Robin Hardy :: The Wicker Man

The Wicker Man survives less as a film than as a form of collective memory resurfacing from the buried subconscious of Europe.

A police sergeant arrives on a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Summerisle, though, runs on rules of its own: pagan rituals, folk songs, harvest rites and ancestral belief seep into every corner of daily life, and as the investigation proceeds the line between rational order and archaic memory begins to dissolve.

Fifty years on, the film keeps generating opposed readings (Christian martyrdom, cosmic sacrifice, colonial critique, ecological allegory), and part of the reason is that it was assembled more than invented. Anthony Shaffer drew his screenplay loosely from David Pinner’s 1967 novel Ritual, with its policeman called to a remote pagan village and its missing child, after he and Christopher Lee paid Pinner £15,000 for the rights. Robin Hardy and Shaffer built Summerisle’s belief system through research into sources including Frazer’s The Golden Bough, that immense Victorian compendium of comparative religion, fertility rites and sacrificial kings. The folklore on screen is a kind of ritual archaeology: fragments of practices gathered from different places and periods, then reassembled into a coherent, plausible whole. Summerisle feels at once unreal and documented, a forgotten fold within European memory surviving outside time.

What unsettles is the serenity. Its people sing, drink, laugh, make love, celebrate body and landscape with a disarming ease, and the horror enters through the calm with which ritual violence is folded into the order of things. Folk horror, at root, is about the collapse of an unspoken contract between people and territory; on Summerisle that contract still holds, and it goes on asking a human price.

The film’s deepest provocation is its amorality. Summerisle is no simple satanic enclave and Sergeant Howie no unblemished hero, and the film reaches past that ambiguity towards something colder: nature recognises no human morality. The seasons have no ethics. Fertility does not tell innocence from guilt. Summerisle endures because it has accepted that impersonal logic; Howie goes on hunting for moral order in a universe governed by principles older than the Christianity he carries.

Read this way the final sacrifice loses some of its demonic charge and takes on something more tragically agricultural, a collective act born of the fear of famine, of the life cycle broken, of a bond with the land the modern world severed long ago.

The landscape does the rest. The cliffs, the cold sea, the wind and the rain-beaten fields all seem quietly party to the ritual long before it declares itself, which is why the film feels more current now than in the 1970s: it speaks of communities trying to force a lost equilibrium with nature back into being, even through violence.

There is a quieter, psychological register too. Every certainty that defines Howie (religion, sexuality, law, authority) thins out as Summerisle draws him into its theatre. The detective story is turned inside out, since he is the object of the investigation, tested for purity and virginity from the start.

The film still disturbs because it hints that beneath modernity there may persist collective forms of thought individual reason can no longer hold. Summerisle works because everyone shares the same myth. Howie stands entirely alone.

When the wicker effigy ignites against the sunset the film touches an image at once ancient and post-apocalyptic. Howie sings hymns as the fire climbs; around him the islanders go on celebrating the harvest, no hatred in their faces, only the fear of a failed season.

The afterlife of the film has its own dark rhyme. British Lion, ailing and recently taken over amid fears of asset-stripping, cut the film and released the shortened version as the lower half of a double bill with Don’t Look Now. Much of the material removed subsequently disappeared. Legend still has it that discarded elements ended up as landfill beneath the M3 motorway, though their actual fate remains uncertain. British Lion had, fortunately, sent a long version to Roger Corman in America for his opinion, and the print he retained later became crucial when Hardy attempted to reconstruct the film. Christopher Lee, who waived his salary and called Lord Summerisle one of the finest roles of his career, went on championing it for decades. A picture that so nearly disappeared now feels like rural memory itself resurfacing, the recollection of an age when survival still hung on climate, harvest and the unreadable will of the land.