50 Years of The Wicker Man, Thousands of Years of History, brought to you by The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies.
Doors: 7pm
Semester pass available here
Riddled with enigmas and ambiguities, the 1973 British Lion production The Wicker Man managed to claw its way back from obscurity to cement itself as an internationally lauded piece of British cinema history. Boasting a script by recent writer célébre Anthony Shaffer, the production immediately hit compromises and challenges, and then struggled to see the light of day. Helmed by Shaffer’s ad firm partner and debut feature director Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man tells the story of a Scottish police officer who arrives at the outer Hebridean island of Summerisle in response to an anonymous letter reporting a missing child and in the process finding his devout Christianity, and the investigation, repeatedly challenged by the islanders and their adherence to the ‘old ways’.
Culminating in an iconic and disturbing sequence of ritual sacrifice, this is a film made by English people about Scottish identity and culture with a heavy focus on the tensions between British Christianity and millennia of British and Celtic paganism. A cursory understanding of thousands of years of British history and culture only marginally reveals the way this movie is informed by a rich and ancient culture that goes back far beyond its own written history. The Wicker Man not only implicitly deals with the colonisation of Scotland – and Celtic cultures more broadly – by the English and the feudal class system it imposed. It also draws from the wellspring of agrarian communal and ritual culture, not just in the gods it worships but in the celebrations developed around the agrarian calendar and the music the community sings together. This only partially explains the mystical grip The Wicker Man has on audiences worldwide, however.
In this presentation, Wickham Clayton will take you through this historical context and the troubled production and distribution of The Wicker Man. Furthermore, he will analyse the film itself explain why a movie which met with tepid praise on release and resigned to obscurity for nearly two decades became a mainstay of British film culture. Furthermore, Clayton will discuss the twin legacies of the film; on one hand it is seen as a ‘cult’ classic, on the other it holds a place as a ‘legitimate’ classic of British cinema. Can the enduring appeal of The Wicker Man be concretely identified, or is it surrounded in as many mysteries as Summerisle itself?
Dr. Clayton is widely published, most recently SEE! HEAR! CUT! KILL!: Experiencing Friday the 13th, and a forthcoming BFI Film Classics book on The Wicker Man.