(The villagers often communicate in song, which the straightlaced Howie can’t stand.)Īltogether the film is a wild, rare confection – a product of true vision made for little money that endures both as a film and as a key object of influence on much of the great art that has come since. That the film is so reliant on musical sequences – sweetly sung diegetic folk songs drift in and out of the film as Howie walks around Summerisle, occasionally giving way to full musical numbers of traditional British folk as reinterpreted by composer Paul Giovanni – gives it an immersive quality, aside from the music’s other function as a kind of meta commentary on the nature of language. Even Midsommar, despite narrative and visual similarities, is entirely different in tone from The Wicker Man’s surreal, musical landscape. Part of this is due to there having been few films like it, before or since. Most sinister of all is that despite their wide grins and penchant for song and dance, Howie is pretty certain the missing girl has been given up as a human sacrifice in exchange for an abundant harvest. The devoutly Christian sergeant is appalled – villagers roaming naked and having sex in the lush fields, churchyards overrun with wildlife and entirely devoid of Christian symbology, school lessons on the phallic origins of the maypole, and a suave, smartly dressed lord, played by Christopher Lee, who rules in place of an elected official. Not only are the island’s residents cheerily working together to obfuscate the details of what happened to the girl, they also seem to have given up on Christianity entirely – worshipping pagan gods and conducting a sinister masked procession on May day. When he arrives, he finds that he’s bitten off far more than he can chew.

Photograph: Allstar/British Lion/StudioCanal Devoid of any ‘traditional’ horror devices, The Wicker Man instead asks viewers to draw their own conclusions about the traditions of Summerisle.

The Wicker Man by Robin Hardy