The Wicker Man is, as testified to previously, suffused in a dreamy, through-the-looking-glass ambience. There are pagan musicians today who still play songs from the movie, just because the film remains such an important touchstone for many in our community. The soundtrack to the movie is also quite good, adding to the appeal. “There’s a bit of validation that comes from seeing yourself on the big screen, even if it's not a completely positive portrayal. “ The Wicker Man was also one of the first movies to feature scenes and ideas common in modern paganism,” he continues. Indeed the latter, with its traumatising scenes of ritualistic sacrifice unfolding in the crisp daylight, explicitly doffs its flower crown to Hardy’s masterpiece. There are clearly echoes of The Wicker Man in the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert (although that event’s founder, Larry Harvey, always denied an explicit debt), and in modern shockers such as Gareth Evans’s Apostle and, especially, Ari Aster’s Midsommar. The idea of paganism as a bulwark against the corruption forces of modernity can also be traced in part back to The Wicker Man. Even Broadchurch carries some of that haunting sense of the jarring bleeding into the everyday. Without The Wicker Man there would be no League of Gentleman (the Edward half of the Edward and Tubbs duo is Reece Shearsmith’s homage to Lee).
The idea of Britain as full of weird little communities, with their customs and their secrets, can be traced back to the shores of Summerisle. The Wicker Man also spawned its own genre of the English uncanny. “It is an American songwriter heading a group of British musicians working with Middle English chants, rowdy pub singalongs, erotic ballads, psychedelic guitar solos and creepy nurses rhymes.” “The soundtrack is really unusual,” says David Colohan of “new weird” band United Bible Studies, whose music is influenced by Giovanni’s Wicker Man score, which he recorded with the group Magnet (assembled especially for the project). Max Porter’s recent novel Lanny, for instance, builds on The Wicker Man by drilling into the rural British psychosphere and drawing a connection between present day social strife and the country’s dimly remembered pre-Christian past. Its impact has, in addition, spread to literature. And if you cheat and lie to people, it creates ill feeling all around.” “People were not really nice to each other,” she told The Independent in 2001. Its biggest star, Britt Ekland, hated every moment on set. Plastic apple blossom trees had to be procured to conceal the fact a film ostensibly set in spring was being shot in deepest November. The director, Robin Hardy, was in the process of having a huge falling out with its writer Anthony Shaffer (who’d had a hit with the play Sleuth) and production designer Seamus Flannery. Unsurprisingly, more than a few of those entangled in the project were convinced they were headed for disaster.īritish Lion, the studio which had bankrolled The Wicker Man, wanted to bury it (hence the lack of a press screening – and Lee’s urgent phone calls to critics). Even in 1973, when the last vestiges of the hippy dream lingered, this was all deeply bonkers. There is singing, choreography and – in a later cut – footage of snails engaged in a mating dance. For a horror film, it breaks all the rules.
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