HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 51
2nd of 4 folk horror films

I finally got around to watching The Wicker Man for the first time only a few years ago, while I was deep into my initial obsession for Hammer horror films and any other British genre films from around the same time. I liked it a lot, but my main memory is of how different it was to anything else I was watching at the time. I was struck more by what felt like a slightly dated weirdness - not a bad thing but maybe not something I felt was a major masterpiece.

Now I do, though.

If I found this weird the first time, and unlike the Hammer films of the day, that's hardly surprising because The Wicker Man is unique. Can you think of any other movie that feels anything like this? And go beyond the thematic subject matter - I know this is one of the so-called "Unholy Trinity" along with The Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan's Claw. I'm not arguing it shouldn't be compared with those other seminal folk horrors, but the contrast is strong - the experience of watching those is nothing like the experience of watching The Wicker Man, but then again, no film is.

The latest point of comparison has been Midsommar, another folk horror film I love dearly, and again: it's an interesting comparison more for the dissimilarities than the likenesses. The great similarity between the two films is their close attention to detail in portraying the practices and rituals of pagan religions which, though strictly fictional, draw their inspiration from genuine pre-Christian belief systems and practices in European pre-history. In the case of Midsommar, this attention to detail is almost forensic (as befits Ari Aster's Kubrickian monomania). The freewheeling Robin Hardy circa 1973 can't compete with that kind of obsessiveness, but he endows the customs with an impressionistic quality which possibly enhances the illusion even further.

Because here's the subversive genius of The Wicker Man. Once it reluctantly allows our egress from Sgt Howie's little seaplane and ferries us across to Summerisle, we find ourselves through the looking glass. Up is down and in is out - and although Hardy grips the subliminal harpstring tightly enough such that we always instinctively know something is badly wrong here, it's Howie we fear for. Because Howie is not "us" any more, he has suddenly become the "other".

Midsommar's depiction of the passionate devotion of its Swedish pagans engendered horror because, while we could understand the theoretical appeal of a community which embraced nature and togetherness at the same time its overt brutality ensured we never stopped considering them as alien - something we could never join. In contrast, the Summerislers often feel like they are the sane ones. Yes, they get up to some weird shit and they are clearly hiding something, but our only immediate point of comparison is Sgt Howie: an ultra-conservative, nigh-on-fundamentalist Scottish Presbyterian. Is this real world religion devoted to some magical being ("Himself the son of a virgin, impregnated, I believe, by a ghost..." as Lord Summerisle derisively puts it) which places denial of one's natural biological urges and flatly rejects communion with the natural world from which we spring any less superstitious, mystical or outrageous than the islanders' own?

This trick on the film's part is largely pulled off on the basis of its wickedly subversive script, especially in the character of Lord Summerisle, portrayed with demonic charm by Christopher Lee in surely one of his finest ever performances. He's like Kryptonite to Edward Woodward's blustering, uptight, existentially tormented Sgt Howie. But I wonder too if the depiction of this nature worshipping religion isn't itself innately compelling to our own long-buried pagan roots. The mythology of The Wicker Man is like the ur-mythology to all the mystical and fantastical notions which survive in our culture today. We think of "magic" as wizards and witches and monsters, but that's what the evangelists of the newer monotheistic religions turned it into, to make it easier to quash and ridicule, to look childish in comparison to their own mystical texts. Magic to pagan humanity was the magic which was evident everywhere: it's the cycle of life and death and rebirth - clearly miraculous but not to the benefit of the individual, only to the species as a whole. The full and unblinking recognition of our impending death is an awesome concept indeed. We now shut it away in a part of our brain, we shunt it into invisibility by sending our elderly into isolated locations where we aimlessly try to prolong their lives, paradoxically in the same place we make them wait for their deaths, conveniently cut off from their communities. I'm generalising, of course, we're not all so callous as that, but that's the modern societal model.

This is supposed to be a review for the movie, but that's what I guess I'm trying to say. The reason I think The Wicker Man is a masterpiece is because it seems to have cracked a mysterious code into unlocking our most primal state - our primal fears, sure, but also our most primal desires. In its writing and performances, in its striking casting (if you want to tap into male animal urges, you can't do better than casting Britt Ekland and Ingrid Pitt as two of the cultists, for instance), in its highly unusual structure and sound design. The music itself is probably not celebrated enough. Paul Giovanni's folk compositions sound more anachronistic today than they would have in 1973, when this sort of folk music was more prevalent in the mainstream, but it hasn't lost an ounce of its eerie power. That scene where Ekland pounds the wall was enough to give me goosebumps - and it was that astounding music that transforms it (although naked Britt and her unknown ass-double don't hurt).

Here be spoilers…

Everyone knows about the final scene, but this time it was the dancing cultists who stamped themselves indelibly in my brain. Aubrey Morris's insane rictus grin. Ingrid Pitt's hunching gait (which strangely called to mind for me the final ritual in Ben Wheatley's Kill List). But most unforgettably, Christopher Lee's transcendent joy at the better future he was ensuring for his people - a look of such pure unadulterated joy at the tortured anguish of his helpless, hopeless, hapless prey. A necessary evil for the greater good.