Protected By The Ejaculation Of Serpents

35 years - or is it 36 - of watching The Wicker Man

NOTE: this piece contains spoilers. I could have written it in a different way, which didn’t contain spoilers, but I opted not to, on the basis that a) it would make the piece a tiny bit worse, b) I suspect the vast majority of people who see this piece will have already seen The Wicker Man, and c) the bit that I’m spoiling is already sort of given away, to an extent, in the title of the film. If you’ve not yet seen The Wicker Man but wanted to read this piece to find out whether you might like to, my feeling is that you should dispense with such hesitation and just watch it.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: each time I say ‘The Wicker Man’ in this piece I am referring to the 1973 version of the film, not the 2006 remake, starring Nic Cage and directed by the guy who made that horrible In the Company Of Men film. I did see the 21st Century version, but my mind, in an act of self-defence, appears to have flushed away all detail of it. One of the annoying things, in fact, about all conversations relating the The Wicker Man since 2006 has been the need to specify that you’re talking about the original Robin Hardy version, not the remake - kind of in the way it would also be annoying if every time you talked about a goat you had to add “I mean an actual goat, not an evil robot goat constructed from plastic and wires”.

FINAL NOTE: I decided to make it free to read for everyone. But if you decide to take out a paid subscription it means you have full access to my archive of well over 100 pieces, and you will be able to read the new fiction I’m posting in a few days. (You’ll also be helping me to pay my rent, but that probably goes without saying.)

Many different things have drawn people to The Wicker Man over the years and contributed to its transformation from cinematic flop to one of the most revered horror films of all time: an interest in the old religion buried only a few layers from the surface of the British landscape, the early 2000s UK folk revival and reassessment and the remarkably eclectic, weird and imaginative soundtrack’s place within it, the beauty of the orchards and towering cliffs of the story’s fictional island setting, folklore’s unlikely ascent to a 2020s trending topic, Christopher Lee’s enticing admission that it was his favourite of all the films he acted in during his seven decade career. Somewhat contrastingly, what I specifically have to thank for my introduction to it is golf. I first watched The Wicker Man in 1989, or perhaps early 1990, when a VHS which I’d left recording a golf tournament - my guess is The British Masters, but let’s face it, who gives a shit which one it was - ran on into Moviedrome, the show where Repo Man director Alex Cox (no relation) would introduce lesser-known cult classics of 60s and 70s cinema. This, in fact, proved to be a gateway to what would become several of my favourite films of all time, including the equally unforgettable Sleuth and the marginally more forgettable American Werewolf In London.

The reason I instantly reach for these two films as references here - rather than the many others I watched and fell in love with courtesy of Moviedrome - is undoubtedly because they each, in my mind, have strong links to The Wicker Man. Sleuth was written by The Wicker Man’s screenwriter, Anthony Shaffer, and shares its penchant for mind games and subterfuge and its fascination with masks and mannequins. American Werewolf In London is a younger, more cartoonish exploration of the way outsiders are treated by close-knit communities in rural Britain. Its infamous Slaughtered Lamb pub, where two American hitchhikers are cast back out onto the freezing moors as punishment for ruining a game of darts and asking unwanted questions about a pentagram, is the obvious younger sibling of The Green Man boozer in The Wicker Man. There’s plenty of high spirits and suggestions of links to the occult in both establishments, and a similar whoosh of air as heads turn to see the arrival of unfamiliar faces in their midst, but it is the latter hostelry which seems more attractive, due to having a warmer atmosphere of community and what appears to be a never-ending live, experimental acid folk jukebox. I have never watched American Werewolf In London and thought, about East Proctor, the Yorkshire village where The Slaughtered Lamb is located, “Ooh, I’d rather like to live there!” but I have thought it many times about Summerisle, the Scottish island in The Wicker Man where a Christian policeman called Sergeant Howie, played by Edward Woodward, is sent from the mainland to search for a missing teenage girl. It is also unquestionably something I have thought progressively more with each successive viewing, as bit by bit (unlike American Werewolf In London) the fact that The Wicker Man is a horror film at all tends to slip my mind.

