Search Results for: the wicker man

Although The Wicker Man’s original release and related reviews were limited and patchwork, over the decades it has gained a higher profile and critical appreciation, and since around 2010 it has come to be one of the main reference points for the loose genre of folk horror and wyrd or otherly pastoral culture. A prominent landmark in this process was the publication in America during October 1977 of a special issue largely devoted to The Wicker Man of the science fiction, fantasy and horror film magazine Cinefantastique, which is quoted from in this chapter. This was published just prior to the cinema re-release of the shorter Theatrical version of the film in America, and approximately a year before the premiere, also in America, of a longer version in September 1978, and the issue’s editorial presciently predicts the growth of interest and critical appreciation of The Wicker Man:

“[It’s] reputation can only grow over the years. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to be among the first to champion the film in the United States, for I think the test of time will show that The Wicker Man is the Citizen Kane of horror films.” (Quoted from “Sense of Wonder”, Frederick S. Clarke, Cinefantastique, Volume 6 Number 3, 1977.)

(This reference to Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane is notable as it attempts to place The Wicker Man alongside the very height of critically and publicly acclaimed films, as Citizen Kane is considered by many to be the greatest film ever made and has repeatedly topped lists of the best films.)

In this issue The Wicker Man was the only film pictured or mentioned on the front and back cover and of the 46 inner pages 34 were taken up by a long article written by David Bartholomew on The Wicker Man and colour and black and white photographs from the film and its production. Also the index page’s background was a photograph of the wicker man pyre from the film and the text on the editorial page focused on the film.

The main long article was based in part on interviews with the abovementioned director Robin Hardy, Christopher Lee who played Lord Summer Isle, Anthony Shaffer who wrote the screenplay, the soundtrack composer Paul Giovanni, producer Peter Snell and also Stirling Smith and David Blake who were involved in the film’s American distribution.

The article opens with details of the cast and crew and then is split into sections numbered in a Biblical or Roman numeral style. These included I: The Film – a review of the film and overview of its plots; II: Genesis – details of the project’s initial development, the writing of the script and finding a backer; III: Research and Background – details of the research carried out which created the background and underpinning of the script; IV: The Screenplay – Anthony Shaffer’s background and views on the screenplay and the horror film genre; V: Production – details of the actual filming; VI: Lord Summerisle – Christopher Lee and other’s views on his character; VII: The Music – extensive background details on the soundtrack that draw from an interview with Paul Giovanni; VIII: Aftermath – the film’s troubled release and eventual re-release in America.

This extensive article predates and is a forebear to Allan Brown’s book Inside The Wicker Man (2000, 2010), which focused on the film, and the issue was unusual at the time, and in large part still is, due to the way that it dedicated so much space within a magazine to one particular film, and in that sense it anticipates the contemporary trend for one-off “bookazines” released by magazine publishers which focus on a particular musician, area of film etc.

It is also unusual in the way that it gave a (nominally) horror genre film a level of critical appreciation that this area of film was at the time normally precluded from.

The amount of detail and information contained in the magazine is quite astonishing, particularly considering that it was produced prior to internet access, and so to discover details of the company buyouts and the film’s production etc featured in it, if they were not supplied by the interviewees, is likely to have involved a taxing and rigorous process of investigation.

Physical copies are now fairly rare and can cost anything from approximately £8 to over £100, although links to a PDF scan of the entire magazine and a text only transcript of the article can be found at The Wicker Man (1973) Wiki archival fan site. The magazine and article are well worth seeking out as a unique part of the film’s history and rehabilitation, and also for its both concise and in-depth exploration of the background, production, themes and inspiration of the film.

It reveals the depth of research into ancient folklore, traditions and beliefs which underpin The Wicker Man and its world, alongside the experiences of its creators which may have gone on to influence the film. This includes the following quote from its director Robin Hardy which, although not directly referred to in the article, seems to mirror and possibly informed how the islanders’ treatment of Howie is depicted in The Wicker Man:

“[In the later 1960s] we were filming in the Cornwall area, and one evening we went into Padstow for dinner. Now that is a village where these [tradition folk] festivals are still held, and quite by accident we stumbled right on to it. We saw the hobby-horse chasing the girls [as shown in The Wicker Man], everything. But they had seemed to put up a wall of evasion about it. And it was very unpleasant being a stranger in that town on that day.” (Quoted from “The Wicker Man”, David Bartholomew, Cinefantastique, Volume 6 Number 3, 1977.)

Elsewhere:

• The Wicker Man (1973) Wiki archival fan site including details of the The Wicker Man Cinefantastique special issue
• Allan Brown’s Inside The Wicker Man

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country (well, a few of such things, I expect there are more):

• The Wicker Man – Revisiting a Cultural Behemoth and Casting Aside Convention on Summerisle: Wanderings 12/26
• The Wicker Man Soundtrack and a Summer Isle Mini-Industry
• The Wicker Man – The Future Lost vessels and Artifacts of Modern Folklore
• 138 Layers and Gatherings of The Wicker Man
• Summerisle in (Sort Of) Pop #1 – Pulp’s Wickerman
• Summerisle in (Sort Of) Pop #2 – The Sneaker Pimps’ How Do / Kelli Ali’s Willow’s Song
• Your Face Here; Peering Down into the Landfill – A Now Historical Perspective on the Stories of The Wicker Man
• The Wicker Man / Don’t Look Now Double Bill and Media Disseminations from What Now Seem a Long Long Time Ago
• Constructing The Wicker Man
• The Wicker Man, Edge of Darkness and Village of the Damned – The “Tricky” Cult Remake
• Willow’s Songs
• Revisiting Willow’s Songs
• The Wicker Man Revisited / Refreshed – The Long Arm of the Lore
• The Wicker Man – Summer Isle Books, Bindings, Pounds, Shillings and Pence
• Sing Cuckoo: The Story and Influence of The Wicker Man Soundtrack and Other Partly-Archived Summerisle Discussions
• The Wicker Man – Notes on a Cultural Behemoth

 

At the A Year In The Country site there have been a fair number of posts that explored the  cultural offshoots from The Wicker Man such as documentaries, different home releases of the film, related books and soundtrack releases etc but I thought it would be good to revisit the actual film.

It is easy to forget just how odd The Wicker Man (1973) is. Even after numerous viewings it retains an ability to shock, intrigue, unsettle and even possibly even beguile and confuse the viewer.

