Cut to ribbons by its distributor and shunned on its release, Robin Hardy’s Brit-horror epic rose back to become almost a religion in itself. David Bramwell on the mystery and legacy of The Wicker Man

The year 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man, a film that had an unpromising start yet went on to achieve an enduring cult status. I’ve watched it more than 100 times. And for good reason, which we’ll come to presently.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, it’s the story of a buttoned-up Christian copper, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), who goes to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a missing girl, Rowan Morrison. Howie discovers, to his disgust, that the islanders have all converted back to paganism and spend their time having orgies, singing, dancing and honouring the “old gods”. Howie comes to believe they’re going to sacrifice Rowan because their harvest failed the previous year. Led by the laird of the island Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), the islanders steer Howie in a sinister game of cat-and-mouse until, at the end, someone meets their fate in the giant effigy of a wicker man.

When released in 1973, The Wicker Man was savagely edited, unloved by its film company, poorly distributed and almost sank without a trace. So dire was the response that Christopher Lee offered to pay journalists to come and review it in London cinemas. Those that did seemed unimpressed. The FT described it as “an erratic and ultimately forgettable little thriller”. Yet over time its cult status grew, thanks in no small part to its growing popularity on the American college circuit in the late seventies and eighties. Now it’s known by some as “the Citizen Kane of horror films” and was ranked fourth in a Guardian Top Twenty-Five best horror films of all time.

In Allan Brown’s book Inside the Wicker Man: How Not to Make a Cult Film, the author wryly notes, “It is often repeated that (Christopher) Lee considered Summerisle the finest role he ever played. However when asked which was his second best he mulled for a moment, then said Doctor Catheter in Gremlins II.”

Where did the idea of The Wicker Man originate? The first recorded image of a wicker colossus designed for human sacrifice is from English antiquary Aylett Sammes’ Britannia Antiqua Illustrata (1676) and reappeared 100 years later in Compleat English Traveller in 1772. These images travelled from book to book over the centuries until landing in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough in the early 1900s. As this was the key research reference for The Wicker Man, the film’s creators most likely got the idea from there.

Where did Sammes’ image come from? It derives from the artist’s imagination. The only known historical source to mention this terrible ritual was over 2,000 years ago: Book Six of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War (50BC). But Caesar had little first-hand experience of the Celts and druids and had certainly never seen a wicker man. He is instead relating an account he’d come across in the writings of the Greek politician Posidonius, who’d spent time in Gaul decades earlier. Even here it’s unknown whether Posidonius claimed to be an eyewitness to such sacrifices; all his works are lost to us. So the iconic image of a wicker man has been handed down to us from a 350-year-old illustration derived from an unsubstantiated account written more than 2,000 years ago by an unreliable source.

Yet there is clearly something powerful and enduring about this image and the film inspired by it. The phrase “a bit Wicker Man” has even entered common parlance as shorthand for a place or event deemed darkly pagan, anarchic and wild. Padstow’s ’Obby ’Oss festival and the annual bonfire celebrations in Lewes are definitely a bit Wicker Man.

The film’s influence has been far reaching, from key lines being knowingly referenced in the comedy series The League of Gentleman to a Wicker Man themed Radiohead video and a truly terrible Nicolas Cage remake. It even spawned a homemade singalong created by myself and friend Eliza which, for the past 13 years on and off, we have toured around the British Isles. Over the years we’ve been joined on stage by the film’s director Robin Hardy, performed in the hotel bar used as the Green Man pub in the film and were once supported by The Buzzcocks at a festival in Scotland. Our audiences are given goody bags with edible frogs, foreskins and umbilical cords and are encouraged to dress up and join in with the dialogue and silliness. The film, after all, does have its camper moments.

But the main reason for the success of the singalong is the haunting beauty, bawdiness and muscularity of the soundtrack. The Wicker Man without its music would be like Withnail and I without Withnail. What’s more, the songs in the film are mostly sung communally, whether by villagers in a bar or children dancing round a maypole, making them perfect for a cinema full of Wicker Man fans in animal masks to sing along to.

Another integral part of the ritual of our Wicker Man singalong is that audiences like to come dressed as different pagan characters from the film, be it Willow MacGregor, Lord Summerisle, a toothless fisherman or the Salmon of Knowledge. Someone once turned up in a suit made entirely of wicker blinds, another as the pink and white cake that briefly appears in Rowan Morrison’s mother’s sweet-shop window. Rarely do they come as Sgt Howie: it’s the islanders who our audiences truly identify with, not the film’s protagonist. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that the show attracts more than its fair share of genuine pagans. At last year’s Glastonbury we performed to over 250 druids who let out a cheer when Lord Summarisle appears.

And therein lies a conundrum. In the film, Lord Summerisle reveals that his ancestors didn’t convert to paganism out of any ecological concerns or for a deep love of nature, but because their harvest was failing. They decided to see if worshipping the old gods might help their crops. Self-interest drove the islanders to ditch Christianity in favour of a more “heathen” way of life. But, as Howie discovers, their harvest has failed again. Summerisle’s solution? Human sacrifice. The laird of the island reveals himself to be a profits-over-people kind of guy and something of a monster. Should the harvest fail again, as Howie desperately argues to Summerisle near the end of the film, perhaps his subjects will sacrifice him too. So why did the druids cheer Summerisle?

