Lost Souls Shimmer in Unquenchable Fire: The magic and majesty of Ghost’s new movie ‘Rite Here Rite Now’
Swedish occult-rockers vote to reign deliciously in California than serve in Heaven with new concert movie.
Photo: Ghost
If there’s one band in the 21st century who deserve all the space, expense and prestige of a stadium show, it’s Ghost. The Swedish metal colossus – fronted by singer-songwriter Tobias Forge under the present guise of evil anti-pope Papa Emeritus IV – turn everything up to eleven. Their shows (‘rituals’ to fans) include a dozen costume changes, reanimated saxophonists, pyrotechnics, dirge-y metal licks and more than one prayer to Lucifer. In fact, quite a few.
It’s a surprise it’s taken until 2024 – fourteen years after the band’s inception with Papa I back in 2010 – to get a concert movie. We’ve had five studio albums, one live album and multiple EPs. Forge’s songwriting has soared to countless new heights and dabbled with every metal subgenre; the group’s debut, Opus Eponymous, was psychedelic doom metal for the Sabbath fans. Their latest album, Impera, is pure late ‘80s AOR.
Rite Here Rite Now immortalises Ghost’s raw power onstage, filmed across two nights at California’s legendary Kia Forum in September 2023. Still high on the success of Impera (their latest LP, released a year earlier), and bolstered by the group’s Mary on a Cross blowing up on TikTok, the shows embodied all that’s great about Papa and his Nameless Ghouls in the flesh.
Filmed in exceptional high-definition, Rite Here Rite Now is the concert film Ghost deserved. It’s big, it’s blaring – it melts the face from the first chord of show opener, Kaisarion. Before the film’s even begun, Ghost fans are invited to do the unthinkable; take their phones out in the middle of the cinema and record their excitement for what’s to come. It’s a bit of a gimmick, but also a reminder of why Ghost fans are so loyal: the band love their audience, and make it clear at every opportunity.
Across two and a half hours, ‘Ghosties’ are treated to a slew of standout and air-beating rock anthems, from 2018’s plague-inspired Rats to chugging Faith and Spillways – a favourite off the latest album.
Ghost are on top form here. If the nerves of hulking film cameras and clockwork-like dance routines are getting to Forge and his merry band of instrumentalists, it doesn’t show. Every note is hit, every riff sounds deliciously evil, and the on-stage banter between Papa and everyone else lands every time. Forge hasn’t just created an onstage persona in boyish Emeritus, he’s sculpted an entire person, full of personality, charm, insecurities and adolescent recklessness.
This feeds into what Rite Here Rite Now is really about, many could argue, which is a plot following the in-universe lore of the band’s many webisodes, or ‘Chapters’. We see lots of Sister Imperator, who dotes on and scolds Emeritus in equal measure, and the ghostly apparition of the original Papa, Nihil. Their relationships are explored in surprising detail given the fairly scant time put aside for them.
But that’s for the best. It’s a lot to follow, and if you’re not a Ghost mega-fan, a lot of it won’t make sense. Forge was clearly aware of this, so we’re never far from a return to the stage, allowing the audience to watch songs play out in their entirety. Even when we’re ‘backstage’, we can hear the drum solos continue in the background, the guitars wail.
Ghost’s show at the Forum is full of exclusive goodies, too, like a beautifully haunting rendition of Ricky Emerson’s If You Have Ghosts, the unofficial anthem of the band and their loyal subjects. Twenties, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on modern day Roman emperors (Impera as a whole explores latter-day tyrants) features skeletal backing dancers, and Mary on a Cross gets a whole animated sequence, Scooby-Doo style.
There’s a lot here to make the concert film interesting, even compared to other rituals. The main set closes with Jack the Ripper-inspired Respite on the Spitalfields, before Papa comes back out, clad in a shimmering blue suit jacket, ready for another three tunes. Kiss the Go-Goat, Dance Macabre and Square Hammer may not appease diehard fans of the early stuff, but prove an unholy trinity for everyone else. Dance-rock and metal blur into one; Ghost are often chastised for not really being ‘metal’. But there’s also an argument to be made that no one really cares. The drumbeats hit you all the same, down to your soul. And that’s good enough for me.
The movie has time for a lovably bizarre, Grease-style climax, before giving us a few twists that will have the Ghost community theorising and crying for the next several months. It feels like everything that’s happened within the band over the past two years is finally drawing to a close. It’s all led to this, but the film leaves just enough to keep us wanting more. Forge satisfies and starves us with the same hand.
For newer fans and the great unwashed, Rite Here Rite Now is a glittering, stomping and endlessly entertaining concert film. For the devout, it’s a true experience. A spectacle. It’s something close to religious ceremony; Midnight Mass for the sinners and the smoky-eyed. I had my doubts whether a gig of Ghost’s could be captured on the silver screen, but almost instantly I was transported into the Forum with thousands of hysterical masses. Forge’s directorial debut blurs the line between concert film and reality, while casting out any doubt that he’s a 21st century cassock-wrapped Elvis. Rite Here Rite Now is a triumph of musical cinema, and a testament to Ghost’s enduring majesty. Hallowed by their name.
GHOST: RITE HERE RITE NOW will be available to watch on Veeps on July 20th (Saturday) at 12pm PT / 8pm BST and will also feature an exclusive Q&A with Tobias Forge. So, if you didn’t catch it in cinemas the first time round or simply want to gorge on it again, you know what to do.