This may in part be due to its mixing of genres and themes; at times it veers towards being a musical, running through the whole film is a crime mystery, at points becomes more an erotic thriller, while it ends on a note of, if not actual horror, then at least terror during its ending. Accompanying all of which it explores complex and morally ambiguous debates around different belief systems and practices, both directly via the characters’ dialogue and indirectly via the results of their actions.

In terms of genres it could be connected with, one of the things that struck me when I recently rewatched it was just how much it includes considerable elements of the con artist movie. More on that later in the post.

I suspect that if you’re reading this you may well already know of the film’s plot etc but just in case, below is a brief synopsis.

Directed by Robin Hardy from a screenplay by Anthony Shaffer and set in contemporary times, the plot focuses around Sergeant Howie, a pious and puritanically Christian police officer who receives a report of a missing child and travels alone via seaplane to the remote Scottish island Summerisle where she lived. The island has an economy largely based around agriculture and the growing of new strains of crops which are able to flourish in the island’s unusually temperate climate.

Sergeant Howie’s investigations are met with recalcitrance and deception by the villagers, and he is repeatedly shocked by them not following the Christian religion, instead having turned to the “old gods” and a form of pagan nature worship, which incorporates an uninhibited attitude towards sex and fertility, and incorporates folkloric rituals and song. Ultimately it is revealed that he has been lead a merry dance by the islanders and their patriarchal leader Lord Summerisle and that the sergeant is intended to be a sacrifice that it is hoped will restore their failed crops, which it is implied has happened due to them being grown in an area where they would not naturally be.

In the final sequence Howie is forcedly placed in a huge wicker man pyre structure, which is set fire to as the islanders serenade his sacrifice with a traditional sun worship song. As the wicker man structure burns, its head falls to one side and reveals the sun setting over the ocean.

(As an aside, looking back the film’s exploration of alternative lifestyles, pagan beliefs and “the old ways” could be considered to interconnect with the “psychic boom” in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a considerable upsurge of interest in the paranormal, the occult etc which was accompanied by a growth in subcultural and mainstream media coverage of such subjects, alongside an increase in the release of related publications.)

Although the ending and Howie’s sacrifice are not easy viewing, their depiction, the reasons for what has happened and demeanour of those responsible are presented in a way that causes the film to stand apart from the gratuitous or almost nonchalantly callous inclusion of sadism that has become an increasing part of the horror, and other, genres:

“For [Christopher Lee who played Lord Summerisle], this is what sets the film apart from conventional horror movies: ‘The islanders are so sincere. Summerisle says [to Howie], ‘A martyr’s death – the greatest gift we can bestow.’ And everybody’s smiling. You know: what a lucky man you are! Joy, joy, joy. There’s no sadistic delight.'” (Quoted from “A Pagan Place”, Damien Love, Uncut, May 2002.)

The film plays with a sense of reality and fantasy and it opens with text that says:

“The Producer would like to thank The Lord Summerisle and the people of his island off the west coast of Scotland for this privileged insight into their religious practices and for their generous co-operation in the making of this film.”

Having been released at a time before the ease of access to information brought about by the internet, the film’s audience is unlikely to have known that no such community or island existed, nor have been able to quickly look it up.

(There is a similarly named island called Summer Isles off the coast of Scotland but none of The Wicker Man was filmed there.)

The blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality in the film is also increased through it using a considerable number of songs that either draw from traditional folk songs and/or are similar in style and content. Alongside this it features a number of folk traditions, rituals and characters that also draw from real world traditions, and which lend a familiarity and layered grounding in semi-known and half-remembered reality to it, of which the film’s director Robin Hardy has said:

“What we hoped would fascinate people is not that they would think these things are still going on in Europe, but that they would recognize an awful lot of these things as sort of little echoes from either out of childhood stories and nursery rhymes or things they do at various times of the year… But they’re not dead. The thing about these beliefs is that people do these things today and not know why they do them. We call them ‘superstitions’. There are millions of people who know nothing about [ancient trees gods and mythology] who will… ‘touch wood’… [Such things] all have profoundly important and real origins in pagan belief.” (Quoted from “The Wicker Man”, David Bartholomew, Cinefantastique – Volume 6, Number 3, David Bartholomew, 1977.)

The changing use and depiction of music in the film further blurs the sense of reality and unreality. At times it is apparently played and sung by those onscreen in a fairly realist manner and appears to be a diegetic or natural part of the film’s world, such as during a sequence when a bawdy song is sung by the patrons of a pub, the music for which was recorded on location and played by those who appear onscreen. Elsewhere the film becomes more similar to a conventional musical as obviously studio recorded singing and instrumentation play, with at times only the vocals being mimed by the onscreen characters, while at other points both the vocals and the instrumentation are mimed, which blurs the lines between the “real” world of the film and its characters and its more obviously artificially constructed aspects. Also at one point the performance of music in the film possibly briefly breaks the fourth wall, which happens when an islander sings and performs an erotic song and naked wall thumping dance in order to tempt and seduce the puritanical Howie through his bedroom wall. During this she is accompanied by studio recorded non-diegetic instruments on the soundtrack which have no “real” world source in the film and she appears to look directly at and acknowledge the camera. The resultant continuous switching of modes adds a shifting sense of reality to the film’s world and the viewer’s perception of it.

There is also a further blurring of reality in the film due to it being shot in real world locations, meaning that there is an authenticity to them which connects with the film’s deliberately misleading introductory text thanking Lord Summerisle, and also

their appearance is not leant a potentially dated studio bound appearance. This sense of authenticity is added to by many of the islanders being drawn from members of the local public rather than being professional actors, and so subconsciously they seem “right” for their location. However, in contrast with the resulting sense of the film being located and grounded in the real world, although the film was set in contemporary times, many exterior signs of modern life such as street lights and television aerials seem to be largely absent, which adds an atemporal “out of time” aspect to the island.

The film also uses a recurring trope in cinema, that of islands and rural areas as places where it is possible for conventions and norms to be stepped away from, and their populations to be an unknowable or threatening “other” who have their own ways and beliefs that are at odds with wider society. As part of the exploration of this the investigating outsider Howie represents two forms of mainstream or conventional authority, being both a devout Christian and a police officer.

