Das Ritual

Voodoo horror, black magic and ritual murders in the middle of New York. Not for the skeptical new police psychologist Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen). But there is the gruesomely mutilated corpse of a teenager and at the scene of the crime his colleague Tom Lopez (Jimmy Smits) seems to have fallen into madness. The location and circumstances of the crime point to a ritual murder. The trail leads to a mysterious voodoo sect that wants to gain immeasurable power through human sacrifices. And Cal is more and more drawn into the spell of the sect. Finally, he makes an outrageous discovery: he himself is supposed to ritually execute his seven-year-old son Chris...

Director John Schlesinger (see 'The Marathon Man' 1976) created an ingeniously constructed horror thriller with 'The Believers - The Ritual' (1987), which captivates the audience more and more by the minute, until the finale in unbearable high tension.