Folk Horror Season: The Wicker Man (Dir Robin Hardy 1h33m, 1973)

The Wicker Man has, itself, become a thing of folklore. Nothing-not the enjoyably naff Nicolas Cage Americanisation in the mid 2000s- nor the less laughable, more generally bad 2011 sequel, The Wicker Tree, nor its co-opting by heavy metal bands, neo-pagan festivities, sing-a-long screenings, and various director's cuts, restorations, Roger Corman-recommended edits, and fifty one years of reappraisals and cinematic homage-can take its towering presence from overshadowing horror cinema. Its tale of a virgin police officer sent to investigate murder intertwined with the festivities of pagan worshippers on a remote Scottish island, has not only maintained its power, but remains the high-tide mark of the British folk horror genre.

By the 1970s, Christopher Lee, long the recurring star of the horror films of Hammer Studios, is becoming aware that he has been typecast-Hammer are also falling on hard times. Lee wants, understandably, more interesting roles, and to break away from his stock trade in monsters, evil scientists, and Count Dracula, and turns to screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, soon to write the Tony-winning, and quickly adapted play Sleuth (1970), later a 1972 film. Together with director Robin Hardy, and head of independent, and distinctly British distributors, British Lion, Peter Snell, the quartet settled upon an adaption of Ritual, originally a script by David Pinner to be filmed by Michael Winner, in which a policeman, (to be played by John Hurt), investigates a ritual murder of a young girl in a remote village.

Relocating the plot from rural England to a Scottish island, and, with the quartet being collectively tired of the violent and gory sensibility of the ailing Hammer, so the film reframed the novel's search for the murderer around a more unsettling sense-the clash between paganism, using Frazer's The Golden Bough as an influence, and the modern Christian policeman sent to investigate. It is this that essentially drives the film; Edward Woodward's Howie arrives on the island in search of the missing girl, Rowan Morrison, to be met with indifference and, soon, hostility; much of the cast is formed of Scottish character actors, their jovial exterior belieing, as it becomes apparent the place is hiding, something, even before its nature is revealed.

Woodward gives Howie a sense of purpose and decorum: the restored cut, released six years after the hacked down original release, (in which it was the B-picture to the starkly brilliant Don't Look Now (1973), restores the sense of a man propelled by his faith and his authority to a place where neither carry any power. Howie soon, encounter by encounter, becomes aware of the unseemly nature of the island; Lindsey Kemp's landlord and his daughter, played by Britt Ekland (though voiced by Annie Ross and Rachel Verney, with miscellaneous stand-ins as well), are insidious influences, attempting to corrupt the devout and moral Howie. Once again, the presentation of the photograph of the missing Rowan leads to little response, and a growing sense of uncanniness, and the beginning of the film's more unsettling, and decidedly folk horrorish, elements.

The film's sexual aspects, for example, begin here; half-seen among the trees are couples whose form and matter-of-fact coupling disturbs Howie; it is the start of several sequences that reveal the loss of Christianity on the island. Seen through Howie's eyes, this is s a disturbing loss of innocence, the Christian virgin-and the audience of 1973, to whom Howie skews close- horror at a total loss of innocence. Ekland's Willow, in particular, is disturbing in her attempts to seduce the police officer, to his increasing distress, whilst the rowdy crowd in the bar seem unperturbed, and indeed, unmoved by his presence among them; it is also here that the film's musical elements, its songs and folk music covers, by actor Paul Giovanni, make their appearance, adding to the film's unsettling tone.

Whilst the power of the sequences, the irreligious Summerisle, has been dulled somewhat by the passing fifty plus years, they remain unnerving, evil, and insidious forces manifesting their power through not violence, through and in an unmistakably cult-like group mentality. At the head of this, of course, is Christopher Lee. In later years Lee would regard this role as his favourite film performance, and his role in driving the film is unmistakable, as well as his championing of it after its poor, if roughly edited, original release-the film's release has become folklore of its own, given the loss of its negatives in the mid 1970s and a chance rediscovery of the uncut film in Harvard's archives.

Lee simply makes this film. Much of this is down to his commanding presence: whilst used sparingly for much of the first half of the film, his control over the island is absolute, so that by the time that Lee makes his appearance in one of his best affable villain performances (1973 would also see Lee film his role as the titular Man with the Golden Gun in the Bond franchise (1974)), we are in no doubt as to what to expect from the nobleman. Yet, Lee surprises even here; his presence in the film ultimately boils down to the figurehead of Summerisle's pagan religion, and the lord of the Island, but Lee imbues this with a disarming charm, a seductive power that makes him seem reasonable, even when observing his naked worshippers at a nearby stone circle, or leading an outlandish party of worshippers on May Day, or simply discussing Summerisle's history with Howie.

Yet, Lee remains remote, his machinations, his knowledge veiled to us and to Howie, the affable villainy, the charm and wit of Lee's performance covering for the fact that he and his followers have seemingly murdered a teenage girl. It is this struggle between the Christian "good" and the pagan, or, as Christopher Lee's Summerisle would correct, heathen "evil" that drives The Wicker Man. This struggle forms much of the genuinely tense and smartly made middle-third to the film, in which the true nature of the island, its hidden secrets, its half-seen visitation by naked worshippers, and animal-headed cultists-much of which has entered cinema's cultural lexicon via The Wicker Man, and disconcerting.

Howie's arrival at the island's school is the film's approach in shorthand-the absent, but never acknowledged empty desk, the power of the-at this point, unseen, lord, the corruption, at least in Howie's eyes of the Christian teaching of a civilised Calvinist mainland, aghast as he hears the maypole, seen in the window of the classroom, be depicted as a phallic symbol. When the film finally reveals its hand, in its infamous finale, it is this conflict it returns to, in an ending that shocks as much as any of horror's greatest endings. The Wicker Man is daringly anti-religious, a stark piece of cinema in which this struggle between faith and paganism continues to make the film controversial-protested as recently as 2018, picketed by Christian fundamentalists as the film celebrated its 45th anniversary in the UK, and continues to bring in a new cult of fans every year.

Half a century on, The Wicker Man remains cult cult cinema; few films have, for example, enjoyed 50th anniversary concerts, a cameo, projected as part of the Opening Ceremoy for the 2012 Olympics, sing-a-longs, not to mention homages in films as disparate as Midsommar (2019), that feels like a modern reinterpretation of the film transposed to Sweden and to the modern day, and the work of Hardy's undeniable successor, Ben Wheatley, but it remains, above all, a quintessentially British film, and continues to haunt the cinema psyche.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

The Wicker Man is available via streaming on AppleTV, and on DVD and BluRay from StudioCanal in the UK and via streaming on AppleTV, and on DVD from Lionsgate in the USA

Next week, we set sail for the American leg of our folk horror season, as we join Robert Pattinson and Wilhelm Dafoe in The Lighthouse