The clash between Howie’s beliefs and authority, and therefore those of the conventional and dominant society, and the islanders’ beliefs and Lord Summerisle’s authority throws up questions about assumptions of moral right and superiority around different forms of religion and authority. Accompanying this the film explores what happens when assumed positions of power and superiority are challenged in various ways, which in this instance involves a society wide lack of compliance and the individual who represents those positions being removed from their supporting infrastructure. When Howie, his investigation and authority are not met with cooperation by the islanders he, at least for much of the film, keeps straightforwardly ploughing on, assuming that somehow he will get to the truth of the matter. This may appear somewhat obtuse, or imply that he is not all that skilled as a detective, but may in fact be due to him being used to operating in a setting and society which respects his authority and the hierarchy and system he represents, and so he is essentially unable to correctly function, or understand how to, when that is no longer the case.

Howie is only on the island for two nights but the islanders’ lack of cooperation quickly has him and his rigorous adherence to the law coming apart at the seams. After exhuming the missing child’s supposed grave he finds only a hare in her coffin, which he had previously been told by the islanders she had transmuted into upon her death. The islander who has helped him in the exhumation just laughs mockingly at him discovering this, and when Howie confronts Lord Summerisle with his finding the response he receives is a knowing and dismissive humouring of him. Thus far in the film whenever in public Howie has been wearing an immaculately kept uniform, in a way that both represents and heightens his own personal sense of authority and also his controlled, buttoned up and even priggish and prissy personality.

(Edward Woodward who played Howie is said to have worn a police uniform two sizes too small in order to enhance the sense and appearance of the character as controlled and overly buttoned up.)

In the above confrontation with Lord Summerisle his tie is loosened and his police jacket undone, which although small things, and even allowing for him having been engaged in the physical labour of digging up a grave, are a notable indicator of just how much he is unravelling.

Rather than attempting to contact the mainland for backup he seems obsessed with solving the case on his own, perhaps because if he can it will prove the continued superiority of his belief systems and authority. He takes it upon himself to set aside the law he represents and effectively carries out acts of breaking and entering as part of his investigation. This is further exacerbated when he does eventually attempt to return to the mainland and finds his seaplane inoperable, most probably due to sabotage by the islanders, after which he becomes a form of vigilante. He knocks a man unconscious in order to steal his masked costume and surreptitiously join the islanders in their May Day parade and hopefully find the missing child, who he now believes will be sacrificed in order to restore the island’s failed crops. While his actions may have a practical legal and moral basis, i.e. the protection of a child to the best of his ability, his actions seem equally those of a man who has come untethered from his own strict moral and legal code. Ironically, and perhaps in part as a form of retribution which reflects his transgressing from his own codes and also possessing a vain pride in his beliefs and authority, this untethering or abandoning becomes the final contributor to his own damnation. As a result of joining the parade he is completing a ritual being enacted by the islanders, and discovers that he has effectively been herded and lead as an unknowing participant in a complex ritualistic game they have been playing with him.

As just suggested there is a hubris, or even arrogance, to Howie and his actions. Until almost the very last moment he does not seem to be able to countenance that his position of legal authority can be defeated. However the strength of his belief in this authority rapidly, and almost instantly, seems to crumble when the islanders surround him and he realises his fate as their sacrifice, and that his authority in the face of overwhelming societal wide non-compliance is now worth little.

There is also a degree of hubris and possibly arrogance to the islanders’ actions. Their game playing, plotting and hoodwinking of Howie is so convoluted that it is difficult to believe they could ever think it would work, and that it did so may well be more due to chance than design. Them achieving their aims is dependant on the entire population knowing and playing their parts consistently and without constant direct supervision, and Howie also consistently responding in the desired way. In relation to this the film connects with the con artist movie genre, and has more than a little in common with the critically and commercially highly successful period film The Sting, also released in the same year as The Wicker Man, in which a large group of people work together to carry out a complex gambling related con which requires an almost absurd level of organisation, cooperation and secrecy.

(The Wicker Man and The Sting – an alternative early 1970s double bill?)

There are also numerous other practical considerations that could have scuppered the islander’s plans, and which indicate a sense of over confidence in the islanders. For example if the weather had been particularly bad and subject to heavy downpours prior to and on the day of the parade that Howie joins as he unknowingly heads towards his doom, it is likely that the islander’s spirits would have been considerably dampened and their costumes and Lord Summerisle’s make up potentially ruined. This would have made the bizarrely upbeat and celebratory nature of their ritual sacrifice of Howie considerably less easy to achieve, while the wicker man pyre they use in this ritual would possibly not have easily burned.

The Wicker Man is ambiguous on a number of levels and it does not have easily or well defined good versus bad protagonists and sides. While nominally the “goodie” or hero, Howie is difficult to warm to or view as such, due in part to his priggish, close minded and judgemental personality, and also him having and representing a puritanical personal and societal viewpoint. Alongside which Lord Summerisle and the islanders may be acting for what they consider the collective good in sacrificing the sergeant but they are still carrying out an act of murder.

Also, despite presenting itself as being benevolently organised and ruled by Lord Summerisle and containing a contented population there is an ambiguity to the structure and society of Summerisle.

The islanders accepted and embraced Lord Summerisle’s grandfather as their ruler, and subsequently Summerisle’s father and then himself, after their lives of near starvation were drastically improved by Lord Summerisle’s grandfather who, as referred to at the start of the chapter, introduced new strains of crops which were able to flourish in the island’s unusually temperate climate. Accompanying this Lord Summerisle says that his grandfather thought that:

“the best way of… rousing the people from their apathy [was] by giving them back their joyous old gods and [by telling them that] as a result of this worship the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance.”

Part of this process of worship and creating social cohesion appears to have included the introduction of the aforementioned playful religious and folkloric rituals, and an open-minded acceptance of revelry in the form of sexual freedom, communal singing and drinking. This proved a seductive and efficient mix, and caused the Christian ministers to flee, with the island’s isolation presumably allowing this way of life and beliefs to become deeply embedded.

But all this has a flipside; is Summerisle a sexually uninhibited society which has cast off puritanical strictures, or an amoral and licentiously creepy form of cult and its brainwashed victims? Or perhaps a mixture of both? Accompanying this, although not overtly, the film can also be viewed as a reflection of real world post 1960s hippie-like ideals and free love that are still “happy clappy” but which have corrupted and curdled into something darker and self-deluding.

