Totally Folked Up: Sex, Song, and Sacrifice in The Wicker Man

|Jay Ditzer|

The Wicker Man plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, October 19 to Tuesday, October 21. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.

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This article contains numerous spoilers for The Wicker Man. 

Along a ruggedly beautiful coastline, a middle-aged man dressed in an incongruous white robe struggles as he is forced up a hill by villagers who sing cheerfully, as if celebrating—because they are. The man’s eyes bulge in terror when he spots his involuntary destination: at the top of the hill is a massive wicker effigy of a man stuffed with kindling and livestock. A strapping brute of a villager carries the man up a ladder and deposits him in the effigy’s torso like a sack of potatoes. The trapped man warns the smiling, singing villagers below that they will be cursed for all eternity if they carry out this rite.

As the sun begins to set, the effigy is set ablaze. Flames climb, smoke billows, wood crackles, animals howl in terror, and the man in the effigy tries to sing “The Lord’s Prayer” but is drowned out by the villagers, who sing and sway around the massive totem as it burns. 

“Daniel! Daniel!” the man pitifully shrieks in the futile hope that his god will save him as He once saved another faithful servant in a lion’s den.

Now fully engulfed in flames, the wicker man looms silhouetted against the sky until its head topples over, revealing the blazing orange sun setting gorgeously behind it. Roll credits.

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In the garden of cinema, a diverse crop of produce sprouts from the horror patch. Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man isn’t just a corker of a film; it’s a foundational text, or, continuing the analogy, a nutrient-dense fruit that helped seed the entire subgenre of folk horror. And like any hardy perennial,¹ it keeps coming back, inspiring creators to harvest new tales of pagan ritual, erotic iconography, and creeping dread more than 50 years after its release.

An elevator pitch for 1973’s The Wicker Man might go “a stranger enters an isolated community in which friendly charm and old-world ways hide a cycle of terrifying rituals.” The same pitch could also be used to sell Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Alex Garland’s Men, and others. But it takes more than a backwoods setting, creepy locals, and unsuspecting interlopers to make folk horror. Otherwise, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would qualify, and while Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic is many things, folk horror isn’t one of them. There’s a definite vibe or feeling or tone that makes folk horror folk horror. In the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it. 

Successful folk horror stories work because you can tell that something is decidedly wrong even though everyone is smiling.

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In The Wicker Man, Sgt. Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), a cop from the Scottish mainland, is summoned to Summerisle, a remote island community, to investigate the disappearance of an adolescent girl. Howie is repeatedly (albeit cheerfully) stonewalled by Summerisle’s inhabitants, many of whom tell him the girl never existed, despite evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, Howie, a deeply devout Christian, is horrified to discover that the islanders have abandoned the church and reverted to sinful, libertine “old ways.”²

Few characters in cinema are as primly pious as Sgt. Howie, but Woodward imbues him with enough decency and humanity to make him more than a self-serious figure of ridicule—you feel sorry for Howie, even as he sternly lectures yet another local. 

During the course of his investigation, Howie learns that last year’s fruit crops—Summerisle’s primary export—failed miserably, and if this year’s harvest doesn’t improve substantially, the shit will hit the fan. Howie fears that the missing girl is to be sacrificed in some barbaric pagan ritual to improve the yield. And wouldn’t you know it, May Day fast approaches.

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Playing the relaxed yin to Woodward’s uptight yang is Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle, the elegantly charismatic, erudite, and witty aristocrat who owns and governs the island as did his father and his father’s father. In a wonderful performance (reportedly Lee’s own favorite in his lengthy career), Lee’s Lord Summerisle takes obvious delight in pushing Howie’s buttons. It’s never explicitly stated in the film, but Lord Summerisle is quite obviously a ladies’ man (there is no Lady Summerisle) whose romantic life is much more fertile than his fields.³ Meanwhile, Howie’s deeply repressed sexuality is so blatant it’s practically another character—indeed, it’s the whole reason Howie was lured to Summerisle in the first place: he’s a virgin.⁴ This tension between duty and pleasure, between doing your homework and skipping school, between Howie’s self-denial and Lord Summerisle’s self-indulgence, permeates and powers The Wicker Man.

One prominent aspect of the “Ant and the Grasshopper” dynamic that runs through The Wicker Man is the way the locals are regularly seen singing, dancing, and otherwise exuding joie de vivre. The songs are all folk tunes (some traditional; some composed specifically for the film by Paul Giovanni) and they pop up so frequently that The Wicker Man flirts with being a musical—not in the Singin’ in the Rain sense, but in the way music that begins as diegetic background color keeps turning into full-blown song-and-dance numbers. One minute, “The Landlord’s Daughter” is establishing the mood at a boozy pub singalong and showing the viewer that even the septuagenarians of Summerisle are lecherous horndogs; the next, you’re three verses and an off-key chorus deep, silently begging the story to start back up again ASAP. 

