re:mote voices

Title: The Wicker Man
Cast: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland, Ingrid Pitt
Director: Robin Hardy

Perhaps strangely, I have just seen the cult classic The Wicker Man for the first time. I had heard vague things about it, seen references to the climactic scene in other media (most memorably, the last volume of Grant Morrison’s Invisibles). These kind of things had suggested that The Wicker Man was something of a horror film, but anything I knew hadn’t really prepared me for the unsettling and disturbing experience that awaited me.

It is possible that this could be considered a spoiler, but I think it is only fair to warn others of things that I wasn’t warned about. Which is, essentially, that The Wicker Man is a musical. Worse than that, it is excruciatingly twee, with every opportunity taken to burst into song, and periodically dance. The material presented here is the kind of material I loathe, I really cannot abide this kind of folksy music, regardless of the fact that the intent is to reinforce the idea of how outrageously pagan the whole island is.

A policeman on the mainland gets a letter telling him about the disappearance of a young girl on a private island off the Scottish coast. This sends the pompous and self-righteous Sergeant Neil Howie off to Summers Isle to investigate. From the start the devout Christian is shocked by the rituals of the island, being more about earth rituals and fertility rites than the proper worship he expects. Initially the islanders lie to him, there was no such girl, but somehow he is drawn in, a little hook at a time. The whole while he is bombarded with the awful music, staying at the Inn he is forced to endure nightly jam sessions in the bar below his bedroom.

As well as the final scene, there is some interest to be gained from a number of scenes. The children of the island carrying death from the village, which echoes similar scenes in Carla “speed” MacNeil’s Finder: Sin Eater Vol.1. Then there are things like the non-consecrated churchyard, with each grave having a tree planted, and one having the memorable engraving “protected by the ejaculation of serpents”. The culmination of the whole festival, with the islanders all in animal masks and the like, is effective and evocative – ideas like the animal masks being echoed in all sorts of fiction over the years, from Moorcock’s Hawkmoon to Aylett’s masked bank robbers.

The film was made in the early 70’s and it shows, leaving no doubt that The Wicker Man has become considerably dated. Not only in the quality of the film stock, but also in some of the concepts it embodies about religion and the like within Scotland. However there remains something effective about the film, certainly with all that bloody singing I would have been crawling into the wicker man and setting a light myself!