In essence the Summerisle family’s methods of maintaining control can be seen as a variation on the classic “bread and circuses” concept, which has its origins in Roman times, i.e. the family have kept control over the island’s population through keeping them happily fed and entertained. There is considerable moral complexity and ambiguity to this, as the islanders’ lives have been materially improved and they generally seem quite happy under their benevolent patriarch’s rule, while equally their acceptance may be due to the successful embedding of an imposed belief system, rather than due to acts of free will.

Related to which for the viewer there is a potentially ambiguous and morally confusing sense of sirenish seduction to the life and world of Summerisle as presented in the film. The folkish songs on the soundtrack and which at times are performed by the islanders, in particular “Corn Riggs”, “Willow’s Song” and “Gently Johnny”, are hypnotic lullabies that linger in the memory and draw the viewer in, the islanders appear to have all their practical and spiritual needs taken care of and the island itself is a timeless rural idyll. Accompanying this the ideology and beliefs that underpin the islanders’ way of life are eloquently and logically presented by a charismatic and benevolent leader (albeit who is also slightly pompous and bufoonish), who seems to intellectually out manoeuvre and rationally refute Howie and conventional and/or Christian society’s arguments at every step. All this can create a heady mix which obscures the realities and problematic nature of Summerisle’s society, not least issues around compliance and control, and also the way it is prepared to solve problems relating to agricultural issues and social cohesion in an extreme and unhinged way (i.e. by entrapping and sacrificing an outsider).

In order for the Summerisle society to continue functioning how it does, all outside influences and contact must be kept to a minimum. Connected to which, in terms of how the islanders are kept entertained through their own homegrown forms of entertainment, such as communal singing and folk rituals, Summerisle seems removed from the rest of the world and time. Also, although there are examples of contemporary branded food, alcohol and other consumer items on the island, alongside some electrical appliances such as hairdryers in the salon, there is little evidence of contemporary electronic entertainment media. It is almost as if in some unspoken and undisclosed manner record players, radios and television have largely and quietly been kept off the island. Perhaps this was instituted by the Summerisle family for fear that they would threaten or usurp the more traditional communal forms of entertainment and ritual which bind the islanders together in their pagan beliefs. Or maybe the islanders themselves have had no need for them, preferring their own more homegrown folklore orientated entertainments. Whatever the reasons this aspect of the film can be seen as a reflection of how in the real world sections of society were drawn to traditional, rural and folkloric places and culture in the 1970s as a form of escape from the troubles of contemporary life, and as part of an attempt to find alternative or more authentic forms of experience and ways of life, which is also discussed elsewhere in the book.

To a degree watching the film is to be given a view of the last decades or corner of a particular way of life. The islanders have been able to live how they do due to their isolation, but it is unlikely that this could have been maintained indefinitely in the face of technological advancements, in particular the relentless and all conquering nature of digital technology and internet communications which would gain considerable pace within a few decades of the film’s events. However, although maintaining their isolation in future decades would have been unlikely, it would not have been impossible and such ambiguities about the film’s story and world, and the way they leave space for the imagination to wonder, may well be part of what has led to it having such an ongoing fascination:

“We don’t know if Summerisle’s sacrifice fails – the apples could come tumbling out of the trees that year, but if they don’t, the people will have to have another go next year… But if the apples do return, whether it was because of the sacrifice or by a natural process – it’s not unknown for crops to fail and grow the next year – who knows? It’s not, after all, the continuing story of Summerisle. You have to be left with a certain doubt.” (Anthony Shaffer quoted from “The Wicker Man”, Cinefantastique, as above.)

Existing alongside this sense of “doubt” about the future of Summerisle are the almost myth-like stories around the films production, which include how footage was disposed of and buried in motorway foundations and no “full” version of the film is still known to exist, which creates further imaginative space around the film:

“And this, perhaps, is the final clue to the uncanny hold it has over its admirers – the notion that, even in the longest extant cut, what we’re seeing is not The Wicker Man, not quite. Its ultimate version may never be seen – the lost movie Christopher Lee made decades ago, existing now only in scenes that haunt his memory.” (Quoted from “A Pagan Place”, as above.)

Which seems like an appropriate place to leave this “cultural behemoth”.

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country (well, a few of such things, I expect there are more):

• The Wicker Man Soundtrack and a Summer Isle Mini-Industry
• The Wicker Man – The Future Lost vessels and Artifacts of Modern Folklore
• 138 Layers and Gatherings of The Wicker Man
• Summerisle in (Sort Of) Pop #1 – Pulp’s Wickerman
• Summerisle in (Sort Of) Pop #2 – The Sneaker Pimps’ How Do / Kelli Ali’s Willow’s Song
• Your Face Here; Peering Down into the Landfill – A Now Historical Perspective on the Stories of The Wicker Man
• The Wicker Man / Don’t Look Now Double Bill and Media Disseminations from What Now Seem a Long Long Time Ago
• Constructing The Wicker Man
• The Wicker Man, Edge of Darkness and Village of the Damned – The “Tricky” Cult Remake
• Willow’s Songs
• Revisiting Willow’s Songs
• The Wicker Man Revisited / Refreshed – The Long Arm of the Lore
• The Wicker Man – Summer Isle Books, Bindings, Pounds, Shillings and Pence
• Sing Cuckoo: The Story and Influence of The Wicker Man Soundtrack and Other Partly-Archived Summerisle Discussions
• The Wicker Man – Notes on a Cultural Behemoth

 

It seems rather appropriate to begin this yearly cycle of Songs for A Year In The Country with a visit to Summerisle via this song which conjures a sense of a timeless and atemporal world…

 

Links:

• Stream “Gently Johnny” at Spotify
• The soundtrack on CD at Silva Screen’s site
• “The Wicker Man Soundtrack and a Summer Isle Mini-Industry” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

Notes on Songs for A Year In The Country:

This is the first of 26 songs for A Year In The Country, which is a sort of Desert Island Discs but with 26 songs rather than eight, so effectively one posted per fortnight throughout this year.

The selection will include some of the songs that I find myself repeatedly returning to, ones that I’d “save from the waves” or bundle up to take into the storm shelter if a Wizard of Oz-esque twister appeared on the horizon.

