"The Wicker Man reminds us that, however barbaric the practices of these villagers, they are more "alive" than post-industrial man will ever be..."

Take a sleepy Scottish village, a routine missing child case, and it all seems like another British tea-and-crumpets mystery.  But when the pagen roots of the isle come out and play, the case--and the movie--quickly become...

By PAUL KESLER

When Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man appeared in 1973, horror films had already entered a new phase. The dominance of Hammer Studios, which roughly extended from 1958 through 1972, was over, though certain films, such as Fox's The Legend Of Hell House, were still mimicking its austere British legacy. Something, seemingly, was in the air, even if horror cinema continued to function in apparent obliviousness to the outside world.

The Exorcist, also released in 1973, punctuated the fact that "the times were a'changing," not only in the real world, but in the circumscribed realm of commercial entertainment. Indeed, the suggested links in Friedkin's film between supernatural evils emanating from mid-eastern archaeological ruins and cinematic "protests" at Georgetown hinted that horror films might break from their usual insularity and embark on more complex themes. In the coming years other films, such as The Last Wave, The Stepford Wives, and Wolfen, began exploring aspects of social satire and semi-political consciousness that, in various ways, were new to the genre, or which at any rate had not been emphasized before.

The Wicker Man, for its part, stood alone. It was an independent film with few affinities to the trends connoted in The Exorcist, but which also broke significantly from nearly all horror films that preceded it. Was this, in fact, a "horror" film at all, or was it instead, like some of the early works of Peter Weir, a hybrid, which told its own tale in a completely different way?

The film proclaims its novelty as the opening credits appear--a plane flies over a river while a languorous Scottish ballad drones in the background. The plane soars over a weird and rocky landscape; the song then segues into something more humorous, a traditional ballad called "Corn Rigs and Barley Rigs." Ultimately, the plane angles down toward the middle of a river, and the occupant, a policeman-cum-minister played by Edward Woodward, shouts out to some villagers that he needs a boat. We are now at the island called "Summerisle."

On reaching shore, Woodward explains to some locals that he's looking for a missing child, a girl named "Rowan Morrison." The villagers seem puzzled when he shows them her photo, as though they never saw her before, though it's obvious from some of their furtive glances that they're hiding something. Unfazed, the policeman moves on, traipsing across the countryside to a nearby inn.

At "The Green Man" pub, Woodward repeats his appeals, showing Morrison's photo to several customers. But they merely echo the bewilderment of the men outside, shaking their heads slowly. Meanwhile, certain groups take up various songs, first a slow ballad, then a bawdy drinking song, while others (among them the seductive Britt Ekland) enter into dances and sensual gestures. Woodward is appalled, and seems ready to arrest the entire group for indecency. Nevertheless, still unable to confirm the whereabouts of the girl, he takes up lodging for the night.

In the second phase of the film, we witness a series of anecdotes. Woodward is shown to an upstairs room, while "Lord Summerisle" (played by Christopher Lee) introduces an adolescent boy to Ekland as a kind of sexual offering. Couples, nude or semi-nude, are seen outside the inn in various stages of orgiastic pleasure. Later on, Ekland shows up naked, gyrating sensually in a dance near Woodward's room, attempting to lure him to bed.

The following day, Woodward proceeds to the local school, again confronting an impasse when he questions the students about Morrison. He finds an empty desk, and checking the student roster, he sees the girl's name clearly indicated. Inquiries to the schoolmistress, meanwhile, elicit vague remarks about reincarnation, and an assurance that Rowan's body lies in the nearby graveyard. But the groundskeeper refuses to show him the corpse, and a librarian and photographer also fail to cooperate.

Things seem to be changing when the policeman finally tracks down May Morrison, presumably the missing girl's mother. But she divulges nothing, and when he questions Morrison's second daughter about the girl, she tells him that Rowan is a "hare" in the fields.

Exasperated, Woodward ends up in Lord Summerisle's castle, attempting to get permission to exhume the girl's body. "You suspect foul play," says Summerisle, implacably. "I suspect murder," replies Woodward, at which point Summerisle assures him he must go ahead. But the policeman does not leave, unable to fathom why Summerisle should be so "unconcerned." The latter makes clear, however, that the islanders could not possibly be responsible, since they are a "deeply religious people."

