Sex, Christ, and Citizen Kane

Reviews | The Wicker Man (with boobs)

In Short Reviews, I set out to write “500-word” movie reviews and usually fail. This is one of the few exclusive features for paid subscribers, with a substantial (hopefully tempting!) preview.

The next free article will probably be a complaint about bad nuclear wargaming… unless Paulsen & Baude come out with something fresh, in which case I’ll clear my calendar.

Nuada, god of the sun, the first image you see in The Wicker Man.

The Wicker Man is often sold as “the Citizen Kane of horror movies,” which is fine, except I’d rather watch The Wicker Man than Citizen Kane, and I’m not sure it’s a horror movie.

What is Horror?

It has seemed to me that what separates suspense from horror is a sense of the inexplicable. A horror story is characterized by nightmarish dread, a dawning realization that there are monstrous Things out there that you’ve never seen, don’t control, and will never, ever understand… and those Things hate you. Horror is defined by the supernatural, the alien, or, at least, the psychopathic.¹

There is much about the The Wicker Man that is surprising, even alarming… but nothing inexplicable. It is a straightforward suspense movie, closer to Alfred Hitchcock than Michael Myers. There are no psychopaths, nor any “supernatural” beings. People talk about religion, but if merely talking about religion qualifies a suspense movie as a horror movie, then the best horror movie of 2024 was Conclave.²

Conclave was excellent. I loved it.³ But there was nothing inexplicable in it, and it wasn’t a horror movie.

Still, I wasn’t sure of myself, so I asked a horror-loving friend, “Hey, [friendname], What Is Horror?” He answered that a work of art is “horror” if it is “created with the intention to cause feelings of fear and disgust.”⁴ He agreed that, yes, fear and disgust are often motivated by the inexplicable, but the defining quality is the aim at fear/disgust. Sure, Jungi Ito is terrifying, but so is Open Water, a movie where a scuba-diving couple is left in the ocean by mistake, struggles to survive, and (spoilers for a 22-year-old movie!), is eventually eaten by sharks.

There’s nothing remotely inexplicable about that. Yet what genre is it, if not horror? Certainly ain’t a romcom!

You could argue that Open Water is a suspense movie, not a horror movie, but here my friend outmaneuvers me: he argues that many suspense movies are horror movies, and that I shouldn’t try to draw such a clear line between them. After all, Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense, also made Psycho and The Birds, typically listed among history’s great horror movies.

My friend argues that the intent to horrify can often be identified by how the work ends. If the hero triumphs, and the intended catharsis is the relief of the hero solving the problem and escaping, the author probably intended “only” a thriller. If the catharsis is simply resolving a bunch of undirected confusion and dread into despair and defeat, then the author probably intended horror.

I think he might be right. Nevertheless, even embracing his broader definition, I’m still not sure The Wicker Man’s proper genre is horror.⁵

MY WIFE (bursting into the room): That’s because its genre is “musical”!

ME: No, dear wife! That’s ridiculous!⁶

Obviously, if The Wicker Man’s genre hinges on how it ends, I’m not going to be able to explore this without spoiling The Wicker Man’s ending,⁷ but, not to worry, I’ll stall for as long as I can. This is De Civitate, so how about a diversion into some weird details only nerds care about?

Version Control

The Wicker Man turned into a cult classic in part because it gave film buffs something to be precious about: there are three main cuts of The Wicker Man, known as the Short Version (88 minutes), the Middle Version (95 minutes) and the Long Version (99 minutes).⁸ This is the kind of thing that gives film buffs morning wicker, as anyone who’s ever talked to a Blade Runner fan can attest. A certain Steve Phillips gives a lovely, detailed overview of the various cuts on his website, so I won’t go into great detail on the differences. Just be aware that Wicker Man fans have a lot of annoying opinions about which cuts you shouldn’t watch.

Unfortunately, this time, the buffs are right: the Short Version is a mess. It was cut very short so that it could work as a B-movie at drive-ins, with key sequences rearranged and important themes tamped down. It doesn’t really make sense. You should avoid it at all costs. Naturally, then, the Short Version is the version running on literally every streaming service.⁹

You will do well with either the Middle Version or the Long Version. Some fans passionately argue that the Long Version is essential. Nevertheless, my personal favorite is the Middle Version.¹⁰

I suggest—wait, are we behind the paywall yet? No? Okay, then I suggest you very carefully study the various DVD releases, scouring reviews to make sure that they are the Middle Version or the Long Version, and then go to your nearest Hollywood Video and purchase a physical DVD for your physical DVD player. I think this DVD is the Middle Version, but you never can be sure until it shows up and you stick it in your machine. That’s my suggestion. Um, footnotes are paywalled automatically, right?¹¹

Enough fiddle-faddle. Let’s talk about the story.

