THE WICKER MAN: THE ESSENCE OF FOLK HORROR
Of the Unholy Trinity of genre-defining Folk Horror movies, The Wicker Man (1973) is most often cited. In 2008, Empire magazine ranked it at number 485 of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time and it inspires a continuing trickle of sequels and variants, a documentary book, the odd song and a roller-coaster ride at Alton Towers, which opened as recently as 2018. Stars Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward both rank it as their best film, and pilgrimages to the locations where it was shot must have given a boost to the Galloway tourist industry. No need to be a horror fan to enjoy the ingenuity of its redherring-strewn murder mystery structure – less a whodunit than a “what did they do and where’s the body?”
The attractions are a resonant jumble of pagan motifs, some memorably folksy musical numbers (there have even been ‘Sing-along-a- Wicker Man’ screenings) and a protagonist way out of his comfort zone in an isolated landscape (well, a small,
orchard-strewn Scottish island retaining a resolute otherness.) A close reading of the dialogue, however, reveals it as the joker in the pack, deconstructing the tropes of Folk Horror even before the term was used. Obvious in retrospect, its brilliantly bleak climax places its audience in the position of the unfortunate Sgt Howie, wrong-footed at every turn and floundering in misinterpretation (though few of us can claim the sacrificial status of being a kingly, willing, virginal fool.)
Like him, too, we have in our minds notions of ritual murders, read about and half-remembered. Possible real-life cases include the (still unsolved) 1945 Warwickshire murder of Charles Walton (see p34-41). After having his throat cut three times with his own slash hook, this 74-year-old agricultural worker was pinned to the ground with a pitchfork driven through his face, his blood draining into the earth. Chief Inspector Robert Fabian travelled from London to conduct an
apparently routine investigation, but years later, in his 1953 autobiography Fabian of the Yard, cast the events in a different light: “One of my most memorable murder cases was at the village of Lower Quinton, near the stone Druid circle of the Whispering Knights. There a man had been killed by a reproduction of a Druidical ceremony on St Valentine’s Eve.”
His enhanced account might, alongside Dennis Wheatley’s hugely popular occult novels, provide a background for actor/playwright David Pinner’s 1967 novel Ritual, where a puritanical Christian policeman investigates the murder of a girl in a remote Cornish village characterised by strange beliefs. Its film rights were sold to Christopher Lee who, along with director Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, became the driving force behind The Wicker Man, though the degree to which film is based on novel remains contested. The filming was bedevilled by issues of personality, logistics and casting. Britt Ekland had to have both her voice and her bottom dubbed, while Ingrid Pitt, wished onto the cast because of her relationship with producer Peter Snell, never convinces as a dowdy (albeit nymphomaniac) librarian. Lee was splendid as the island’s patriarch, Lord Summerisle, but his and Pitt’s involvement hardly contributed to an intended distancing of the film from the Hammer studio style. Filming of spring orchards took place during a cold, wet winter: cue yards of plastic apple blossom strung from bare trees.
Shaffer’s script delivers the essence of Folk Horror: A Christian policeman, Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward), investigates the case of a missing girl on an island where fertile crops depend on ancient rites. Now the crops are failing and a sacrifice is needed… The film, however, illustrates anything but a rural survival of the old ways. Its folklore offers a miscellaneous catalogue of pagan motifs, with eggs and hares, protective eyes, sympathetic magic, rites of sexual initiation, mummers, maypoles, sinister cakes, naked fire-leaping (almost – the girls wore body-stockings), sexy folk songs and, of course, a Celtic sacrificial ritual described by Julius Cæsar. The filmmakers clearly rifled every available source to create this patchwork – which process couldn’t be more appropriate for their (often misinterpreted) plot. Lord Summerisle tells Howie how in 1868 his grandfather, a freethinking Victorian scientist, spotted agricultural opportunities on a bleak island whose population made a bare subsistence from sheep and sea. He seeded not just the orchards but also the islanders’ minds, introducing a fabricated culture of “the old ways” maintained with cynical affection by his son and grandson. This isn’t survival; it’s economically inspired, paternalistically fostered revival. There’s an early clue when Summerisle refers to Willow (Ekland) as “Aphrodite” – classical Greece sitting oddly among “local” traditions, as does the decidedly non-rural concept of parthenogenesis. Over all presides the solar deity, a Sun-face reminiscent of the Roman military cult of Sol Invictus. If The Wicker Man defines Folk Horror, it’s with an implicit warning that the reconstructed tends to be much more accessible than the original.
dramatisations included both the overtly Folk Horrific witchcraft story The Ash Tree (1975), and A Warning to the Curious (1973), whose plot of place infused with the apotropaic power of buried relics was powerful enough to send many of us on the fruitless quest to find a real folklore source for its author’s invention. The pervasively eerie series The Owl Service (1969-70) put many of the familiar tropes to use in a “coming of age” drama, and younger viewers were also treated to a memorable overlap of motifs when Children of the Stones (1977) fused threads about standing stones (one of the easiest shorthand ways to signal Folk Horror intentions) with time-slips and occult knowledge.