Some “rules”:

1. No songs by or featuring myself or any of the other contributors to the A Year In The Country albums (more on those another time perhaps…)
2. No TV intro sequence theme tunes etc that haven’t been commercially released on record, CD, streaming services etc.
3. One song per artist.
4. Only one version of a song and only one appearance by each performer.
5. All songs must be available to listen on the various mainstream streaming and download services (Spotify in particular but hopefully they’ll also be available at Apple Music, Deezer etc).
6. One image per song, which will be the relevant cover art.
7. Reflecting the cycle/weeks of the year, each post will include no more than 52 words on each song.

For ease and simplicity I will post the links to stream the tracks on Spotify. However, as “they” say, other streaming services are available…

 

For the final post of the year I thought I would gather together some of the film and television novelisations and tie-in novels of some of the recurring reference points and inspirations for A Year In The Country, of which I have previously written:

“Often, when I was young, [novelisation and tie-in novels] were the only access I had to particular films and television shows, particularly in the days before home video releases of things became more ubiquitous, if the films etc were ‘too grown up’ for me to watch (!), I’d missed them at the cinema and so on. Viewed nowadays they can also have a particular period charm to them and can sometimes be almost like mini time capsules of particular eras.”

As I’ve also written about in an earlier post, I’m not sure that novelisations of films and television are quite as prevalent as they once were. Perhaps now that people have easier access to the actual films and television series  there isn’t such a demand for them.

Also possibly with more niche films the number of potential readers and related budget would be too small to make it practical. It’s a shame really. Possibly for similar reasons fotonovels / fumetti adapatations which use stills from their source films don’t seem to be around much any more either , which is also a shame as I’ve always had quite a soft spot for them and they’re a good way of seeing and collecting together images from a film.

Above is the French fumetti adaptation of The Curse of the Crimson Altar featuring Barbara Steele in her horned priestess outfit, which in terms of style is probably the definitive otherly pastoral image of a “baddie”.

The post has “cathode ray” in the title as I think the majority of the related films and series I first saw on television and also, as with say some vintage hardware synthesizers, there’s a certain nostalgic romance and hauntological-like character to cathode ray television images and associated interference, glitches, scan lines and so on.

Collecting the books together also lets me revisit some of those recurring reference points and return to some longstanding cultural “friends”, while also rounding the circle of the year.

As a side note, Fantom Publishing have been reissuing some of the novelisations of ’70s children’s television dramas which have become hauntological and otherly pastoral reference points, including the rural time rift tale Children of the Stones, Arthurian eco fantasy tale Raven and the also Arthurian mystical The Moon Stallion, along with releasing a new novelisation of “the boy who fell to Earth” eco science fiction series Sky. The editions are handsomely presented in a distinctive in-house style that feature silhouette based illustrations inspired by the stories.

Above is The Midwich Cuckoos “Filmed by M.G.M. as The Village of the Damned” tie-in edition book cover. This may well be the definitive novel and film of things going science fictionally awry in the bucolic setting of a British village. The “Midwich Cuckoo” on the left of the book’s cover looks curiously both angelic and threateningly terrifying.

The Owl Service’s tie-in edition book cover does not really reveal or all that much hint at the mystical rural nature of the series, although the press quote on the back cover remedies that somewhat:

“Youth and love and fear in a modern summer, a Welsh valley where an age-old legend still has to live itself out again, generation after generation.”

Time to go and revisit the rather fine opening sequence for the series, which I think is probably one of the definitive otherly pastoral-esque of such things.

And then there is the cover for Nigel Kneale’s novel of the final series of Quatermass which is something of a classic design in all its posterised glory. I suspect finding a copy of this in the bargain book stand of a local newsagent many years ago and the story’s themes of dystopia, mysterious alien contact and stone circles as gathering and possibly reaping places is one of the main wellsprings that eventually led to A Year In The Country.

“Huffity puffity ringstone round…”

Above is John Boorman and Bill Stair’s novel of Zardoz. Problems with immortality, invisible barriers, entropic advanced technological and medieval lifestyles, The Wizard of Oz, a giant flying head…

As I’ve said before, Zardoz is such an odd and peculiar “Quite how did they get away with making that?” film.

And then there’s the novel of the cultural behemoth and folk horror wellspring The Wicker Man. The original novel was published five years after the film was released and the cover in this post is one of the various reissues, which featured a foreword by Allan Brown who wrote Inside The Wicker Man.

The above right images are beind the scenes photographs of the construction of The Wicker Man structure but they could just as easily be images of an attempt to entrap this “creature”.

Above is the cover of Brian Freemantle’s rare and often hard to find novelisation of The Touchables film released in 1968. The film is something of a unique late ’60s psychedelic romp; where else will you find a story set in a huge see-through rurally based and real world life-sized inflatable bubble, complete with fairground attractions and a missing pop star?

And of course, creator of the series Peter J. Hammond’s Sapphire and Steel novel tie-in: “This is the trap. This is nowhere, and it’s forever.” Brrr.

Above is one of the novel tie-ins of The Prisoner. If you have ever visited the real world village resort of Portmeirion where much of the series was filmed you may well think of the series as a dream set within a dream…

And then there is Phase IV. The legendary and long thought lost original psychedelic ending finally had a home release as an extra included with the reissue of the film in 2020, the announcement of which was good to hear. Next step a release of the film with the original ending restored and in pace.

Above is the cover for one of the The Tomorrow People tie-in novels, the opening sequence for which I have previously written that it seems like a mixture of “The Owl Service [opening sequence], The Modern Poets book covers from back when, Mr Julian House’s work tumbling backwards and forwards through time and the audiologica of The Radiophonic Workshop… but all filtered somehow through an almost Woolworths-esque take on such things… Despite that Woolworths-esque filter and the inclusion of a somewhat incongruous sliced pepper in amongst the other more overtly unsettling imagery, I still find it unsettling now.”

In terms of hauntological and/or otherly pastoral reference points it can be filed alongside the likes of the introduction sequences for The Owl Service, Children of the Stones, Noah’s Castle and The Omega Factor.

Then finally there is the 1959 edition of Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, which features cover art taken from promotional artwork for Powell and Pressburger’s film adaptation released in 1950. Below is text on the book quoted from A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields:

A while ago I sat down and listened to the 1998 Trunk Records of The Wicker Man soundtrack back to back with the Silva Screen version that was first released in 2002 and which was also included with the 40th anniversary home release of the film and has had various reissues on CD and vinyl.

As you may well know if you are reading this the soundtrack was composed and arranged by Paul Giovanni and performed by him and the band Magnet, which was formed in order to record the soundtrack and was assembled by the film’s associate musical director Gary Carpenter.

