I got a chance to see the original 1973 Wicker Man for the first time recently and it’s every bit the freaky, messed up yet beautifully made folk horror nightmare I’d heard it was, I loved it to pieces. See the thing is the very words ‘wicker’ and ‘man’ put together in a sentence these days just evokes the mental image of Nicolas Cage with a beehive on his face, such is the pop culture absorption and frenzied notoriety of the much spat upon remake which, without going into too much diversion here, I think is actually a really good film. This one is too, in many different ways, it feels like the folk horror benchmark and I can see it’s cultural influence on much horror material in decades to come. It stars The Equalizer himself, Edward Woodward, as a London inspector sent to a wee tiny island off the coast in search of a missing girl, with not much of anything to go on in terms of intel except just that, a missing girl and a name. I’d be suspicious af, but he plows right into their earthen hippie community, pagan customs and frankly downright hilarious pageantry looking royally out of place with his crisp, chromed policeman’s uniform in such a colourful, wreath adorned, elemental backdrop. I enjoyed his ongoing abject horror at the local’s embracement of free love, loose values and rejection of staunch Christianity, the film is very… of its time and those certainly wouldn’t be things anyone would care about today but it’s fascinating to see how much of a big deal narrow-minded Christianity was for a lot of silly people back when. The film of course circles an ending that’s become legendary, where the titular wicker gentleman makes his appearance and everything kind of collectively goes bonkers for a finale that will wake the gods. Christopher Lee is at once amusing, endearing, charismatically sinister and somehow just a bit eccentric as the sort of “homestead regal” Lord Summerisle, the ringleader and pater manifest of this island dwelling bunch of cult loonies, it’s one of his best, and most entertaining performances, especially when he dons a great big wig for the final hoo-hah that is prophetic in a way, as he’d rock the exact same look decades later as Saruman in Lord Of The Rings. This film is a blast, full of strange editing, spooky music and eerie vocals that show up when you least expect them and a terrific ensemble cast that all do a splendid job of scaring the piss out of this poor, buttoned down big city copper with their collective antics, often funny, frequently frightening, consistently off the wall and always just what you’d expect a weird, island-bound, nature worshipping cult to act like. Excellent film.
–Nate Hill
Podcasting Them Softly 