The Wicker Man (1973): You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?

 Every now and then - most recently with the release of Midsommar - the idea of “folk horror” will come up in the conversation. It’s a very pure expression of a fairly basic premise, that of the outsider coming to an isolated community where ancient beliefs and rituals are still practiced and meeting with a bad end. What I gather distinguishes folk horror from films as wildly different from it (and each other) as Dagon and Children Of The Corn and Cannibal Holocaust is that in folk horror, the traditions being drawn upon are distinctly pagan in flavor and rooted in real historical traditions (the “folk” part(, and not just stock-standard crazy evil cult worship.

It’s not something of which I’ve seen a lot, but it’s really difficult to talk about without bringing up what is largely considered the modern beginning of the genre, The Wicker Man. This is another one of those classic films (it’s been referred to as “the Citizen Kane of horror films”) that I haven’t seen…well, no, that’s not entirely true. I have a dim recollection of watching it many years ago and not being especially impressed. But I was much younger and less patient then, so I thought it’d be good to give it another look and see if it still holds up decades later.

And the verdict is…well, sort of. It definitely has its moments and I can’t say I’ve really seen anything else like it (in a good way), but ultimately it’s more interesting as an exemplar of a style than it is effective as a horror film.

The film opens with a cheeky title card where the producers thank the lord and residents of the isle depicted in the movie for their cooperation, and I have to say, it’s a nicely off-kilter touch…much like thanking the residents of Halsingland for their cooperation in the filming of Midsommar. We cut to a seaplane flying across a stretch of rocky islands in what are presumably the Hebrides, before landing just off the harbor in a small village. The plane is flown by Sergeant Neil Howie, a police officer sent to the small, isolated island village of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a little girl. Howie floats out on the water as a crowd gathers at the harbor, gawking at him without sending a dinghy out to bring him to shore. A fair amount of shouting on his part doesn’t change this, and he’s told that nobody’s allowed to land in the harbor without the permission of Lord Summerisle. Howie eventually manages to convince them that refusing to cooperate with a police investigation would be a very bad move, and he’s allowed to come ashore.

What Sergeant Howie finds is a very strange place indeed. Summerisle is known for its especially delicious fruit, exported all over Scotland, but the local pub only has canned food. The usual evening pub crowd is unusually bawdy and lascivious. The local church and its attendant graveyard are left to ruin, overrun with weeds. And even though a letter from the island requested the police’s help, everyone swears that they don’t know the missing girl.

They have their own traditions here.

Right off the bat, this film is not so much scary as it is relentlessly uneasy - the juxtaposition of pagan belief with otherwise contemporary English village life lends the whole film a feeling of pervasive strangeness that dovetails well with the story of an outsider come to an isolated, rural place with its own strange ways. The people are never explicitly sinister or leering villains, this is just their way of life, as normal to them as any other, but there’s definitely the paranoia you expect when someone from outside comes nosing around. All conversation stops when Howie walks into the room, windows open and people peer out as he passes, and with that comes cheerful, friendly obstruction and noncompliance with the investigation. People are happy to tell him that no, they’ve never heard of this girl, and even the woman who presumably wrote the letter insists that there must be some mistake, even though it’s ostensibly her daughter he’s come to find. He can’t even search the local records without the explicit permission of Lord Summerisle. The small village with its secrets works well in establishing a mood because it is an environment at once familiar and alien, so nothing can be taken for granted.

All of that works fine as it goes, and it’s a good foundation on which to build a story, but it’s undercut by the characterization of its protagonist. Sergeant Howie is depicted as a Christian devout almost to the point of puritanism, which makes sense as a contrast to a village full of people practicing pre-Christian beliefs and rituals, but the story constantly trips over the clash between these perspectives. Howie flip-flops between being a policeman investigating a crime and a puritanical zealot in ways that don’t quite feel believable and end up distracting. It’d be one thing if her were a devout Christian experiencing a crisis of faith as he sees a community flourishing in the absence of his god, but almost from the moment he hits the island he’s a bull in a china shop, doing as much harm as good to his investigation by loudly objecting to everything he sees and as often as not exceeding his jurisdiction to satisfy his moral outrage. I think either story by itself could have potentially worked, had Howie been a priest sent to a post on Summerisle as the village’s vicar, primarily characterized by his shock at the absence of God on this island, or in a procedural story as a police officer trying his best to navigate an extremely unfamiliar culture while trying to find a missing girl. Either of those works, either of those has interesting story beats associated with them, but cramming the two together disrupts the flow of the story and worse, tends to make Howie unsympathetic, which I think makes the film less effective overall. A more sympathetic Howie and a story that didn’t feel like a police investigation interrupted by a lot of exposition and argument about faith would have made for an even more compelling story than what we get.

To its credit, it certainly doesn’t look or play like most horror films, and I’m always here for a singular vision. It’s extremely colorful, with lots of sunlight and soft focus and even when the locations are drab, the villagers and their community pop with color. The people are cheerful and smiling and even though there’s no leering villainy, it still all feels unsettling. The soundtrack is largely English folk music, which makes sense for a film about Britain before Christianity came, but the overall result is something that feels,- at least on the surface - pastoral rather than sinister, which adds to the utter strangeness of the village itself.

There’s a tremendous eye for detail in the strangeness as well. There are lots of little bits of business in the background from the villagers, the local drugstore is stocked with ancient remedies, not modern ones, schoolchildren are taught about May Day rituals as naturally in school as history would be anywhere, and everyone, multiple generations in on this island, are as natural and comfortable in their beliefs as would be anyone anywhere, but they’re just different enough from modern sensibilities (especially around sex, which bothers Howie to no end) that it’s a little disquieting. There are a number of musical interludes as well, which adds to the otherworldly feel at the level of narrative. Horror isn’t usually musical (Sweeney Todd aside), so again in this we’re slightly wrong-footed throughout, to the film’s credit.

It’s definitely easy to see the DNA for a film like Midsommar here. It has some of the same beats, the colorful village and geniality of the villagers, the way the real story is sort of hidden in plain sight the whole time, but between the character of Howie (and some desultory editing which tends to break the film up into vignettes rather than a single story with momentum), I’m not sure this one still works as well to the modern eye. It definitely, definitely has its moments (and the end, while somewhat overlong and convoluted, ends up as a doozy), but it maybe tries to be too many things at the same time. You can do a lot with the story of someone looking for a little girl who’s gone missing, especially against a backdrop as vivid and evocative as Summerisle, and bringing ancient beliefs into a modern context makes for a surprisingly uneasy experience, but piling on a debate about faith on top of everything else just ends up making it a bit of a muddle.

IMDB entry
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