It is easy to forget just how odd and unique the soundtrack is. It feels very much like part of older British traditional music even though only a small part of it is directly traditional in origin.

The Trunk Records release is described as “The original motion picture soundtrack music and effects” and is not a conventional soundtrack album where each song is presented as an isolated whole, possibly with snippets of dialogue from the film between the tracks. On this album the songs, effects and so on are sequenced into one another and at points fragments of earlier songs reappear and fade in and out:

“The original music and effects tapes were found and carefully copied, and the LP release is an identical copy of the sounds found on these tapes.” (Quoted from the Trunk Records site.)

(Above: the 1998 Trunk Records release of the soundtrack which included a map of Summer Isle.)

It isn’t purely a straightforward edited recording of the film’s audio… it’s more like it takes you a journey through the atmosphere of the film, one which evokes a sense memory of its story rather than telling it in full and it captures the “otherly” character of the film.

Something which struck me when you sit down and listen to the lyrics is their obsession with fecundity. They are more than bawdy, more a sort of overwhelming sleazyness masked by a connection to nature. They become akin to a form of propaganda intended to convince the listener/islanders that this is the correct and natural way of being and there is a sort of overpowering enforcement of conformity to them, disguised as a form of liberal paganism.

The current interest and critical appreciation of The Wicker Man can in part be traced back to the Trunk Records release of the soundtrack; at the time of its release the film was not overly referenced and the release was one of the sparks (apologies for the accidental sort of pun) that started its rehabilitation.

My copy of the CD still has the HMV price sticker on the back and cost £14.95, which allowing for inflation since the late ’90s means it probable cost the contemporary equivalent of £25. Blimey (!)

The Silva Screen edition of the soundtrack is more conventionally presented and features isolated complete songs accompanied by some snippets of the film’s dialogue and at times it seems almost curiously showbiz-like in comparison to the Trunk Records edition. It isn’t sequenced in the order that the music appears on the album but rather is front loaded with the “hits” – Corn Rigs, The Landlord’s Daughter and Gently Johnny.

Both versions of the soundtrack have their champions and pros and cons and they complement one another in a manner which is in keeping with the film’s history in the sense of there not being a definitive, complete and final version of the film known to still be in existence.

Interest in The Wicker Man only seems to grow as the years pass, as do the number of releases and reissues of books, DVDs, Blu-rays, posters, zines, documentaries, trading cards, soundtracks etc related to it. As I’ve commented before the film has inspired a mini-industry all unto itself.

I suppose collecting multiple releases of a film, alongside related merchandise, is not all that different to say following a band and buying different versions of their singles back in the ’80s and 90s, which sometimes varied only slightly in content and at times it was only the cover art that was different. However, if you were to attempt to be a completist Wicker Man collector you would probably need a fair few pounds and also a fair amount of shelf space.

In this post I gather together some of the output (very bountiful harvest?) from the Summer Isle mini-industry…

The first more full length (well, sort of, this is The Wicker Man after all) and archival “proper” home UK release of the film.

The Quest for The Wicker Man, Constructing The Wicker Man and the two editions of Allan Brown’s Inside The Wicker Man non-fiction books.

One of the many and varied poster designs.

A title graphic which accompanied the BFI’s Sing Cuckoo: The Story of The Wicker Man Soundtrack documentary, which featured amongst others Stephen Cracknell of The Memory Band and Jonny Trunk of Trunk Records.

Covers to two issues of Nuada – “The Wicker Man journal” from the late 90s.

Artwork which accompanies Stephen Applebaum’s eBook of conversations with Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer and Edward Woodward.

The first edition of The Wicker Man novel and a reissue.

The Wicker Man The Complete Piano Songbook.

Images from The Wicker Man press book.

More images from The Wicker Man press book and a collection of images from The Wicker Man trading cards.

The DVD of The Wicker Man given away free with The Guardian newspaper – and for completist purposes as in its early days The Wicker Man shared a double bill with it, the DVD of Don’t Look Now that was given away free with The Observer newspaper.

More images from The Wicker Man trading cards, including various “chase”-able collectibles such as original print blocks, signed cards etc.

Various DVD, VHS, poster, novel and soundtrack covers etc (including a revisit to the Trunk Records edition). No laser disc I notice, which I don’t think the film was released on…

…but talking of rarer formats, above are two Betamax versions.

The limited edition Record Store Day seven-inch single of Willow’s Song and Gently Johnny released by Silva Screen in 2012.

One of the various VHS covers.

The limited edition poster released in 2013 to accompany the Silva Screen limited edition reissue of the soundtrack and another trading card printing block and I think one of the collectible “chase” trading cards.

The issue of Sight & Sound magazine with The Wicker Man as the cover feature and Vic Pratt’s Long Arm of the Lore article from the magazine and the The Films of Old, Weird Britain issue with cover art partly inspired by The Wicker Man.


And last but definitely not least… one of the places where the current interest in and critical acceptance of The Wicker Man can be traced to; Volume 6 Number 3 of Cinefantastique that was published in 1977, which was an issue of the magazine that largely focused on The Wicker Man.

 

Links:

• Notes on The Trunk Records release of The Wicker Man’s soundtrack at the label’s site
• Silva Screen’s 45th Anniversary reissue of The Wicker Man’s soundtrack
• Sing Cuckoo: The Story and Influence of The Wicker Man Soundtrack at the BFIPlayer
• The Wicker Man (1973) Wikia – an extensive “rabbit hole to disappear down” resource of all things Summer Isle

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country (well, a few of such things, I expect there are more):

• The Wicker Man – The Future Lost vessels and Artifacts of Modern Folklore
• 138 Layers and Gatherings of The Wicker Man
• Summerisle in (Sort Of) Pop #1 – Pulp’s Wickerman
• Summerisle in (Sort Of) Pop #2 – The Sneaker Pimps’ How Do / Kelli Ali’s Willow’s Song
• Your Face Here; Peering Down into the Landfill – A Now Historical Perspective on the Stories of The Wicker Man
• The Wicker Man / Don’t Look Now Double Bill and Media Disseminations from What Now Seem a Long Long Time Ago
• Constructing The Wicker Man
• The Wicker Man, Edge of Darkness and Village of the Damned – The “Tricky” Cult Remake
• Willows Songs
• Revisiting Willow’s Songs
• The Wicker Man Revisited / Refreshed – The Long Arm of the Lore
• The Wicker Man – Summer Isle Books, Bindings, Pounds, Shillings and Pence
• Sing Cuckoo: The Story and Influence of The Wicker Man Soundtrack and Other Partly-Archived Summerisle Discussions
• The Wicker Man – Notes on a Cultural Behemoth

 

Constructing The Wicker Man (2005) is a collection of essays that explore The Wicker Man, edited by Jonathan Murray, Lesley Stevenson, Stephen Harper and Benjamin Franks and based around contributions to an academic conference on the film that took place at the University of Glasgow in 2003.

