The satirical masterpiece goes well beyond what one expects from folk horror, with Edward Woodward as the priggish cop sent to investigate a pagan island
After 50 years, here is a re-release for that gamey satirical masterpiece of folk horror – although “prog horror” is perhaps a better description. Folk horror, like film noir, is a term that seems to have been first used by critics before film-makers themselves, but The Wicker Man is so much better and more distinctive than any film that comes under the folk-horror heading that it’s virtually a one-movie genre in itself. It now appears billed as a “final cut”: a restoration complete with the footage that was excised when it was released as a B-picture support to Don’t Look Now in 1973.
It is a brilliant conspiracy-chiller set on May Day on a remote fictional island off the Scottish coast, ruled over by the haughty laird Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), whose inhabitants are devoted to sinister pagan observances to preserve the annual fruit harvest on which their economy depends. The Summerislanders are variously polite and insolent towards a thin-lipped young copper from the mainland who has been alerted to the disappearance of a teenage girl by an anonymous letter. This is the fiercely respectable Sgt Neil Howie, wonderfully played by Edward Woodward, a stickler for the Christian religion, saving himself for marriage to his demure fiancee, and outraged and yet also faintly excited by the sensual abandonment he sees around him.
The film is a genuinely scary adventure in group psychopathology, carried off by director Robin Hardy with an inspired seriousness and density of imagined folkloric detail. It is all clearly inspired by Ira Levin at some level, but adapted by Anthony Shaffer from the 1967 novel Ritual by David Pinner, an actor-turned-writer who originally developed the story for Michael Winner and whose cop protagonist may owe something to a part that Pinner played in the West End: Sgt Trotter, from Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. (Like TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, incidentally, The Wicker Man is indebted to the images of death and rebirth from James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.)
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