The Wicker Man (1973)

In the wood there grew a tree, and a fine, fine tree was he

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal to the teenager on your sofa about the teenager you once were? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator Pitch

Devout Christian Sergeant Howie (Ewar Woowar) of the West Highland Police flies to the Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate reports of a missing girl, Rowan Morrison. He is horrified to discover that under the leadership of Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) the island has abandoned Christianity and reverted to the worship of pagan gods. No one will help him in his enquiries, and he begins to suspect that Rowan has been abducted to be sacrificed on May Day. The truth, however, is even more horrifying than he imagined. Especially for him. Oh God! Oh Christ!

The Wicker Man is a folk horror movie. Indeed, it’s probably the folk horror movie. The two other key folk horror films from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s — Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) — are both period pieces. The Wicker Man, however, is set in contemporary ‘70s Scotland, and thus most perfectly exemplifies what the genre was about: the tussle between the modernist mainstream and the atavistic counter-culture.

The hippy youth of the late ‘60s had rebelled against state Christianity, consumerism, and the wipe-clean space-age aesthetics of the early decade. Instead, they embraced esoteric beliefs, environmental consciousness, and run-down farmhouses in the misty Celtic fringe. Folk horror plots dramatise this opposition using a recognisable template: a (masculine) figure (representing authority and reason) arrives in an out-of-the-way community. He discovers that the community has abandoned contemporary beliefs for something ancient, something identified with the rural, the feminine and/or the occult: pagan rites, disquieting magic. The incomer is set against the community in a struggle between Christian civilization and pastoral idolatry, the Apollonian and the Dionysian (see also The Secret History, of course).

In Blood on Satan’s Claw, the conservative traditional authorities win. They slaughter all the sexually promiscuous and heretical kids, as millions of sclerotic uncles had been wanting to do for a whole decade by that point. But in The Wicker Man, the forces of law and order are defeated by unorthodoxy and unreason.

A word of warning: I am going to assume, from this point, that spoilers don’t matter. This is because people tend to think one of two things about The Wicker Man: that it is a silly, old fashioned piece of hokum with irritating fiddle-di-dee music; or that it is something to be watched religiously at least once a year.¹ You either don’t care, or you already know the plot and, indeed, all the lyrics to the ‘Maypole’ song.

Given the template for the folk horror plot, the film wrongfoots the viewer in at least two ways. The first trick is played on the audience via Sergeant Howie himself. He has come to Summerisle on the track of a missing girl, Rowan Morrison, but his investigation is curiously fruitless (pun intended, iykyk).² Nobody has heard of her; nobody recognises her photograph. What Howie is discovering is that the whole village is entirely pagan. The local church has been abandoned; the children are taught magic in school; and the fields are full of locals rutting away in pale-bottomed slow motion.

Howie puts these things together with numerous dark mutterings about the May Day celebrations and how he ought to leave the island before they start, and concludes that Rowan has been abducted so that she can be sacrificed on May Day. The audience believes this too. That is how these films work, right? Especially cheap British horror movies from studios like Hammer and Amicus.

Wrong. There is indeed going to be a human sacrifice on May Day, but Rowan is merely the lure who draws the sacrificial victim to the island. Instead, the victim will be a symbol of authority and modernity, a practising Christian, and a virgin: it will be Sergeant Howie himself. He is anointed, bound, and burned up inside a giant wicker figure on the cliff tops.

The second twist, though, subverts the folk horror model in a more profound way. The film proposes that Sergeant Howie, despite his sea plane and smart police uniform, is not the figure of modern rationality he appears to be. Instead, it is his preferred form of mysticism that is outmoded. His Christianity is presented as an ancient belief, no longer fit for the times. His faith in both the Church and the law, and his inability to distinguish between the two, mark him out as a relic, a man without the cultural sensitivity and broadmindedness required by the ‘70s. Lord Summerisle explains that his grandfather invented their religion in the nineteenth century, apparently patching it together out of scraps of Fraser’s Golden Bough. Compared with Christianity, this is a contemporary religion for sexy modern people, a handy and practical faith for the new age.

Delights

Director Robin Hardy surprised the crew halfway through filming by announcing that the film was going to be a musical. It’s not, of course, but it includes a great deal of (all together now) diegetic music, a mixture of folk and pseudo-folk tunes composed by Paul Giovanni. It has a peculiarly and specifically ‘70s sound, evoking long embroidered skirts, corn dollies, and electric kettles decorated with wheat stalks and harvest mice. Anyone who was a small child at the time will have a deep atavistic response to the maypole scene, which is basically a ‘70s kindergarten music-and-movement session, all florid hand gestures and man-made fibre flares. Indeed, a great deal of the appeal of the film for me is glimpsing again those settings of my childhood. It is a montage of nostalgia triggers: Lord Summerisle’s mustard rollneck, the bare, smoke-stained walls of the pub, the Victorian oddments still moldering in forgotten corners.

Discomforts

This also includes a great deal of period nudity, including Britt Ekland’s stunt bum. Ekland had agreed only to top-half nudity in the scene where she lurches about her bedroom in the nip, testing Sergeant Howie’s chastity. So the crew waited until she was back in her trailer before getting someone else in to double as her bottom half.