Did I enjoy The Wicker Man when I first watched it? “Enjoy” is not precisely the word. The ending upset me (and still does), even though I knew the farm animals in the vast effigy were not really burned during the making of the film. The film was aesthetically offensive to everything which, at 14, I had been taught by my peers to deem aspirational and not yet grown up enough to feel at ease in rejecting: I knew the kids at school who thought I was weird for having brown bread in my lunchbox and parents who owned Neil Young records would instantly despise the fruit-worshipping hippies of Summerisle, their folk singarounds and the corn dollies which hung on the walls of their stone cottages. Without having the capacity to quite articulate it to myself, I was aware of the potentially tricky back-and-forth if, the next day, during double Maths, I chose to reveal I had watched such a cinematic concoction:

Classmate: “Seen Nightmare On Elm Street 5? Smithy says he nearly shat his sen, it were so scary.”

Me: “Nah, I dunno if my mum and dad would let me see it, but last night I watched a mega weird horror film from 1973. It were brilliant. It’s got the guy who plays The Equaliser, but as a policeman who’s waiting until he gets married to get his end away, and it’s all about the cycle of death and rebirth in nature. There are loads of hares and people with combovers and flares in it, and quite a few horses. Some of the horses wear flares too. There were this super cool bit in a graveyard where the policeman found a headstone that said, ‘Here lies Beech Buchanan. Protected by the ejaculation of serpents’.”

Classmate: “Darren Totworth said yer a great big bender and I reckon he int lying. Piss off and sit somewhere else.”

I knew instinctively that to open myself up to The Wicker Man was to violate various smallprint of adolescent life in working class 1980s Nottinghamshire, yet, significantly, I could not bring myself to hit the “off” switch on the video player linked to the small black and white TV in my bedroom. The Wicker Man, as it still does, penetrated beyond all the surface nonsense right to my core: the part of me which will always respond to tangly, meticulous storytelling connected to our enduring relationship to the earth. It stripped me away from several temporary layers of myself. “I think a lot of the mystery of the film’s appeal can be explained by its rootsyness,” its director, Robin Hardy, would tell me in 2005. “It awakes in people a kind of tribal memory. We tend to forget that Sunday was a day we originally worshipped on because of the sun, and that we knock on wood to avoid evil.” A heart attack had left Hardy bedridden during the film’s planning and his convalescence gave him time to read the full, twelve-volume version of James George Frazier’s 1890 study of magic and religion, The Golden Bough. He told me this meant his research on his subject was more comprehensive than it otherwise probably would have been, and the result speaks for itself. It’s the little details in the portrait of Summerisle - the Pagan sex ed lesson on the blackboard behind Howie as he interrogates the pupils at the island’s one tiny school, the John Barleycorn-scored bread and the gruesome, intricate designs of the animal masks worn at the May Day procession - which make it feel additionally real.

Fortunately the golf footage I’d been recording was merely a one-hour highlights show, so I was able to watch the whole film on that old, much-erased VHS. This had not been the case with American Werewolf In London, which had cut off before half of the action had elapsed, meaning that, for at least a decade, I remained in the unique position of being someone who could recite the first segment of the film virtually word-for-word, yet whose picture of the remainder of it had been solely created by the descriptive powers of Leslie Halliwell and a random selection of amateur horror film aficionados from the East Midlands.

With hindsight, I find something quite poetic and instructive about the exact point during Werewolf that my VHS tape chose to stop: David Naughton had just had a randy shower with Jenny Agutter while listening to Van Morrison’s Moondance (I could never work out how they’d managed to get the stereo to play successfully with the water running on top of it) and, left alone in her London flat, bored out of his mind, was seconds away from his initial transformation into his lupine alter ego. When I finally did see the rest of the film, I could only be disappointed. My own mental pictures of it had set the bar impossibly high. Also none of the bits where the werewolf goes on his metropolitan rampage are half as scary as the early bits in Yorkshire, which are all primarily fuelled by the power of suggestion. The scene where he chases the stockbroker through a tube station could never live up to the colourful way my friend and early mentor Jane Hamshaw (fun fact: she was the inspiration for Jane Fennel in my novel 1983!) had once run me through it. Here, perhaps, are the foundations of my position as a “you don’t need to show me the monster” person where spooky films are concerned. Uncoincidentally The Wicker Man is possibly the ultimate in spooky films for the “you don’t need to show me the monster” crowd. We do see the monster, finally, but even then, its precise location is a point of debate. Is it the eponymous giant burning clifftop effigy? Or is it the grinning islanders beneath it, linking arms and singing a 13th century round to welcome in the summer? Or is it the terrified, pious policeman, staring his own imminent immolation directly in the face while wishing he’d had a shag with Britt Ekland while he’d had the chance and her then boyfriend Rod Stewart was off on tour singing about lipstick?

