By John MacLeod The real story of a horror masterpiece...
After 43 years, The Wicker Man is still a benchmark in British cinema, its dissection of the nature of evil at once visceral and intellectual
IT is one of the most terrifying films ever made – though not a drop of blood is spilled. It was so despised by its production company that (locking its incandescent auteur out of the cutting room) they hacked it ruthlessly and finally released it as a B-feature.
It’s an astute study of religious cultdom that has, more than 40 years on, itself become a cult – and eclipsed everything else its director ever did.
Robin Hardy died on July 1 at the age of 86 – knowing, despite two other rather lame pictures and a couple of steamy novels, he would be remembered only for The Wicker Man, long esteemed as one of our best post-war British movies and among the finest horror films ever made.
It was by his own post-production endeavours – for, on initial release, it was panned by puzzled critics and died at the box office – that The Wicker Man nevertheless won its apotheosis, winning acclaim as early as 1979 and, by 2003, a worldwide legion of faintly sinister fans and the abiding ker-ching of Dumfries and Galloway tourism.
And it has, besides, begotten its own mythology – that Rod Stewart tried frantically to buy out the film and destroy all prints, lest everyone see girlfriend Britt Ekland’s bare bottom, or that cans of the long-lost original negative are buried in the foundations of the M3.
But its status endures. Books have been written about The Wicker Man and there have been famous conferences and seminars. The late Sir Christopher Lee (who played the mesmerically villainous Lord Summerisle with utter relish) always thought it the finest film he had been in and certainly the best scripted.
Even if you have seen it many times and know the ending – with its huge twist – it never loses its power to unsettle. It asks huge questions about, for instance, the degree to which all religion is no more than a social construct or how human evil can be at once delusional and cosy.
One of the film’s most unnerving scenes is in a very Scottish sweetie shop – and, if you come from a Western Isles background, it is an infinitely chilling glimpse of what, granted renascent and implacable paganism, they could again become.
The picture’s plot may be simply told. Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Police, very religious and distinctly stuffy and played brilliantly by Edward Woodward, is sent to Summerisle in the Hebrides (a lush little place ‘famous for its fruit and vegetables’) after reports of a missing girl, Rowan Morrison.
He disembarks from his little seaplane to find himself met at every turn by sly smirking Hebrideans, all of whom deny Rowan ever existed; stared at ominously wherever he goes.
On his first night, though sorely tempted, he heroically resists a determined bid to seduce him by the landlord’s daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland) – for Sergeant Howie disapproves of sex before marriage.
And he is shocked both by the orgiastic rites he glimpses everywhere he goes, the heathen folk medicine (live toads are swallowed as a cure for sore throats) and the fly, tittering attitude of islanders at every turn to what is, potentially, a murder inquiry.
His central protagonist, though, is the laird, Lord Summerisle, whose Victorian forebear not only created new strains of apple trees and so on that prospered this far north but, we learned, closed the church and brought his tenants back to the ‘jollier old religions’.
The encounters between those two determined men – the sleek, flamboyant laird and the humourless Howie, the latter now trapped on the island as his aircraft has been mysteriously sabotaged – is at the moral heart of The Wicker Man, Lee’s character at once the cleverer of the two and self-evidently, silkily wicked. ‘Himself born of a virgin,’ he sneers of Howie’s Christ. ‘Impregnated, I believe, by a ghost…’
HOWIE finally grasps – when he finds a photograph of Rowan’s mother May as Harvest Queen, with a pathetically thin harvest – that this is almost certainly a plan of human sacrifice. Unfortunately, the intended victim is not the child, but him – a man ‘with the power of a king,’ a man who is a virgin, a man who is a fool.
He blunders straight into the trap, is seized by the joyously crazed community and, alongside assorted livestock, is burned to death in a vast wicker-cage sculpture of a man as all Summerisle deliriously sings Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu…
The story behind The Wicker Man began because Christopher Lee, an accomplished actor, was tired of roles in the Hammer Horror series. He met screenwriter Anthony Shaffer and the plot thickened quickly to include Robin Hardy, a struggling but ambitious director, and Peter Snell, head of British Lion Films.
But the creative heavy lifting fell to Hardy and Shaffer, who were eager to move away from the schlocky tropes of horror cinema at the time. ‘Tony and I were great horror film buffs and used to see lots of the original Hammers,’ Hardy later recalled.
‘We wondered why it was that they always centred on pentacles, garlic, stakes in hearts and all those other things to do with black magic.
‘We thought it would be fun to go back to the religion on which all this hokey witchcraft stuff was based – the old religion – and recreate a contemporary society that was pre-Christian.’
They happened on a novel by David Pinner, Ritual, in which a pious policeman is called to investigate what seems to be a ritual murder, and snapped up the rights. Shaffer rapidly decided the novel’s plot would not readily make a screenplay and discarded all but that central idea.
Who really pulled a credible storyline together the two men always sharply disagreed. (They finally took joint credit for the script and a subsequent, rather sordid novelisation.)
Sober observers, though, credit Shaffer, who certainly wanted the film to be ‘rather more literate’ than the typical horror flick – indeed, The Wicker Man is all the more powerful for its lack of violence, blood and guts – and researched paganism heavily, once he chose a theme of sacrifice. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough was an important source on ‘jollier old religions’. The idea of the Wicker Man itself Shaffer gleaned from Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars.
This authenticity – and a wellrealised contemporary setting – gave the finished film added punch, capped by Hardy’s subtle direction and the building sense of unease and dread (for no obvious reason) as Sergeant Howie stumps about.