To be fair, the film is relatively restrained with the (inevitably female-only) nudity. Even the girls jumping over the fire between the standing stones are wearing body stockings, despite Lord Summerisle’s advice: ‘It’s much too dangerous to leap through a fire with your clothes on.’ Overall it is (marginally) less sexist that most of its contemporaries, like Hammer Horror.

Can we show the kids?

Because you’re going to want to, aren’t you? The Wicker Man is about a forgotten population treasuring a lost culture in the teeth of contemporary mores; it is basically the story of Gen X’s midlife.

The film was reasonably well received and well regarded on release, but then largely disappeared from popular culture until it was ‘rediscovered’ in the late ‘80s by a younger audience. In 1988 it was the first film in Alex Cox’s BBC 2 cult film series Moviedrome, a screening that included some previously unreleased footage.

It has since acquired all the folklore that a cult movie must, including multiple different versions.³ It has become a touchstone for a certain kind of Gen Xer: one who has a treasured copy of the Reader’s Digest Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, watches the M. R. James ghost stories every Christmas, and owns a couple of Ghost Box records.⁴ And like all generational touchstones, it almost certainly looks like a weird pebble to everyone else. Its importance might be too dependent on its context to be fully comprehensible to someone younger. If you need any further convincing of this, I refer you to the comments below my piece on Easy Rider.

Also, you’d have to be willing to sit next to your child as, on screen, the pub listens to Britt Ekland taking a teenager’s virginity and Christopher Lee soliloquises at a pair of snails slimily writhing over each other.

Is it still worth it?

There is a moment in her nude scene when Britt Ekland breaks the fourth wall. She has been writhing about her room, throwing herself sexily against the walls. Her bottom double has beaten, sexily, against Sergeant Howie’s door; Britt herself has sexily caressed some furniture and a picture, and then is momentarily caught without anything sexy to do and so tries to sexily fondle a stone homunculus. This is something that eludes even Britt’s formidable sexy-fondling talents.

Then, though, she looks straight up at us. The camera, caught out in its prurient peeping, recoils, backing out of the window to hang in mid-air, as Britt advances on us, still holding our gaze, singing:

Please come
Say how do
The things I’ll show to you?
Would you have a wondrous sight?
The midday sun at midnight

This invitation implicates the audience in the homunculus fondling. We too, like Howie, are invited to cross the border into this other world. Watching a film, singing an enchantment, praying to a god; these are all similar actions of imaginative and spiritual endeavour.

Lord Summerisle is very clear that his grandfather made up the faith the islanders follow. Here, the film is being admirably honest about the Victorian reinvention (and often, just plain invention) of British folklore and ‘traditional’ practices. Many of the references on which the film draws were patched together in their time; now the film patches them together anew. (Even the wicker man of the title is of dubious provenance. It comes to us via Caesar, who was in the process of conquering the Celtic tribes himself, and was therefore keen on any story that presented them in a bad light.) The film is suggesting that if one man can patch a religion together out of odds and ends of lore, then anyone can do it. How many of the ancient religions were founded by someone casting about for a decent god to motivate the farmers? How about this Canaanite storm god, Yahweh? He seems like a good bet. Might go the distance.

But the film isn’t really making an argument about specific religions. It’s careful to depict both sides as flawed: Sergeant Howie is intolerant, but upholds the law; the villagers are permissive, but homicidal. The important note is that Lord Summerisle knows his religion is fake, and yet still believes in it. Indeed, he believes in it so fervently that he is willing to sacrifice a policeman to gods invented by his grandfather. The film is saying something profound here, not about religion but about human nature and stories.

Our life is spent in stories. Our perception of the world is mostly made up in our brains, with just a little sense-checking. Our cognitive biases are stories that we use to make sense of too complex a reality. We know we can’t believe our eyes, and yet we trust them anyway. We know fiction is untrue, and yet we suspend disbelief. Or rather, we have to suspend belief in order to remember that fiction is untrue. Deep in the most fundamental parts of ourselves, we are unable to distinguish between the fictions our brain makes and the fictions it consumes. Our bodies react as if the unreal was happening. Involuntarily, we smile at the lovers on screen, tense for the thrills, jump at the scares. Some of us — it seems unlikely, but all things are possible — may even become aroused by Britt Ekland tentatively pawing a homunculus.

We watch a silly and old fashioned piece of hokum with irritatingly fiddle-di-dee music, and engage with it so fully that it becomes a cult of its own.

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Revered by a certain slice of Gen X almost as much as The Wicker Man: Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain

1. October for me, usually when we’re on holiday in a remote corner of Cornwall, where, so far, no one has tried to sacrifice us to ancient gods. A chap can have ambitions, though.

2. Alright, alright. The whole thing is only happening because the previous year’s harvest on Summerisle failed and the villagers now believe they need a sacrifice to appease the gods.

3. For what it’s worth, the version available on Amazon Prime has the opening sequence in church on the mainland, among other additions.

4. Me. It’s me. I’m describing me.