My conversation with Hardy took place in 2005, for a piece I wrote in the Sunday Times newspaper, long after I’d become entirely at one with my love of The Wicker Man, but some years before I held a make-your-own Wicker Man mask party to celebrate my birthday, and when I had still only racked up two dozen or so rewatches. He was promoting his newly released, preferred cut of the film, which featured 11 minutes of extra footage (a cut that, despite suggesting the undeniably exciting prospect of MORE WICKER MAN, I actually like less than the original cinema version, owing to the fact that it reveals just a bit too much of the monster and contravenes the film’s general “show don’t tell” philosophy). During our chat I discovered two new facts about that final scene: firstly that, during its shooting, a goat urinated on Edward Woodward’s side parting, and secondly that it was only by an act of beautiful meteorological serendipity that, when the wooden head of the Wicker Man toppled, the setting sun nudged through the clouds behind it, giving the film its lyrical, heliocentric conclusion. Additionally I learned that the room upstairs in The Green Man where Sergeant Howie tries unsuccessfully to sleep and the room supposedly next-door to it where Ekland (playing Willow, the daughter of the pub landlord, aka David Bowie’s mime teacher Lindsay Kemp) tries to seduce him with a sex dance were in fact thirty miles apart.

The Wicker Man does not shoot straight-on for laughs, but it has - aided in no small way by Kemp, Ekland, and Christopher Lee as the island’s surprisingly chilled CEO Lord Summerisle - a wry winking campness about it, and I find myself chuckling at it more as time passes. After Sergeant Howie expresses alarm at the sight of nude girls jumping over a fire in the grounds of Summerisle’s mansion, Summerisle responds, “Naturally! It’s much too dangerous to jump through fire with your clothes on.” When I watched the film for the first time on the big screen, and the fortysomethingth time overall, on Halloween 2010, the Ekland scene - specifically the part of it where she is infamously replaced with a “bum double” - got a collective guffaw larger than any I’ve ever heard in a cinema, with the possible exception of the one which, at a screening of the Eddie Murphy film Coming To America in Nottingham in 1988, accompanied the line “The Royal Penis is clean, your highness.” This is an early example of what I think of as The False Sarah Michelle Gellar Rule, which works on the optimistic belief that, if your main actor has enough long blonde hair which she can violently flick about and her stunt double has similar hair, the audience will fail to notice that the stunt double has a drastically different body shape to hers. However, far more disillusioning than Ekland’s inauthentic posterior is a rumour I have heard that Summerisle’s wild, tousled barnet was in fact a wig. I choose not to believe this, as someone who has gone to valiant - yet always unsuccessful - lengths in his attempts to recreate its windswept majesty in various remote upland locations.

Me on Dartmoor in 2015.

Christopher Lee on Summerisle in 1972.

“Folk horror” used to be a phrase which drew a blank with all but the tiniest fraction of the population, but, when you used it, and you located someone within that tiny fraction, you could guarantee they were a Wicker Man fan. Now it’s a phrase people put on t-shirts and tea towels before selling them on their Etsy account via Instagram. It’s overused, overstretched, overhipped. As far as films are concerned, folk horror remains an attractive genre, until you realise just how disappointingly few of them were made in the prime folk horror decade, the 1970s. The original BBC adaptations of MR James’ Whistle And I’ll Come To You and A Warning To The Curious are mini masterpieces, but when it comes to folk horror cinema of the same period, what you find is a lot of atmosphere, a lot of ham acting and a lot of flaccid storytelling. I always want Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan’s Claw to be as great as some people say they are. I keep thinking it’s high time I re-reappraised the former and I would, except I loaned my DVD of it to a puppeteer in summer 2016 and I’m still waiting for her to return it. So instead I rewatch The Wicker Man, again and again, and remember that folk horror isn’t really one genre at all; it’s one film. And whether that film can even be fully categorised as “horror” is a little doubtful.