It was the first time that such an event had focused on The Wicker Man at a point when the film was still going through something of a period of growing critical and cult appreciation. It also forebears more recent academic conferences which focus on flipside of folklore related culture, including A Fiend in the Furrows at Queen’s University in 2014, Child Be Strange: A Symposium on Penda’s Fen at the BFI in 2017,  the various Alchemical Landscape related events at Cambridge University which began in 2015, the Centre for Contemporary Legend’s Folklore on Screen conference at Sheffield Hallam University in 2019, The Geographies of Folk Horror: from the Strange Rural to the Urban Wyrd conference at the Royal Geographic Society in 2019, Folk Horror in the 21st Century conference at Falmouth University in 2019 and the upcoming Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media Conference at Leeds Beckett University in 2020.

(I have written about those various events at A Year In The Country previously – see links below.)

The book is particularly rare and in terms of books I’ve sought out during the A Year In The Country wanderings that have been hard to find I would put it next to Brian Freemantle’s novelisation of the 1968 film The Touchables and Filming The Owl Service. Second hand copies of Constructing The Wicker Man do appear online from time to time but often there aren’t any to be found.

In 2006 there was a companion book to it published called The Quest for The Wicker Man that drew from the same conference and was edited by the same people which, while it is currently out of print, seems to have had a wider release and copies can still more frequently be found online and generally at a lower price than Constructing The Wicker Man.

Both books could also be seen as companions to the editions of Allan Brown’s more pop culture orientated exploration of the film Inside The Wicker Man.

There is a link below to an in-depth exploration and analysis of Constructing The Wicker Man at the Offscreen website – one of the few pieces of writing about it I can find. That article ends with a still from The Wicker Man captioned with “Bright, Beautiful and Serene: Anti-horror?”, which quite succinctly captures one of the intriguing and curious contradictions of folk horror and related work; the way that rural areas are often places of beauty, respite and so on – sometimes in the real world, sometimes in the films etc which have been labelled as folk horror – but how within such work this sense of the bucolic has an unsettled flipside.

The Wicker Man’s director and co-writer of the novelisation Robin Hardy also provides writing for both Constructing The Wicker Man and The Quest for The Wicker Man books; a short Foreword in Constructing…, where he describes the film’s now well known stilted and staggered release and slow accumulation towards cult and critical appreciation and a longer piece called The Genesis of The Wicker Man in The Quest… in which he discusses the inspirations and development of the film. Robin Hardy is also interviewed later in the book and Gary Carpenter, who was an arranger-orchestrator on the soundtrack, also contributes an article, all of which adds a nice extra touch of direct connection with those who worked on the film.

Curiously my copy of Quest For The Wicker Man is signed. It was bought as a used item and I’m not sure who it was signed by, as it was not mentioned by the seller. The signature is fairly abstract but I think that it begins with an R, so it may be Robin Hardy.

Hmmm…

 

Elsewhere:

• Constructing The Wicker Man – A Cult Film Reviewed by Donato Totaro at Offscreen
• Folklore on Screen
• Folk Horror in the 21st Century
• The Geographies of Folk Horror: from the Strange Rural to the Urban Wyrd
• Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media Conference
• The Alchemical Landscape
• A Fiend in the Furrows
• Child Be Strange: A Symposium on Penda’s Fen
• The (Occassional) Availability of Constructing the Wicker Man
• The (Partial) Availability of The Quest for the Wicker Man
• The (Occassional) Availability of Brian Freemantle’s Touchables
• The (Generally Non) Availability of Filming The Owl Service

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• The Folklore on Screen, Folk Horror in the 21st Century, The Geographies of Folk Horror and Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media Conferences – A Return to Investigations of the Spectral Landscape
• Research and Investigations of the Spectral Landscape
• Folk Horror Roots – From But a Few Seedlings Did a Great Forest Grow
• The Wicker Man – Notes on a Cultural Behemoth
• Filming The Owl Service; Tomato Soap and Lonely Stones
• Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen, Red Shift and The Owl Service – Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes
• The Touchables and a pop-art pastoral playland
• Queens of Evil, Tam Lin and The Touchables – High Fashion Transitional Psych Folk Horror, Pastoral Fantasy and Dreamlike Isolation

 

Over the years in the A Year In The Country books and at the website I’ve discussed various television series and trailers which could be considered as offering glimpses of Albion in the overgrowth, i.e. mainstream television which to various degrees explores, utilises and expresses a “wyrd” or otherly pastoral sense of rural and folk culture, while also at times variously containing elements of and/or intertwining with folk horror.

Some previous examples I have written about include amongst others: the unsettling “pastoral spook” drama series Requiem (2018); the supernatural folk horror-ish drama series The Living and the Dead (2016); the gently melancholic comic drama series Detectorists (2014-2017) that centres around two rural treasure hunting metal detectorists; the reimagining of Roman history in the drama series Britannia (2018-); the folk horror related themes in some of the episodes of the 2000-2001 remake of the supernatural detective series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-1970); and the “Savage Party” trailer released in 2012 for the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks, which has a playful and almost dreamlike rural temporary autonomous zone aesthetic.

In terms of “Albion in the overgrowth”, the 2018 “Wicker Man” ident for the British television channel E4 could well be grouped amongst the above series and trailer, and in some ways is odder than all of them.

It is an animated short film used as a link between programmes, and seems to variously be channeling 1960s or 1970s British children’s television animated series, some lost Eastern European animation series from an indefinable earlier decade, bucolic calm, folk rituals, folk art and folk horror – in particular The Wicker Man (1973) – all in a brief 30 seconds or so. It’s the kind of thing that you could imagine being part of some semi-forgotten children’s television series originally broadcast back when that Finders Keepers Records would release the soundtrack to.