The Wicker Man uses its soundtrack to serve narrative purposes, as well. On Howie’s first night on the island, the innkeeper’s beautiful daughter Willow, played by Britt Eklund,⁵ dances nude (a body double was used for some shots because Eklund was pregnant during filming) and sings a song that gets Howie so hot and bothered in the next room over that he trembles, sweats, and pounds the shared wall in frustration, which begs the question: If Howie was lured to the island to be sacrificed specifically because he is a Christian virgin, wouldn’t the ritual have then been ruined had Willow succeeded in getting Howie to pop his cherry? Perhaps Willow’s song was a test engineered by Lord Summerisle to see just how strong Howie’s self-discipline and/or faith are?

And then there’s the climax. After waylaying Willow’s pop the innkeeper (played by Lindsay Kemp, under whom David Bowie and Kate Bush studied mime) and stealing his fool costume and mask, Howie surreptitiously joins the May Day parade. After more singing, dancing, and capering, the missing girl is revealed tied to the rocks in a cave. Howie frees her and they skedaddle, but it’s all a ruse: the girl leads Howie back to Lord Summerisle and the rest of the villagers. Lord Summerisle then spells out to Howie (and the viewers) why the sergeant was lured to Summerisle: He is the intended sacrificial offering, not the girl. Howie’s fate is sealed.

This is where we came in lo these many words ago. I must once again call attention to the wonderful final shot of the film. As the titular effigy and its unfortunate contents go up in flames, the camera gets a shot of the wicker man’s head, which topples off its body, revealing the setting sun. This is one of those “you only have one chance to get it right” shots that can make or break a scene (or an entire movie), and since they had to build a full-scale wicker man and then set it on fire while making sure it was positioned properly so that when the head came off the sun would be in the correct position in the sky, well… I’m glad I wasn’t responsible for those logistics. Forget Ethan Edwards framed in the doorway at the end of The Searchers, this is the final shot for the ages.

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The Wicker Man is not sui generis; loosely based on David Pinner’s 1967 novel Ritual, its roots are in Irish folklore and pagan fertility rites with a healthy dose of the “stranger in a strange land” trope. It also shares DNA with earlier works like 1968’s Witchfinder General (released as The Conqueror Worm in America), the 1970 BBC television film Robin Redbreast, and 1971’s Blood on Satan’s Claw, all of which traffic in the tension of outsiders poking around places that clearly have their own customs and rules. 

Another hallmark of folk horror is that much of the unsettling, even terrifying, stuff occurs in broad daylight, subverting our instinctive belief that bad things happen at night, in the dark. These daytime horrors—Howie’s death in The Wicker Man, Christian’s death in Midsommar,⁶ the witch trials and executions in Witchfinder General—remind viewers that the locals see nothing wrong in their beliefs or actions, making those beliefs and actions feel more exposed and inescapable. Plus, it ups the “WTF?” factor.

Like fields left fallow, the influence of The Wicker Man mostly lay dormant for years before sprouting anew in films such as 2015’s The VVitch (rural isolation, sexual awakening), 2018’s Apostle (pagan cult in a rustic island community), 2019’s Midsommar (daylight horror, smiling locals, sex as a natural extension of community life), 2022’s You Won’t Be Alone (shape-shifting, ancient rites), 2022’s Men (“Green Man” mythology, birth rituals), 2022’s Enys Men (rural dread with pagan undertones), 2024’s Lord of Misrule (a village with sinister traditions and rituals), and even the first season of HBO’s True Detective (occult folklore, human sacrifice, atmospheric dread)—it would seem that time is indeed a flat circle.

—For Jasper. Lord Summerisle had nothing on you.

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Link to full video

Folk horror keeps rearing its rustic, woody, sunlit head, sometimes in unexpected places. A couple of years ago, I created a music video by pairing a moody little song I wrote with royalty-free video clips to show how folk-horror elements can still unsettle, even in broad daylight. I mean, c’mon, there’s a woodland setting, an androgynous youth lurking in a pond, a masked dancer gyrating in her underwear, and Kmart Elle Fanning—what more could you want?

As modest as it is, my music video shows how the genre keeps inviting creators to rework old patterns in new ways. Folk horror isn’t something to ponder from a distance—it’s something we keep reimagining, because all who partake of the harvest must one day feed its roots.

Notes:

1. See what I did there? ↩︎
2. History is littered with instances of devout God-fearing Christians sentencing others to death by hanging, immolation, drowning, and any number of sadistic methods for the crime of not conforming to the right set of superstitions. It’s interesting to see the shoe on the other foot. ↩︎
3. Lee sports an unflattering bouffant hairdo throughout The Wicker Man, but we’ll chalk that up to the movie being made in the early ‘70s. His hair looks much better when it gets wind-blown in the film’s final scenes. ↩︎
4. As Neil LaBute and Nicolas Cage so readily demonstrated with their batshit 2006 remake, The Wicker Man could not be made today. One reason: It’s certainly not impossible for there to be a middle-aged male virgin, but it’s improbable, especially in the macho world of law enforcement. Maybe if Howie was an incel… ? ↩︎
5. If Sgt. Howie and Lord Summerisle represent the film’s theological dichotomy, the women of Summerisle represent its lustful energy. The Wicker Man drives that point home by casting three icons of late ‘60s/early ‘70s English cinematic sex appeal: Eklund, Ingrid Pitt, and Diane Cilento. ↩︎
6. Real subtle, Ari Aster. ↩︎

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Edited by Finn Odum

The Wicker Man