Sir Galahad in a Bobby Hat

“This is still, in theory, a law-abiding Christian country,
however unfashionable that may seem.”
—Sgt. Neil Howie

The Wicker Man’s driving force is Edward Woodward’s gripping performance as Sgt. Neil Howie. I was already a fan of Woodward from his work on Callan, a British Cold War spy show that was excellent but incredibly dark for 1970:

In The Wicker Man, however, Woodward plays a devout Christian. The film establishes this immediately, because Howie’s Christianity is the most important fact about his character. Unusually for a modern film, the fact that he is religious is not the thing that matters, but specifically the fact that he is Christian.¹² He speaks often of Christ, sees Christ as the source of right moral action (which he always pursues), and is utterly devoted to the well-being of his fellow-men—even strangers. Howie is widely regarded by the other characters as an uptight puritan,¹³ and audiences run the risk of taking their word for it. There is no question that Howie takes his oath to the law very seriously, and that his bedside manner is, well, rather Scottish… but watch what he actually does and you will find yourself cheering for an unvarnished hero.

Howie also bears one of the great and difficult marks of Judeo-Christian religion: Howie is a virgin. This is not because he is an asexual or an ascetic. (We see this very clearly late in the movie.) He very much wants sex. Indeed, he is engaged. He just believes sex is only for his bride. This is implicit in his devout Christianity, but the movie makes it clear, and the Long Version takes pains to make it clear right at the outset. Howie’s belief in Christ is the beating heart of this movie!

The film begins when Howie, a police detective, receives an anonymous letter from Summerisle, a private island in the Scottish Hebrides famous for its excellent apples. A young girl, Rowan Morrison, has gone missing. She has not been seen in months. She could not have left the island on her own. Her mother won’t answer questions. Someone should find her.

Howie boards a seaplane to Summerisle and insists that the unfriendly natives allow him to land. When he starts showing Rowan Morrison’s photograph around, though, Howie gets a surprising response: the villagers claim they haven’t seen Rowan Morrison—not ever. They agree that May Morrison works in town, but that May only has one daughter, whose name is Myrtle. Rowan Morrison, they say, does not exist. Howie must be the victim of some kind of a prank.

Sgt. Howie can’t responsibly leave it at that, though, not with a girl’s life even potentially at risk, so he begins an investigation. It soon becomes clear that Rowan Morrison is dead… but what killed her? And who? And where, oh where, is the body?

It also becomes clear that Summerisle is pagan. Coughs are cured with spells cast using toads. The church has been abandoned, the graveyard converted to pagan gods. They sacrifice the firstfruits of their harvest to the gods of sky and sea in exchange for their blessings. The Christian notion of resurrection has been fully supplanted by the idea of reincarnation, and, indeed, the islanders believe Rowan has been reincarnated as a hare. That’s the pedagogical purpose of the Maypole Song:

Above all, though, the pagan residents of Summerisle are obsessed with sex. The barkeep’s daughter serves as a kind of temple prostitute, “beloved” by the whole town. When night falls, people couple freely and rut on the lawn in large numbers. Children are taught in their school lessons to venerate the penis, as well as phallic symbols of all kinds. There are way more boobs in this movie than I expected from the English, even in the ‘70s. You come into “the Citizen Kane of horror movies” expecting gore, and instead you get a Mr. Skin catalog.¹⁴

Though all this public indecency certainly makes him upset, Sgt. Howie takes it in stride, more or less. After all, he is an officer of the law, and these people are on a private island, where they aren’t breaking any laws. (God’s laws, but not the king’s.) Meanwhile, Howie has a job to do: rescue Rowan Morrison. So he averts his eyes, erects the occasional outraged crucifix in the occasional desecrated churchyard, and otherwise gets on with it.

Heathens in the Heath

The case soon leads Sgt. Howie to the doors of Lord Summerisle, ruler of the island: a young Christopher Lee playing the most perfectly Christopher Lee role in the history of Christopher Lee.¹⁵ After Summerisle explains that a circle of dancing naked girls jumping outside his window are praying to be impregnated by divine parthenogenesis, Howie laces into him:

HOWIE: Oh, what is all this? I mean, you—you—you’ve got fake biology, fake religion? Sir, have these children never heard of Jesus?

SUMMERISLE: Himself the son of a virgin impregnated, I believe, by a ghost.

[…]

HOWIE: And you, you encourage them in this?

SUMMERISLE: Actively! It is most important that each new generation born on Summerisle be made aware that, here, the old gods aren't dead.

HOWIE: But what of the true God, to whose glory churches and monasteries have been built on these islands for generations past? Now, sir, what of Him?

SUMMERISLE: Oh, he's dead… and he can't complain. He had his chance, and, in modern parlance, blew it.

HOWIE: What?!

[…]

SUMMERISLE: What my grandfather started out of expediency, my father continued out of love. He brought me up the same way: to reverence the music and the drama and the rituals of the old gods. To love nature, and to fear it, and rely on it, and to appease it where necessary. He brought me up—

HOWIE: He brought you up to be a pagan!

SUMMERISLE: A heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.

At this point in the movie, you might be starting to worry about the same thing I started worrying about: does this movie know what paganism is?