Still incredulous, the policeman remarks on the many perverse rituals he has seen, at which point Summerisle expounds upon the religious and sexual traditions of the island. "What religion could they possibly be practicing?" Woodward asks, referring to some women jumping naked through a bonfire. "Parthenogenesis," says Summerisle...just part of the ritual obeisance to the "gods" his people worship. "And what of the true God," asks Woodward, for whom so many people have devoted their lives? "He had his chance," replies Summerisle imperturbably, "and in modern parlance--blew it."

Summerisle then relates the history of the island--how it had been turned by his agronomist grandfather from a wasteland to a refuge. Over the decades, he says, the people had abandoned Christianity for a form of polytheism, which seemed better to suit his grandfather's ideals. You were brought up to be a "pagan," shouts Woodward contemptuously. "A heathen, perhaps," says Summerisle, patiently, "but not, I hope, an unenlightened one."

The film now enters its final phase as the policeman redoubles his search. Returning to the cemetery, he manages to open her grave, only to find a dead hare lying in the coffin. He hauls it back to the castle, where both the Lord and his wife pretend to know nothing. "Sergeant Howie," he says, "I think you are supposed to be the detective here."

The policeman then goes to the library for some research, discovering a book on ancient fertility rites. Many of the descriptions shock him, and as he compares the written accounts of "May Day" festivities with some photos on the library walls, he is obviously shaken. "Even these people can't be that mad," he mutters.

Eventually, it is clear to Woodward that Rowan is not dead, that she is being "hidden" somewhere as a sacrifice for the May Day celebration. He decides to secretly enter their festivities, at one point knocking the innkeeper unconscious, and wearing his costume for the May Day parade.

But things do not go as planned. The policeman finds Rowan on May Day, but the girl leads him to Lord Summerisle and the rest of the villagers, who quickly take him hostage. "It is time," says Summerisle, "to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man." This figure, an enormous human effigy made of twigs, is shown towering ominously on the crest of a hill as Woodward is led toward it. His arms are bound, and he is soon locked in a cage in the middle of the figure. Crying out with scriptural protestations, he vanishes in flames as the islanders roar their approval. "Summer is a-comin in," they sing, a suitably medieval lyric for this eminent sacrifice.

This summary, of course, can give no idea of the detail contained in the film, either anthropologically or visually--the entire film, in fact, was shot on location in Scotland, which adds to the realism of the enterprise. But it may be helpful to explore the cultural elements which make The Wicker Man such a vivid experience.

What initially strikes us is the way the film differs from the genre films that preceded it, not only those in the Hammer vein, but also those of the Thirties and Forties. Indeed, there is little in any of these films, not the Universal classics, nor most of those in the RKO or Monogram tradition, to prepare us for this picture.

Perhaps the closest thing to an antecedent is Val Lewton's I Walked With A Zombie, originally released in 1943. In this film, an American nurse abandons her domestic security for a stint in the West Indies, working for a planter on the island of San Sebastian. The natives, of course, are mostly Haitian peasants, for whom voodoo rituals are a way of life. At one point, when the nurse announces she will go to the "Home Fort" to release her employer's wife from her "zombie" sleep, a doctor tries to warn her. "These people are primitive," she says. "Things that are natural to them might shock and horrify you."

In Lewton's film, the nurse does, in fact, attempt a cure. But while this collision of ancient and modern cultures might seem to anticipate The Wicker Man, in Lewton this is merely a subtext. It is never exploited for its social implications, and is therefore little more than an interlude.

A more direct precursor might be Nicholas Roeg's film, Walkabout (1971), in which two white children explore the Australian outback, and in the process meet an aborigine who leads them across the desert. The heart of Roeg's film lies in the contrast between the destructive "civilization" introduced by Western colonizers and the remnants of tribal culture. But the film, like most of Roeg's work, seems detached--it works effectively from a conceptual standpoint, but fails to engage us emotionally. There is, moreover, no attempt in the film to present a detailed portrait of primitive life--it functions symbolically but obliquely, having more in common with a documentary like Koyaanisquatsi than with narrative in the usual sense.

It may, in fact, be a literary source, rather than a cinematic one, which furnished the greatest inspiration for The Wicker Man. This was Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery," first published in 1948, but which, apart from a mediocre TV adaptation, remains untouched by film directors. A case can be made, in fact, that The Wicker Man is an expanded version of the Jackson story, not an "improvement" in any real sense, but a powerful variation upon it.