They need, beside, good locations for shooting. In fact, apart from the haunting opening titles, as Howie flies forth on his mission – when we see some particularly jaggy bits of Skye – nowhere in the actual Hebrides was used for The Wicker Man.
The film was largely shot in Galloway, in villages such as Gatehouse of Fleet, Newton Stewart, Kirkcudbright. Culzean Castle in Ayrshire features, and Creetown in Dumfries was also used, though a convincing West Highland atmosphere was cleverly foregrounded by using Plockton in Ross-shire for Sergeant Howie’s landing, with local extras.
Casting was trickier. The Howie role was turned down first by Michael York and then by David Hemmings. Edward Woodward was a TV actor best known for Callan, who would go on to attain international acclaim years later in The Equaliser.
Some horror movie veterans were roped in – Diane Cilento as the island’s unsettling schoolmistress and Ingrid Pitt the local registrar and librarian. Britt Ekland’s recruitment might have
been thought rather a coup. In fact the chief reason she has come to hate The Wicker Man is ‘there was very little of me in that film’.
Given her marked Swedish accent, Hardy made the ruthless decision to have all her dialogue and the celebrated song – there is a lot of singing in The Wicker Man – dubbed by Scots chanteuse Annie Ross; and, given Ekland’s visible pregnancy, two body-doubles were roped in for the no less celebrated nude scene.
THIS scene which, albeit indirectly, led to former justice secretary Michael Gove’s brief screen career alongside Lee. Gove, a university friend of Justin Hardy, son of Wicker Man director Robin, made his only movie appearance in Justin’s screen debut, a little noted film entitled A Feast At Midnight.
Justin and Gove were huge fans of The Wicker Man (Gove would later write that the sight of Ekland’s dancing ‘has a powerful effect on a teenage boy’s mind’), and insisted Lee was also cast in the film. Lee, always the gentleman, accepted. The atmosphere on the set of The Wicker Man was fraught, for the film was made at a time when the British movie industry was practically on its last legs. British Lion Films had just been bought by the wealthy John Bentley when production was approved and was sold to EMI before it was finished.
The budget, then, was mean; some of the company, including Christopher Lee, worked without pay. Though set in spring, shooting began in October, so everyone was chilly and the crew spent untold hours gluing artificial leaves and blooms to bare trees.
There was much conflict on location; high temper, prodigious drinking. And things grew worse still – for, on completion, the bosses hated it. New executive Michael Deeley (and Lee dined out on the tale for the rest of his life) said it was ‘one of the ten worst films’ he had ever seen.
They demanded a more upbeat ending: might not a providential downpour quench the flames and save Howie’s life? They demanded cuts. Hardy reluctantly trimmed away 20 minutes – and, when he would slash no more, his superiors took over and did it for him. The Wicker Man was finally released as a faintly jerky 87-minute flick and as second feature to Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. No effort was made to promote it – apart from Robin Hardy himself – and critics were unenthused. It wasn’t even shown in cinemas outwith London.
It was not Britain that finally made The Wicker Man a classic, but America, for after the initial flop Hardy managed to find a relatively unmangled print – a 99-minute version, originally sent to horror mogul Roger Corman – and learned that the US rights had been sold on by Warner Bros to a smaller and much friendlier outfit, Abraxas.
Hardy persuaded them to rerelease something much nearer his own version of The Wicker Man, cleverly roped in noted American churchmen to discussing its merits on the chat-show circuit and so on and – in a much more religious country and with the New Age movement well under way – The Wicker Man at last prospered.
By 1977 one influential magazine hailed it as ‘the Citizen Kane’ of horror movies; by 1979, critics were unabashedly describing it as a ‘classic’. And for the rest of his life Hardy industriously promoted it, searching through decades for more missing chunks of the film – there have been at least four versions of it.
The Wicker Man works, as Allan Brown argued in a 2000 book about the picture, because of two brilliant inversions of the horror genre.
NORMALLY, those terrorised are in a small, innocent community, confronted by an evil intruder; and, normally – for in recent decades the main market for ghoulish flicks has been loved-up teenagers – it is the naughty and sexually active who are picked out for death.
But, in The Wicker Man, Sergeant Howie is the moral agent for good and, in the end, his chastity costs him his life. ‘The power of the film, which is considerable, is in the feeling the audience shares with Woodward’s character,’ insisted two critics in 1999. ‘That he is the outsider, a butt of jokes – the community knows what he does not, that he is doomed. The landscape of the British Isles is seen imaginatively as a place where anything might happen in the broadest of daylight.’
In many ways, as Brown has argued, its production is a bleak moral tale of how not to make a classic movie – the blunders in timing and location, the cat fights on set, the uncomprehending executives who butchered the final print and managed to lose the original of what is now a hugely lucrative film.
Yet The Wicker Man endures, largely because Shaffer took it so seriously, researched it scrupulously and was determined to make people think. ‘It’s stood the test of time because it’s about ideas,’ film historian Jonny Murray reflected in 2003. ‘It engages you on an intellectual level. It’s about paganism: the clash between superstition and modernity; authority and sexuality.’
Were it released today, Christopher Lee always insisted, ‘it would collect Oscars for best film, direction, photography... the most remarkable screenplay’. Essentially it haunts, as one shrewdly observed, because it reminded him of the ‘village where I grew up and a witchy forgotten past that seeps through our culture despite many attempts to stop it’.