Occult Classic, the original Wicker Man

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Occult Classic
The thematic daring and genre-bending perversity of the original Wicker Man

by Graham Fuller
August 29th, 2006 12:38 PM

Whatever the fate of Neil LaBute's Yank remake of The Wicker Man—which Warner Bros. is releasing this Friday (without advance press screenings) —it's unlikely to generate the enduring passion and rancor inspired by the 1973 occult classic. Other British films, such as Peeping Tom, The Devils, Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange, steeped in violence and sexual sadism, have been more controversial; Get Carter, lionized by the '90s lad fad, has similarly gained in retrospective glory. But The Wicker Man's genre-bending, thematic daring, and tortuous history have made it the U.K.'s definitive cult movie. Equally admired by witchcraft geeks and cineastes, though critically neglected, it has spawned two books, three documentaries, websites, and fan conventions.

The film was conceived by the consortium of writer Anthony Shaffer; producer Peter Snell of British Lion; and actor Christopher Lee, who wanted to break from the Hammer films that had typecast him in gothic horror parts. They bought the rights to David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual, but chose instead to work on an original Shaffer script about a sexually repressed Christian police sergeant from the Scottish mainland who investigates the disappearance of a schoolgirl in a remote Hebridean village. Shaffer admitted to being influenced by Pinner's book, albeit unconsciously, when the author complained of plagiarism.

First-time director Robin Hardy picked Edward Woodward, best known for playing a troubled TV spy, to play Sergeant Howie. Lee took the role of Lord Summerisle, the island's suave phony magus—auguring his Saruman in The Lord of the Rings—who exploits the villagers with his theories on parthenogenesis and agrarian fecundity. Britt Ekland and Ingrid Pitt (another Hammer favorite) were cast respectively as the lubricious barmaid, Willow, and the sexy librarian who test the sergeant's celibacy; the third blonde in this contemporary spin on Macbeth's witches is Diane Cilento's teacher, who outrages Howie by instructing her adolescent female pupils in phallic symbolism. The naked Willow's primal mating dance, in which she smacks impatiently at Howie's bedroom wall, is still a shocker; only production stills survive of Pitt's nude scene.

Misled by the villagers, who have abandoned Christianity for pagan fertility rites involving the human sacrifice of virgins, Howie proceeds through an increasingly dreamy labyrinth of temptations, traps, and cul-de-sacs, only to realize he is the prey. He is encaged in a Brobdingnagian wicker-work effigy that the villagers burn as a Beltane offering to the Celtic sun god. The film's perverse merriness, underscored by Harry Waxman's floaty handheld camerawork and Paul Giovanni's airy folk songs, gives way to last-minute dread as the screen fills with stately images of the blazing colossus backlit by a tangerine sunset.

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