This premise is strengthened by the fact that the scenarist for The Wicker Man, Anthony Shaffer, had earlier provided the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, in which a serial killer does away with women through strangulation. One scene from Frenzy, in particular, seems to anticipate one of the main elements in The Wicker Man--two inspectors are discussing the psychopath over a restaurant counter, and one of them describes the curious relationship between sexual and religious mania. They are frequently found together in the minds of serial killers, he says, and in The Wicker Man, we witness a colony of villagers who, in a curious twist, combine lechery with pagan religiosity.

This does not, of course, imply that Shaffer intended to negatively satirize the villagers of "Summerisle," but it does seem to indicate an interest in sexual and religious symbiosis. The Wicker Man expands upon this theme, but in a totally different direction.

"The Lottery," in any case, is more interesting than Frenzy for its links to Hardy's film. Like Shaffer's screenplay for Wicker Man, Jackson's story deals with villagers who have somehow remained confined within a "primitive" environment. Sacrifice is common, and takes place, like the human sacrifices on "Summerisle," as a means of restoring crops. "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon," says one villager to another, and when a girl is ultimately stoned to death at the end of the story, the primitive beliefs of the people are brought home with devastating impact.

It's quite possible that Shaffer had "The Lottery" in mind when writing his script for The Wicker Man, though it's greatly to his credit that he expanded on the plot-line, turning the film into a rich exploration of pagan culture. Shaffer also did significant research into anthropological sources for his script; The Wicker Man, for example, was an actual effigy used in ancient rituals for sacrificial purposes (as an interesting side light, see the BBC series, "The Celts," where a sketch of a Wicker Man is seen at one point to illustrate Celtic traditions).

Other elements lending color to the film are the maypole ceremony seen during the first half of the film, where villagers chant a ballad as an "homage" to fertility, and the dance around a bonfire during the visit to Summerisle castle--still another fertility practice. Fire, in fact, has often been linked in the primitive imagination with fecundity--see, for example, James Frazer's classic book on magic and religion, The Golden Bough, as well as Gaston Bachelard's Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

In addition, the on-location photography by Harry Waxman conveys a special aura of strangeness, not only in the interior scenes (e.g., the shots of copulating pigs, foreskins, and other oddities in the photographer's shop), but in the megaliths, plant-life, and jagged lineaments  of the Scottish countryside. It's doubtful that cinematography has ever been more perfectly matched with the underlying theme of ancient ritual. We might even say that on a psychic level, the "unnatural" landscape of Scotland mirrors the rites on Summerisle in the same way that the sets in The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari reflect the bizarre figurations of the unconscious mind.

The scenes of May Day rituals, too, furnish an ironic commentary on "naturalism" which lingers in the mind long afterward. We see, among other things, how the comic (in the guise of the clown, "Punch") is mingled with the horrific (a group of swordsmen ritually involved in a medieval game of roulette), and how it all takes place in an atmosphere of both happiness and dread. It is this frequent collision of opposites that gives The Wicker Man such power, and reminds us that the cozy, linear world of Western "civilization" often provides the advantages of "order" at the price of societal freedom.

We should never forget, however, that The Wicker Man has religion as its primary focus, and it is here that the film has most to say about the "real world" we live in. The policeman, after all, is fittingly obsessed with law and order, but the authoritarian aspects of this theme are linked with Western religion. It is no accident, in other words, that the "detective" in this film is both a sergeant and a minister. This highlights the links between religious and civil authority, and in the process forms a contrast to the culture of Summerisle. We're confronted, along the way, with the same question that lies at the center of Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor"--is "law"  inextricably linked with cultural "security"?

The Wicker Man reminds us that, however barbaric the practices of these villagers, they are more "alive" than post-industrial man will ever be. Its message may be that our world is, in fact, simultaneously safe and withered, that whereas Summerisle is content with an occasional human victim, we have sacrificed our souls for the dubious virtues of a structured existence.

In the final analysis, Hardy's film leaves us with the question of just how far we have come, and whether, looking back, it was worth it.

Thanks, Paul, for shedding some light on the dark themes behind The Wicker Man.  It may not be a horror film in the traditional sense, but its implications are horrifying all the same.

Article copyright © Paul Kesler

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