The Wicker Man is often tied in with the films Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw as a so-called “unholy trinity” but, as the risk of inciting a folk-horror fatwa, these other films are one-dimensional, trashy and inferior in every way. The Wicker Man has complexity. It merits repeated viewings. Both Sgt Howie and Lord Summerisle are flawed, complex men with deep convictions. Howie is courageous and pious yet also judgemental, humourless and uptight. He is blinded by his faith and hard to like. Summerisle may be a monster yet he’s one with a merry twinkle in his eye and someone whose strong leadership and flair for theatrics makes for a united and sexually liberated community. They would certainly applaud the Idler’s motto of “Slow down, have fun, live well”. Such convolutions of character in the film lead us to interesting questions as to where our sympathies lie. How do we deal with a charismatic but sadistic leader whose community seems to be more harmonious, more connected to nature and having more fun than the rest of us?

After performing the singalong in Glastonbury in 2022, I spent the rest of the weekend there asking as many druids as I could why they loved the film. At a mead-drinking meeting in an esoteric library in the town, Penny Billington told me, “The Wicker Man remains such a compelling story about pagans that we’re cheering along all the way. But we both deplore it and love it. Druids live in world of paradox. Our work as spiritual people is to get away from binary thinking.”

On top of Glastonbury Tor, I met Steve, both a copper and a druid. He’s hard to miss, towering above the crowd at over 7ft in height. With his connections with both paganism and the law, I wonder where his sympathies lie with Howie and the islanders. Steve laughs and tells me he likes the question.

“Well obviously no decent copper would have gone into that situation without back-up,” he said. I love that his immediate response is to question the validity of Howie’s police procedure.

“I sympathise with Howie,” Steve continued. “He doesn’t deserve to die. But ever since I saw that film as a young man I wondered if it was a prophecy of what’s to come. The part that really caught me wasn’t the ending but the first shot we see of the islanders wearing the masks and the faces of the animals. That really got me. That to me was nature stamping down its law. Fuck with nature and it’ll take you down. We’re not destroying the planet, it’s going to destroy us.”

Ask a druid copper whether he’s on the side of the islanders or the policeman in The Wicker Man and his response is: “Mother Nature”.

I completed my Howie-like line of inquiry at the lodgings of Kris Hughes, head druid of Anglesey and a strapping man in his early fifties with a lilting Welsh accent. Before asking him about the film, I first asked what ritual meant to him. He’d clearly thought long and hard about this throughout his life.

“Have you noticed how it’s only in the last three decades we’ve had roadside shrines where accidents have happened? That tells you there’s a craving in society for ritualised actions. Because we’ve become so secular, we no longer have the priest to go and talk to, we don’t have the vicar who comes for scones and Victoria sponge on a Sunday, who we could tell our woes. So we’re ritualising things in way to feel a connection to something that we have no power over.

“If you look at the way in which people ritualise death, you will learn an awful lot about those societies. I was talking to a druid today from the United States who is of Indian ancestry and he had to go to India as his grandmother had died. I think he went to the city of Varanasi, and set her on fire, you know, he set the pyre alight. And he’d never done that. And this profound experience happened to him that was deeply ritualistic, but so intimately connected to the visceral element of what was happening. And we’ve lost that completely.

“But those rituals are really important for integrating people into the mechanisms that society has in place to deal with the things that happen to it. The purpose of that ritual is to emotionally relocate that the person has been deceased and as an ancestor, which is why when, in settings where a body is never found, the grief can never be reconciled, because the ritual is lacking something.”

When I asked Kris why he loved our Wicker Man singalong so much, he said: “In Summerisle the entire community is so immersed in ritual activity. Everything circumambulates around that fact. And I think a part of us is constantly trying to recreate that in our paganism. We see something like The Wicker Man and think, yeah, that’s what we long for.”

“Apart from the blood sacrifice!” he added with a laugh. “But even then Howie’s death can, if we wish, represent all the things in ourselves and our culture that we don’t like. Ritual is symbolic after all.

I’m sure Kris is right. The Wicker Man reminds us of the kinds of rituals that many of crave. It kindles a yearning to reconnect to nature, to ceremony, to community, to magic and enchantment. Take part in Singalong-A-Wicker-Man and you’re engaging in a joyful ritual, based around a ritual-themed film, the viewing of which itself is ritual.

A 2022 UK religious poll revealed paganism, shamanism and Wicca to be the UK’s fastest-growing religions. Summer and Winter Solstice rituals and Mayday celebrations such as Jack in the Green, well-dressing and Padstow’s ’Obby ’Oss are becoming ever more popular too.

As for me? I now dance and sing with the pagans both onstage and off.

Blood sacrifices aside, I’m happy for my life to continue being a bit more Wicker Man.

This article is from Idler #92.

David Bramwell’s book The Haunted Moustache is Idler Book of the Week. Read an extract here.

You can order David’s book The Sing-Along–A-Wicker-Man Scrapbook from his website: drbramwell.com

David also presents the Idler Academy course How to Build Your Own Utopia.

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