So the other night I was trying to get to sleep, and this naked chick next door starts banging on the wall while singing a wild hypnotic song, asking me whether I’d like to come over and say “How do?”
Now for most men this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but for Edward Woodward’s Sgt. Howie, it is a moment of pure, undiluted terror. Woodward’s ability to make a prudish snobbish British police officer into a character of such sympathy is only one of the reasons The Wicker Man is such a fantastic horror movie. Instead of laughing at Howie for not rushing into the other room to fulfill the luscious Willow’s request, we are right there with him, stuck with the feeling that something is seriously, horribly wrong.
Most horror movies today rely on shock value and gore for scares (though there are certainly exceptions—The Orphanage comes to mind) but The Wicker Man takes time to scare us, slowly plunging us into a world that is at first a little quaint and backwards, then slightly off, then threatening, and finally just out and out evil. There is no blood (though there is plenty of sex—it was the early 70s after all), and things very rarely jump out to scare you, but trust me, you will be scared. The film’s final hopeless sequence of suffering is more frightening than any of the situations cooked up in the entire Saw franchise combined.
The plot deals with Police Sgt. Howie’s trip to the isolated Summerisle somewhere off the British coast in search of a missing girl. Howie is an upright, uptight Christian, who has gone so far as to keep himself a virgin until his upcoming wedding. Naturally, when the inhabitants of Summerisle prove to be sexually liberated nature-worshiping pagans, Howie’s stuffy British sensibilities are taxed to the breaking point. Eventually Howie comes to learn more than he ever wanted to know about the people’s pagan beliefs and practices.
It may be a product of our modern politically correct society more than the intention of the filmmakers, but at on my first viewing of the film I was totally on the side of the pagans. Sure, they were a little out there, but Howie comes off as an intolerant prig for the film’s first act. It only adds to the horror, then, as we slowly learn that these people are even worse than Howie’s worst fears. By the end of the movie I saw him as an unfortunate man who had walked into a nightmare from which he had no real hope of escaping. One of my all time favorite scenes in movie history (and there are many) has to be the moment when Howie crests the beautiful green hill in the film’s climax to come face to face with the Wicker Man. Never was there a more hopeless and heartfelt cry of dereliction than Woodward’s “Jesus Christ!” You can feel the pain and terror in every syllable, made all the worse by the joy of his captors and the film’s grim sense of inevitability. This is not a movie where the hero’s wits and strength come to his rescue.
Most of the film’s cast are Hammer horror veterans, most notably Christopher Lee in the role of Lord Summerisle, head of the island. Partly because of his long tenure with Hammer, Lee has a reputation for schlock that may be justified, but I just can’t get enough of the guy. He considers this one of his best roles, and it’s hard to argue with him. He gets to spread his wings a bit and go beyond his usual role of scary guy with a booming voice—though he of course is that, as well. Lord Summerisle takes a certain glee in the proceedings that remind us that Lee does have real depth as an actor that is often buried beneath lesser roles.
Another star of the movie is the environments themselves. This movie looks as though it was actually shot on location on Summerisle, and there are no outdated special effects to show the film’s age. Instead we are treated to a quaint British village, rolling hills, rocky cliffs, and a decayed cemetery. I’m not sure of the production history of this film or where exactly it was shot, but it is a breathtaking locale. Some of the photography looks a little dated and trapped in the 70s (yes, there are some zooms), but most of the film holds up remarkably well today. Even the music, which in any other context would perhaps date the film, sounds appropriately creepy for this out of the way British village. It has something of a 60s folksy feeling to it, but incorporates a lot of older musical styles to arrive at a very bizarre and unique sound. There’s a fabulous cover of “How Do” (the song I mentioned at the beginning of this post) by the Sneaker Pimps that is certainly worth a listen to get a sense of the enormous role music plays in this film. What’s a pagan island without lots of singing and dancing, after all? Not much of a pagan island in any capacity at all, that’s what!
There has been endless talk about a sequel to the movie, but it has been stuck in development hell since before development hell was a phrase, and though it has at various times looked as though something was going to happen with it, I’m not going to hold my breath. The idea would reunite Christopher Lee and the original’s director, Robin Hardy, but I feel like too much time has passed to revisit it now. (There was also the disastrous, unwatchable, heaven-cursed remake staring Nicholas Cage that I am only mentioning in the spirit of dire warning. You know you’re watching a bad movie when you are informed that a character’s legs are broken by his offscreen exclamation, “My legs, what are you doing to my legs?” Now imagine that line in a whiny, Nicolas Cage voice and you’ll understand just what level of travesty we’re dealing with here. But I digress.)
Unfortunately the film doesn’t quite survive in its original form. There are supposedly reels and reels of film worth of lost footage floating around in a basement somewhere. What remains is a short theatrical cut and a longer, 100 minute version that has all of the available missing footage restored. I myself have a spiffy two disc version of the movie that originally came in a numbered wooden box. I’m not sure if this is still available, but it has both versions and several good special features that discuss the process of discovering the missing footage and making the film. There is certainly a wooden box free version of the 2 disc set that is still available, which is definitely the way to go.
The Wicker Man is the kind of movie that would probably never get made today (and perhaps that’s for the best, considering the remake). It is slow, lacks a lot of action, and has no gore to speak of. It is also the rare horror movie that tries to go beyond the regular quick scares of the genre to something more substantial. It is a serious look at religion, it’s successes and failures, and in a lot of ways a criticism of the western idea of the victorious hero. Sgt. Howie ends up utterly doomed through no fault of his own, and for me those were always the best kinds of horror stories. The Wicker Man is an odd movie for sure, but the film’s final images will stay burned in your brain long after the DVD has been put away. It doesn’t get much better than that.
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