The Wicker Man, from 1973, was directed by Robin Hardy.
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BFA/Alamy Inventory Picture
The Wicker Man, from 1973, was directed by Robin Hardy.
BFA/Alamy Inventory Picture
The influential horror film The Wicker Man got here out Dec. 6, 1973. It will definitely impressed a complete subgenre often called ”people horror,” together with movies similar to 2019’s acclaimed Midsommer.
However when it was first launched, The Wicker Man was seen as an obscure cult basic – if it was even seen in any respect.
”For a really very long time, nobody cared about The Wicker Man,” says Grady Hendrix, writer of quite a few novels, together with How you can Promote a Haunted Home and the forthcoming Witchcraft for Wayward Ladies.
”It is a low funds film filmed in Scotland, a few police officer who goes to analyze the disappearance of a small lady on an outlying island,” Hendrix explains. ”He’s a religious Christian and is horrified to find that this island nonetheless practices pagan rituals to make sure that it has an excellent harvest the next yr.”
At first, the rituals appear innocent, even charming. Maypoles, a little bit of nude frolicking outdoor, discuss of a springtime competition. However the villagers’ actions flip more and more sinister. A lifeless hare, buried in a coffin. A masked procession to an historical henge, in grotesque costumes similar to stags, rabbits and frogs. Human sacrifice, it’s steered, is routinely practiced as a part of the faith.
The Wicker Man’s genesis, explains Hendrix, lies in a few books celebrating pagan-era rituals that supposedly survived in altered kinds: The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer and first revealed in 1890, and Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, from 1921.
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”They harkened again to a time after we have been extra linked to the land, earlier than modernity, earlier than all these machines and all these schedules and all these trains began messing every thing up. Again after we have been ’actual,’ good individuals who glided by the previous methods and worshipped the people spirits,” Hendrix notes dryly.
The connections in these books, from historical practices to modern ones are tenuous at greatest, Hendrix says, and far of it’s largely fabricated. However they knowledgeable — and proceed to tell — widespread tradition. The Golden Bough was regularly cited by director Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer as inspiring The Wicker Man.
Within the early Nineteen Seventies, The Wicker Man resonated with the back-to-the land motion and the rise of different religions similar to Wicca. The movie may also be understood within the context of a wave of low-budget horror films arriving within the wake of the worldwide trauma of the Vietnam Warfare.
Then within the Eighties and ’90s, a brand new technology found the film on movies and DVDs. Followers have been thrilled by its dramatic construction.
”Anthony Shaffer was an actual genius of building,” Hendrix says of The Wicker Man’s screenwriter, noting that in 1970, Shaffer’s Sleuth had received a Tony award for Greatest Play on Broadway.
”Sleuth was an enormous hit. It is principally a thriller inside a mousetrap recreation. It is stunning in the best way it unwinds. And The Wicker Man, regardless of being a really hippy dippy film that appears to maneuver at this shambling rhythm, has a climax the place you out of the blue notice you’ve been ambling together with the nice individuals of Summerisle all via the entire film. You have been wandering deeper and deeper right into a metal clockwork lure.
”Within the final scene is the place all of it snaps shut… There’s one thing so stunning and the way completely and meticulously it is constructed in order that you do not even see that it is constructed in any respect.”
The Wicker Man has seen a number of sequels since its preliminary launch. One notoriously unhealthy 2016 remake, written and directed by Neil LaBute, starred Nicolas Cage. In keeping with a 2006 story in The New York Instances, it aggravated the unique director.
”I believe it is a homage,” Cage stated on the time. ”It is a approach of us saying this can be a great movie. It isn’t us saying that we’re higher. If something, it’s a tip of the hat, and maybe it should encourage individuals to have a look at the unique once more.”
Radio story edited by Rose Friedman.