I get older, and The Wicker Man has a way of telling me some stuff, not always gently, about where I am in my life, but what it mostly tells me is I’m still a person who loves The Wicker Man as much as ever. May is my favourite time of year, the time of year I was born, and The Wicker Man is a film which takes place at the beginning of that lovely, excitable month. Christopher Lee was another May baby, and perhaps that’s an additional reason he found The Wicker Man such a delight to make. I’m sure there is an example of a human being blatantly having as much fun acting in a film, but I can’t remember it right now. His law-bating becomes ever more delightful with each watch, the bit where he sees Woodward off and turns back to his afternoon session at the piano with schoolteacher Diane Cilento no less thrilling, in its own way, as hearing NWA’s ‘Fuck Da Police’ for the first time. I remember my initial reaction, when I realised it was Lee playing Summerisle: “Hold on! That’s Dracula! But 14 years later. And how come he looks so much younger than he did when he was Dracula?” I deleted my Twitter account a long time ago, so the Wicker Man tweet I did which Britt Ekland retweeted no longer exists, nor does one of the other Wicker Man tweets I did where I talked about Christopher Lee’s appearance in The Wicker Man, but it was something along the lines of “I’ve just discovered that Christopher Lee was 50 when he played Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. If I look that good at 50, I’ll probably never get anything done as I’ll be spending all day every day feeling myself up.” That was probably written in 2009 or 2010. 50 felt ages away, something easy to joke about due to its blurred grey connection of any reality I believed I was living in. But, with it almost here, it looks… quite a lot like 34 or 35 in many ways. I still watch The Wicker Man at least once a year and still don’t have hair that’s anywhere near as good as Lord Summerisle’s.

“What girl would not prefer the child of a God to that of some… acne-scarred artisan?”

Lee will be 103 on May 27th this year (ok, so his Wikipedia page claims he died in June 2015 but do we really have any proof, plus I have seen some quite suspicious-looking crows recently). Precisely a week before that, I will turn 50. That means I can no longer look at Lord Summerisle and think, “This much older dude seems unnervingly cool and mellow, in lots of ways, despite his enthusiasm for human sacrifice.” I am right there, part of his peer group, sharing some - though definitely not all - of his interests. I even made a hare out of willow last summer, although I won’t be burning anyone or anything inside it. I do not want to live Summerisle’s life. His mansion looks like it would take fucking yonks to clean and I doubt the climate of the West coast of Scotland, even aided by the Gulf Stream, would be suited to my Mediterranean blood. But as I step into his world yet again, seeing how it has influenced my own life, my own storytelling - both what I put into it and what I leave out - I see 50 in a different way than I used to: not necessarily more negatively or positively, just differently. One of the downsides of it as an age is that, if you’ve spent most of your life to that point coddling your rampant thirst for culture, many pieces of art you once enjoyed can feel overwatched, overplayed, overconsumed, overdone. You might, for instance, rewatch a film you once loved, and think, “Ok, I can see why I did love it, but that belongs firmly in my past now, and I need to accept that my relationship with it is over.” You might even find cause to wonder, at a bleaker moment, if you have raised your standards too high, seen too much to be able to enjoy like you once enjoyed. But then you rewatch something like The Wicker Man, something with that magic extra something, a film that still reveals more of itself to you after all these years, and you realise that the one thing that can never be overdone is genius. In fact, genius will actively resist being overdone, all on its own, from beyond the grave, just like it actively resists many other things, including bullshit, fashion and wankers. Time is its friend, and it can still be yours, in many ways, despite some visible evidence to the contrary. It’s a reassuring thought - not just about art, but about life itself. As Summerisle himself says: one should always be open to the regenerative influences.

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