magical operation.
They seal themselves inside.
Days become weeks.
Weeks become months.
There is fasting. Purification. Prayer. Isolation. Exhaustion. Abstinence. Repetition.
And eventually something appears to be answering.
The ultimate objective is contact with Sophia’s Holy Guardian Angel.
It sounds like a fantastic premise dreamed up for a horror movie.
Except Liam Gavin didn’t dream it up.
A Dark Song is constructed around the Abramelin operation, a ceremonial magical working associated with The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.
The operation involves an extended period of spiritual preparation intended ultimately to achieve contact with what later Western occult traditions commonly call the practitioner’s Holy Guardian Angel.
And Gavin hasn’t been coy about his source material.
He has explicitly described Abramelin as an actual ritual and explained that he and the film’s principal actors researched it extensively.
Even the movie’s grueling duration has a real-world basis.
Gavin has said that the operation can take roughly a year to eighteen months, while the film compresses its version to approximately eight.
But here’s where things become particularly interesting.
Despite all that research, Gavin deliberately didn’t want to perform the complete ritual on camera.
Although A Dark Song follows the general structure of Abramelin, scenes frequently show Sophia and Solomon entering or emerging from portions of the operation rather than depicting an entire ceremonial working from beginning to end.
Think about the implication of that for a second.
The filmmaker made a movie about an occult ritual…
and deliberately stopped short of actually doing it.
And then Aleister Crowley turns up again.
Crowley famously attempted the Abramelin operation at Boleskine House, his residence near Loch Ness, around the turn of the twentieth century.
Gavin has specifically discussed learning about Crowley’s attempt as part of the inspiration that eventually became A Dark Song.
Which brings our list almost perfectly full circle.
We started with Bring Her Back, where filmmakers investigated people who genuinely believed in occult resurrection practices and then constructed their own supernatural mythology.
We end with a filmmaker discovering an established ceremonial magical operation and constructing almost an entire horror movie around it.
No randomly assembled pentagrams.
No vague pseudo-Latin.
No screenwriter deciding six candles probably look more Satanic than five.
There’s a text.
There’s a tradition.
There are historical practitioners who attempted it.
And there are people today who continue to study the magical traditions surrounding it.
Does performing the Abramelin operation actually result in contact with a Holy Guardian Angel?
That’s where our investigation ends.
THE OCCULT CONNECTION: DOCUMENTED CEREMONIAL MAGIC
Of every movie on this list, A Dark Song comes closest to answering our original question with an uncomfortable:
Yeah. Somebody actually tried this.
SO…IS THE MAGIC REAL?
That’s the question horror loves asking.
And after looking at these five films, it may actually be the wrong question.
Because something considerably more interesting emerges.
The magic may or may not be real. The rituals unquestionably are.
Human beings have spent centuries developing elaborate systems intended to communicate with things they believe exist beyond ordinary human perception.
We’ve drawn circles intended to establish sacred or protected spaces. We’ve made offerings to spirits. We’ve recited prescribed words intended to drive demons away. We’ve isolated ourselves in pursuit of angels.
Different cultures call these practices religion, magic, shamanism, mysticism, witchcraft, prayer, invocation, exorcism and countless other names—and those distinctions matter enormously to the people practicing them.
Horror cinema takes those traditions, strips away certainty and asks essentially the same question humans have been asking around campfires considerably longer than we’ve been making movies:
What if it works?
That’s why the best occult horror doesn’t necessarily need a monster jumping out of a closet.
Sometimes all it needs is a person standing inside a circle.
A book open in front of them.
A ritual that’s been performed before.
And one final instruction:
Whatever happens, don’t leave the circle.
The rituals are real.
What happens when you perform them?
Well…
That’s one experiment we’ll leave to somebody else.
