The Wicker Man (1973)
There are films that earn their reputations quietly, through repeated late-night screenings, word of mouth, and a slow accumulation of critical reassessment. The Wicker Man is perhaps the defining British example of that process. Released in 1973 by British Lion Films, it arrived with almost no fanfare, was cut down by its distributor, and was initially paired as the lower half of a double bill with Don't Look Now. Decades later, it sits near the top of every folk-horror list going and is routinely cited as one of the strangest, most singular films ever to come out of these islands. Whether the reputation holds up is, of course, another matter entirely.
The premise is deceptively simple: a devout, strait-laced Scottish police sergeant travels to the remote Hebridean island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, only to find a community that denies she ever existed and operates according to its own pre-Christian set of beliefs and rituals. The collision between Howie's rigid Presbyterianism and the islanders' earthy paganism is where screenwriter Anthony Shaffer locates most of the film's tension. Shaffer, who had written Sleuth just a year earlier, brings the same taste for theatrical cat-and-mouse to the material, though here the arena is an entire community rather than a single house. Director Robin Hardy, making his feature debut, keeps things largely grounded and observational, trusting the strangeness of the setting to do much of the heavy lifting. It is a notable debut in the sense that Hardy never really followed it up in any comparable way, which has only added to the film's singular, slightly orphaned quality in his career.
The cast is well worth noting. Edward Woodward plays Sergeant Howie with a tight-wound rectitude that makes him both sympathetic and, at times, almost insufferable, which is probably the point. Christopher Lee, playing the island's cultured, charismatic laird Lord Summerisle, brings the kind of relaxed authority that only comes from years of commanding a camera (I also reviewed his earlier genre work in Dracula (1958), where a very different kind of menace is on display). Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, and Ingrid Pitt round out a supporting ensemble that leans into the film's peculiar, unsettling warmth, all smiles and bare feet and something not quite right underneath.
Cinematographer Harry Waxman shoots Summerisle, filmed largely on location in Galloway, with a bright, almost pastoral clarity that deliberately resists the murk you might expect from a horror film. The images are sun-drenched and open, which makes the material feel wrongfooted in productive ways: the colour and the light should be reassuring, and they are not. Paul Giovanni composed the film's folk songs, which are genuinely the strangest element of the whole enterprise. The songs sit somewhere between a genuine folk revival record and something heard in a dream, and they recur throughout the film with an insistence that lodges in the memory long after the plot details have blurred. Editor Eric Boyd-Perkins keeps the rhythm measured, allowing scenes to breathe at a pace that the marketing might describe as slow-burn, and which will test the patience of some viewers considerably. For companion pieces in folk-inflected or pagan-adjacent horror, see also The Babadook (2014) and Candyman (2021), both of which work in similarly loaded cultural territory.
I went into The Wicker Man expecting a cult classic, the kind of film people speak about in hushed, reverent tones, and I came away wondering what it was I had missed.
My overriding impression was that it is slow. It is meant to be a slow-burn, atmospheric piece, the dread building steadily as a mainland policeman digs into a strange island community in search of a missing girl, and I can see the shape of what it is going for. It simply did not land for me. The atmosphere everyone talks about never quite took hold.
What I kept thinking about, oddly, was Midsommar. The similarities are hard to miss: the outsider drawn into a close-knit, pagan-tinged community with its own unsettling rituals, and the creeping sense that something is very wrong beneath all the folksy welcome. The irony is not lost on me that The Wicker Man came first and more or less wrote the folk-horror template that Midsommar later drew on. But for my money, Midsommar does it better, getting under my skin in a way this never quite managed.
I would not call it a bad film. There is clearly craft and intelligence in it, and Christopher Lee, as ever, is a legend, bringing a silky menace to the island's enigmatic leader that is easily the best thing on offer. But I was disappointed, there is no getting around it, and it fell a long way short of what its reputation had led me to expect. Three stars, an influential and well-made film that, for me, has been comfortably surpassed by what it went on to inspire.
The Wicker Man occupies a genuinely odd position in British cinema: a film that was nearly lost, then rescued, then mythologised to the point where the myth and the film itself have become difficult to separate. Its influence on what has since been labelled folk horror is well documented, and the template it helped establish has been drawn on, refined, and in some cases considerably surpassed in the fifty-odd years since. As I noted in my review of Get Carter, British genre cinema of this era has a habit of producing films that feel both of their moment and somehow slightly outside of time, polished but unremarkable in some lights, totemic in others. The Wicker Man is the most extreme version of that quality. It is a film that clearly matters, that has left visible fingerprints all over the genre, and that continues to divide audiences depending on how much they are willing to meet it on its own unhurried, May Day-wreathed terms. The cult will go on. Whether you join it is, honestly, a matter of temperament.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1973 | Watched: 2026-10-10
Trailer
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