Even Doctor Who put in an excellent hybrid candidate in 1971 (Jon Pertwee era) with The Dæmons. OK, the ancient burial mound turns out to contain a spaceship and the demonlike Azal belongs to a race of aliens and has been called up by an equally alien Time Lord disguised as the local vicar, but there’s also a white witch, an activated gargoyle and (in an interesting variation on ritual convention) the Doctor almost gets burned at the Maypole on the village green. The vital idea of sacrifice is there too – the fact that this series pre-dated
The Wicker Man demonstrates how pervasive these ideas had already become. The Dæmons plot fuses its folk horror with the sciencefictional notion that aliens have long since been involved in the development of humanity and in the process have accidentally coloured our fears and superstitions. If this sounds familiar it’s because another TV series had terrified an earlier generation with the same idea, albeit in an urban setting.
Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit was broadcast in 1959 when, according to my parents, it became a topic for conversation across the nation. The previous two Quatermass serials had played on fears of contagion and invasion via settings of worrying technological advance, but though this third outing, with its bug-like Martians and buried space-ship, must also qualify as science-fiction, it introduces
the uncannier notion that ancient racememories haunt our minds, finding distorted expression in our beliefs and mythologies. The final Quatermass series, shown on ITV in 1979, again has the planet under the thrall of (unseen) aliens who harvest the bodies of the young, hippyish, cult-hypnotised Planet People, inducing them to gather at Neolithic monuments (of course) for the purpose (see FT379:43).
THE MYSTERY OF THIS LAND
The message of all this could be “don’t go near the standing stones”, but Folk Horror can also deal with the bewitching and liberating aspects of an encounter with the ancient uncanny. Penda’s Fen, commissioned in 1974 from left-wing playwright David Rudkin, used the transcendent beauty of the Malvern Hills, the music of Edward Elgar, the imagery of angels and demons, the last pagan king of Mercia (the Penda of the title) and a series of dream visions and philosophical conversations to deliver a message about fruitful self-knowledge versus the diminution of experience offered by a corporate, class-ridden society. Public school sixth-former Stephen accepts his sexuality and ancestry while questioning the stultifying classical orthodoxy of his education, a process obviously aided by the mystically enfolding landscape. The power of the piece endures – in 2011 it was included in Time Out magazine’s 100 best British films, and described as a “multilayered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines. Fusing Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’ with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and prescient – ecological awareness.” [6]
The TV play also posits one of the most powerful ideas throbbing beneath that Folk Horror label:
The Reverend Franklin [Stephen’s father] is the author of an unpublished heretical manuscript ‘The Buried Jesus’, who extols not the plaster Christ of cathedrals but ‘the village god’ – pagan in the true sense, therefore – that he believes Joan of Arc may have seen as she burned. Speculating that ‘man may revolt from the monolith and come back to the village’, the father’s speech to his son becomes incantatory as, walking in the gloaming with the Malvern Hills behind them, he wonders ‘what mystery of this land, what wisdom’ died with King Penda as he fought his last battle against ‘the new machine’ of the institutionalised church.
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Here, Rudkin has definitively nailed the philosophy of the genre: that we have lost something strange and (though potentially terrifying) wonderful. I’m old enough to remember such films first time round, and can recall the sense of reinforcement they brought to feelings that powerful beliefs much older than Christianity were somehow encoded in the national psyche. 1960s hippydom was, after all, only slowly fading, and an ad hoc approach to mystical experience seemed highly attractive, even if it involved no more than a visit to standing stones, earth barrows or even the local antiquities display of a regional museum. The occult was fashionable, and this was an all-natural variant – though of course, you could go further.
June Johns’s romanticised biography of Alex Sanders, King of the Witches, had appeared in 1969, publicising a Pagan/ Wiccan tradition that, its subject claimed, was not a revival but the active survival of pre-Christian practices. He claimed to belong to a line of hereditary witches, but drew strongly from the ideas of Gerald Gardner, to the point of copying the latter’s own Book of Shadows, a miscellany of spells of which each original coven would have
The occult was fashionable, and this was an allnatural variant
its own variation, lovingly passed down the generations. The idea and original example were probably concocted by Gardner in the 1940s. Like Sanders, Gardner helped popularise the seductive notion of witchcraft as a suppressed pagan survival (see FT267:39, 343:56-57), but the concept had been inherited from a more scholarly source.
