Wild and wacky and Wicker

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This article was published 09/07/2016 (3733 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

wfpyoutube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-tDnavDCwI:wfpyoutube

British filmmaker Robin Hardy died on July 1. Like a lot of film fans, when I heard the news I was moved to rewatch Hardy’s directorial debut, the ineffably odd 1973 horror movie The Wicker Man.

The term “cult classic” might be overused, but this bonkers-brilliant film deserves the moniker. You can’t make a cult movie by setting out to make a cult movie. That’s like giving yourself a nickname. Your work needs to be claimed, and over the decades, the once obscure midnight movie has been claimed — and then some — by fervent fans.

An indefinable hybrid of horror/comedy/detective story/1970s nudie musical, The Wicker Man starts with prim policeman Neil Howie (Edward Woodward). He arrives on a remote Scottish island to investigate a missing girl and encounters a pagan cult led by the charismatic and hardly-menacing-at-all Lord Summerisle (played by horror icon Christopher Lee).

Howie’s devout Christian morality becomes increasingly discombobulated by the village’s parade of fleshy revelry, filthy folk songs and flagrant phallic symbols. He suspects the “heathen island” is hiding a terrible secret, but it’s not until the film’s shocking final sequence that he understands its true nature.

The Wicker Man’s cult-classic status mostly comes down to the film’s what-the-hell-was-that quality, which never quite goes away, no matter how many times you see it. But there are a few other things going on.

BACKSTORY: As with any self-respecting cult flick, the film’s own story offers as many twists, turns and mysteries as its screenplay. The Wicker Man’s production was marked by bankruptcies, studio politicking and distribution snafus.

Wicker Man completists point to at least three versions of the film, lost and found through the years. The original U.K. release, which most fans consider a mutilation, clocked in at 88 minutes. A 102-minute original director’s cut is rumoured to be circulating on old VHS tapes. Finally, there is a 94-minute version that was hunted down through a social media call-out and re-released with Hardy’s approval in 2013.

HI-LOW: Like many cult classics, The Wicker Man hits that sweet spot between cheesy pleasure and pointy-headed analysis.

The Wicker Man started as a B-movie, literally. With a poster proclaiming it “a totally corrupt shocker,” it was released as a supporting flick for Don’t Look Now, another classic of 1970s horror, right at the end of the old double-feature days.

The movie’s cheapie charms include twee folk music, trippy costume design, jumpy editing, some bad dubbing and a much YouTubed comic-erotic sequence in which Swedish sex bomb Britt Ekland does a naked seduction dance. Far from wrecking Hardy’s film, they actually contribute to its uncanny, unsettling vibe.

And these low-budget qualities produce some high-end ideas. At a multidisciplinary academic conference held at the University of Glasgow in July, 2003, The Wicker Man was discussed as feminist statement, capitalist critique and existential investigation. Critics have called it “a treatise on modern incomprehensibility in the face of social upheaval” and “a mordant study of theological anxiety.”

The film can be viewed as a showdown between human law and the law of nature, between modernity and “the old ways,” between Christianity and paganism. As Lord Summerisle says, Neil’s God “had his chance and, in modern parlance, he blew it.”

One of the reasons the film continues to fascinate might be that its final meaning is so hard to pin down. Sergeant Howie is both unbearably prissy and oddly sympathetic. The islanders are free-spirited and joyful but also superstitious and carelessly cruel. The fact that both sides are so certain in their beliefs is what makes the final so terrifying and memorable.

AFTERLIFE: A singularly strange one-off, The Wicker Man has never really been replicated.

Like many cult classics, however, it has been hugely influential, especially in the “folk horror” genre, which is characterized by sinister rustics, isolated rural settings, ancient rituals and occult symbolism — almost anything involving people in stag masks, really.

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz is a comic riff on the Wicker Man scenario, while Radiohead’s recent video for Burn the Witch references the film through adorably uncanny Claymation.

The film’s most serious inheritor is Brit auteur Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England), who has become the pre-eminent contemporary practitioner of English horror, and by that we mean not just horror movies made in England but movies about the specific horror of being English. Emotional repression, lurking aggression, the weight of history — they all pour out of Wheatley’s films in a bloody rush of the bizarre and violent.

Paradoxically, one film that is not a descendent of The Wicker Man is the 2006 American remake, in which Nic Cage (“Not the bees!”) keeps stumbling into unintentional comedy. If you decide to mark Robin Hardy’s passing with a neo-pagan movie night, make sure you avoid that one.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca