Summerisle’s response is confident, supremely confident, confident to the point of madness: “Well, don’t you understand that if your crops fail this year, next year you’re going to have to have another blood sacrifice? And next year, no one less than the King of Summerisle himself will do! If the crops fail, Summerisle, next year your people will kill you on May Day!” “I know it will,” Summerisle replies in his booming baritone. It’s against nature! Don’t you see that killing me is not going to bring back your apples?” He turns to his chief captor. Fruit is not meant to be grown on these islands. Your crops failed because your strains failed. Unless Howie can talk his way out of it, which he tries desperately to do in the moments before he is marched off to his doom. It’s he who they’ll burn alive in the wooden colossus called the Wicker Man. A virgin invested with the law-enforcement powers of a king, a fool they duped into coming to them willingly, he is the sacrifice they’ve awaited. Young Rowan Morrison isn’t really missing. No, they don’t, because they all know the real story. Don’t they care that one of their own is missing, dead, or perhaps still alive and awaiting human sacrifice to bring those crops back? British Lion Film Corporation Howie’s suspicions seem justified, his concern over the children of Summerisle admirable, while the locals’ behavior seems less harmlessly horny and free-spirited, and more sleazy and sinister. That’s when the trick is revealed: The protagonist we found insufferable is right, and the pagans we found enticing are wrong.
Howie discovers this himself while he hunts for the missing girl, whose fate the townsfolk alternately lie and act blithely unconcerned about. “Disastrously so,” Lord Summerisle eventually admits. After a few generations, both projects were a resounding success. In order to cultivate happy but hardworking laborers, he reintroduced the old gods to the townsfolk, bringing pagan light and lust into their hardscrabble lives. Urbane, worldly, slightly hipsterish in his mustard-colored turtlenecks and wild Beethoven mane of hair, Lord Summerisle is the grandson of a Victorian scientist who developed a special strain of apple that could thrive in the island’s harsh climate. Howie, who reacts to sex ed and paganism the same way he’d react to an ax murderer. He’s a cheery chap, especially in comparison to Sgt. Presiding over it all is the towering aristocrat Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee, relishing his role in what he’d go on to call the finest film he ever made). May Day festivities bring all activity to a halt as the townsfolk prepare a ritualized sacrifice in honor of the sun god and the goddess of the fields. Girls are taught about phallic symbols in school and cavort naked over a fire in hopes of bearing a god’s child. Young men are deflowered by the innkeeper’s daughter, an avatar of the love goddess, while the pub crowd listens in. Summerisle, he finds, is home to a thriving community of neo-pagans, who honor the old Celtic gods and traditions primarily through sexualized fertility and virility rites. So when he is summoned to the island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a missing girl, the discoveries that shock him delight us. He’s an upright lawman from the Scottish Highlands, a devout Christian who’s saved himself for marriage well into adulthood. Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is the type of cop who’d bust a Wicker Man audience member for possession.
The film, loosely adapting David Pinner’s novel Ritual, presents the movie’s audience - assumed to be horror buffs, occultists, and the midnight-movie crowd - with a protagonist they couldn’t possibly sympathize with less, and an antagonist who hides in plain sight until revealing an insidious rhetoric that, for new viewers, would echo much of what we hear today. The Ring poses as a murder mystery, The Babadook as a confrontation between a broken family and a supernatural entity, but in each case the endings complicate and confound our expectations of how such stories are meant to conclude.īut The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror film, is the trickiest of the lot.
The Blair Witch Project is less about the witch than the project, and how frightening viewing life through a camera can make the world beyond the lens. Get Out rips the façade off a family of wealthy, West Wing liberals to reveal nightmarish cruelty and racism. The Wicker Man plays tricks on you, as many great horror movies do.
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