Sir James Frazer’s epic anthropological work of comparative religion, The Golden Bough (appearing in various editions and volumes between 1890 and 1915) had drawn on a huge historical and geographical range of religious beliefs and practices to conclude that beneath them all (including, controversially, Christianity) ran the common thread of the dying and reborn solar god/king whose sacrifice ensured the fertility of the land. Hugely influential as this work proved, its most direct effect on popular culture came in 1921 with the publication of The Witch-cult in Western Europe by esteemed archæologist, folklorist and Frazerian Margaret Murray (18631963; see FT364:38-39 and p34-41 this issue). Followed by The God of the Witches and (perhaps most tellingly) the article on Witchcraft in the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this promoted the witch-cult hypothesis, proposing that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress the survival of a pre-Christian, pagan religion revolving around the worship of a Horned God of fertility whom the Christian persecutors referred to as the Devil. Though academically discredited, the power of this idea re-surfaces in modern Wiccan practice and informs the Folk Horror notion that in some obscure and perhaps primitive nooks of the countryside there might still continue an unbroken tradition of “the old ways”, where seasonal offerings meant more than the local harvest festival.
THE SENSE OF THE PAST
Of course, one doesn’t need to believe this thesis in order to enjoy its use in the fictions of Folk Horror. It has also, in conjunction with feminist re-interpretation, helped create a sympathetic view of the witch not just as persecuted victim but also as Shamanic wise-woman and healer. Indeed, sympathy rather than horror characterises the eco-aware aspect of the genre, where ancient monuments and landscapes become sources of power and identity whose preservation is vital to our identity/ relationship with the past.
This sense of place/past may come easily in the context of Britain, but the idea has to be re-thought when considering American culture. The Salem witch trials represent an obvious incident of real, historical Folk Horror, but they also highlight a conflict of definition. The trials took place in the Christian – indeed, Puritan – society of (mostly) British settlers in Massachusetts. Their beliefs, and the violent need to suppress anything that looked deviant, had been imported with them and had little to do with a local landscape. Perhaps in the USA Folk Horror needs to be coloured by the culture and religion of Native Americans, which certainly spiritualised the natural world while lacking (precolonisation) the threat of any conflicting centralised or written authority. America, though, can claim many variations of haunted terrain, and the native/colonist clash of world views suggests its own definition of “the old ways”. The trope of building on an “ancient Indian burial ground” turns up in The Amityville Horror, The Shining and Pet Sematary (not to mention numerous cartoon parodies) while Steven King’s Children of the Corn offers a violent take on the notions of rural sacrifice/ fertility/evil. Perhaps the most distinctive piece of American Folk Horror, however, The spirit of Folk Horror animates recent films such as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England.
remains Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story The Lottery, a chilling evocation of ancient custom in a contemporary small town, which inspired a barrage of complaints when initially published in The New Yorker.
In “lit crit” terms, Folk Horror belongs under the umbrella of hauntology, creating imagined pasts that engender a nostalgia for the futures that never followed. We’re still re/creating it, with films such as the psychedelic Civil War drama A Field in England and via the enthusiastic output of actor/writer/TV pundit/fan Mark Gatiss. Not just novels but anthologies, studies and websites hone our definition, reclaiming a surprising variety of earlier examples for generic inclusion.
Even before it was named and defined, however, the concept had found a natural home in the pages of Fortean Times, where high strangeness with a rustic flavour has been explored, dissected and thoroughly enjoyed for years. Best place to find it remains the Letters page, which abounds with corpse-roads, fairy-led confusion, strange hummings, ancient remnants and time lapses. Folk Horror struck its chord because, even if we’ve never belonged to a Wiccan coven or tripped over a standing stone, we’re susceptible to just the kind of mood and atmosphere that lie at its core.
NOTES
1 In his 2010 BBC documentary series A History of Horror, Mark Gatiss grouped together Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man as the prime examples of the Folk Horror sub-genre. The BFI website refers to them as the ‘Unholy Trinity’. 2 The compendious website at https:// folkhorrorrevival.com/ includes a link to the extremely helpful article From the Forests, Fields and Furrows by FT regular Andy Paciorek; see also his piece in FT349:55. 3 http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot. com/2013/11/interview-piers-haggard.html
4 In 1968, Hammer was awarded the Queen’s Award to Industry in recognition of their contribution to the British economy.
5 In 2018 MR James authority Rosemary Pardoe edited A Ghosts and Scholars Book of Folk Horror, an anthology of recent stories in which the Jamesian mode was combined with a Folk Horror æsthetic.
6 www.timeout.com/london/film/100-bestbritish-films
7 www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/ features/quest-romantic-tradition-british-filmpendas-fen
✒ GAIL-NINA ANDERSON has lectured on the history of art at the universities of Newcastle, Northumbria, Nottingham and Sunderland, and the OU. She runs independent courses on art history, film and literature for adults Newcastle. A collection of her ghost stories is planned for 2020.