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, not invented. Anthony Shaffer drew his screenplay loosely from David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual — a policeman called to a remote pagan village, a missing child — for which he and Christopher Lee paid Pinner £15,000, and he built Summerisle's belief system out of Frazer's The Golden Bough, the great Victorian compendium of fertility cult and sacrificial king. The folklore on screen is therefore not decoration but ritual archaeology: fragments of real European practice 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. The community isn't governed by fanaticism in any modern sense; its people sing, drink, laugh, make love, celebrate body and landscape with a disarming ease. Horror doesn't enter through the monstrous — it 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 not paganism but amorality. British criticism has long noted its moral ambiguity — Summerisle is no simple satanic enclave, and Sergeant Howie no unblemished hero — yet the film reaches past ambiguity toward something colder: nature recognises no human morality. The seasons are not ethical. The harvest is not just. 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 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. Summerisle is less an evil society than one still trapped inside a sacred contract with the earth.

The landscape does the rest. In most horror, territory is backdrop; here the land watches the characters. The cliffs, the cold sea, the wind, 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. Howie isn't only killed; he is emptied. Every certainty that defines him — religion, sexuality, law, authority — thins out as Summerisle draws him into its theatre. The detective story is turned inside out: Howie never conducts the investigation, he is its object, tested for purity and virginity from the start. The sacrifice does not arrive suddenly at the end; it begins the moment his seaplane crosses the shoreline.

And this is why the film still disturbs — not because paganism returns, but because it hints that beneath modernity there may persist collective forms of thought individual reason can no longer hold. It is a film about religion, finally, and more about belonging: Summerisle works because everyone shares the same myth. Howie stands entirely alone.

When the wicker effigy ignites against the sunset the film touches something rare — 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 biological necessity and the fear of a failed season.

The afterlife of the film has its own dark rhyme. British Lion — ailing, freshly bought by an owner suspected of asset-stripping — cut it and dumped it beneath Don't Look Now on a double bill; the original elements were lost, and legend still has it the negative lies buried under the M3 motorway, the film about a body given to the fire rumoured to end as a body under the asphalt. It survived almost by accident: Christopher Lee, who called Lord Summerisle the finest role of his life and worked for free, championed it for decades, and Robin Hardy rebuilt a longer cut from a print Roger Corman happened to have kept. A film that so nearly vanished now feels like rural memory itself resurfacing from the buried subconscious of Europe — the recollection of an age when survival still hung on climate, harvest and the unreadable will of the land.