The animation and figures that appear in the ident are at a notable remove from polished contemporary CGI based work, appearing (I assume) to have been done my hand and have a pleasingly handcrafted folk art-ish feel, and seem to be made from materials such as fabric, wood etc. In terms of their aesthetic and animation style they recall the 1960s and 1970s Smallfilms work by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, such as Bagpuss (1974) and The Clangers (1969-1974), and like those series the ident also seems to offer a glimpse or portal viewing of a magical self-contained world unto itself.

The ident opens on a view over a neatly recently harvested looking field, taking a viewpoint from the uncultivated edges of the field which is where events take place, as though to show that they are at a remove from the norms and orderliness of civilisation. Initially a lone king-like figure walks onto the screen, wearing a cape and holding a flower by its stem as though it is a sceptre. He is vaguely human-like in shape but without facial features, has long thin bendy pipe cleaner-esque limbs and his body/fabric skin are green.

He is soon joined by other figures and creatures, who to varying degrees often have anthropomorphic human characteristics, and they begin folk ritual-esque revels and dancing. The other revellers include, amongst others, two frolicking corn dollies, a sheep that walks on its hind legs and is carrying a flag standard that bears the E4 logo, a strange folk ritual-like pyramidical stag headed creature, a cockerel that only seems to consist of a blue head and unnaturally long stilt-like orange legs, a staring eyed blue headed rabbit and a black and white creature, possibly a cow, made from layered wooden sections with a squared head. The soundtrack during this section mixes the stomp of the king walking, rural field recordings of birdsong etc and a free form seeming acoustic folk tune (loosely) played by the revellers.

A fox wearing human style clothing which also walks on its hind legs and some kind of clown, that is reminiscent of an unsettling skewed memory of a Victorian child’s toy, wheel on a cart that contains a folk art-esque wicker structure that forms the E4 logo. Once this is in place at the centre of the revellers the day darkens and the fox sets fire to the wicker logo, and it is at this point that the ident begins to take a darker turn, and marking this the soundtrack quickly and briefly changes to some form of choral drone.

NIght suddenly descends, the folk music resumes and the revels continue but now there is something, if not bacchanalian, then at least subtly frenzied about it as the participants dance around the burning wicker structure; the king sets light to one of the wicker dollies, which continues merrily dancing, and the clown also seems to be on fire but not making any attempt to halt this. The ident ends but there is a sense that the revels and their transgressions will continue.

What it brings to mind is Mackenzie Crook’s 2018 reimagining of the rural magic realism children’s television series Worzel Gummidge (1979-1989), which in the newer version features a living scarecrow who befriends two visiting children and via preternatural means and with the assistance of his fellow scarecrows helps to mend the seasons which have gone out of joint, and of which I have written:

“Worzel Gummidge is light-hearted, humorous and tender but also at times feels like a friendly nightmare, and it has an air of unsettling unpredictableness, which is heightened by the scarecrows often having a chaotic and unfettered by convention character, particularly when they are gathered together.”

E4’s Wicker Man ident has a not dissimilar sense of both playfulness and an unsettling  air, and as in the end of the 1973 The Wicker Man film, which it seems to fairly directly draw from and interconnect with, there is a sense of a folkloric ritual orientated rural community having come adrift.

What both Mackenzie Crook’s Worzel Gummidge and E4’s “Wicker Man” ident both also bring to mind is the (possibly) accidental at times surprisingly dark or unsettling atmospheres of some sections of late 1960s and 1970s British children and young adult orientated rurally set television drama series that have become hauntological and wyrd rural cultural mainstays – such as the drama series The Changes (1975), Children of the Stones (1976), The Owl Service (1969-1970) and also possibly some public information films from that time – with the “Wicker Man” ident sharing with them a sort of head shaking “What? What was that?” aspect.

The John Boorman directed film Excalibur (1981) draws from Arthurian myth and legend, taking in its complete story cycle from the conception of the “once and future” King Arthur until his death (or slumber across the ages).

King Arthur is said to have been a British leader who lead the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. The stories that are associated with Arthur are mainly drawn from folklore and literary invention, with modern historians debating and disputing these and also Arthur’s existence. Excalibur includes iconic and archetypal stories and characters connected with Arthur such as the wizard Merlin, Arthur pulling the mystical sword Excalibur from a stone, the forming of The Knights of the Round table and their quest for the Grail and the love triangle between the king, his wife Guinevere and his greatest knight Lancelot. Boorman co-wrote the screenplay with Rospo Pallenberg and it is based in part on Le Morte d’Arthur, written by Thomas Mallory and first published in 1485, which reworked existing stories and folklore about King Arthur and has since become one of the best known works of Arthurian literature.

Excalibur is far removed from being a straightforward mainstream piece of cinema, despite having had an at the time relatively high budget of approximately £30 million, if adjusted for inflation, being the number one film during its opening weekend in the United States and listed at 18th in the 1981 US box office takings.

Excalibur also forbears and stands apart from the trend for more purely escapist swords and sorcery and fantasy films in the 1980s, being nearer to an arthouse film cloaked in the trappings of blockbuster spectacle. It is a uniquely distinctive take on Arthurian myth that is unflinchingly full of sweat, stench, mud, blood, lust and primal desires but is far from being a realist, gritty or conventional depiction of King Arthur’s story:

[On its release] the film was a hit, but its reputation feels more cult-like, perhaps thanks to Boorman’s commitment to creating [its] otherworldly, mythic reality: it’s strange, lavish, and dream-like.” (Quoted from “A dream to some, a nightmare to others: sex, magic and myth on the set of Excalibur”, Tom Fordy, telegraph.co.uk, 18th Feb 2019.)

Mainly taking place in forest, castle and rural landscape and waterside locations, Excalibur is set in an unnamed British isles and what is described as the Dark Ages, and creates a form of Medieval never-never land that incorporates elements from around the 6th to 12th centuries.

Throughout the story there is a sense that Arthur’s reign is becoming a myth even while he is still alive and he says at one point “I was not born to live a man’s life but to be the stuff of future memory.” Alongside this, and underlying the entire story, is a warning of the doom that lies in wait when mankind, or an individual, loses touch with nature, or breaks natural laws and cycles, as was the cause of Arthur’s enfeeblement. Related to this, as discussed by John Boorman in his first autobiography, the film can be seen as a metaphor for the stages of mankind’s development:

“[While developing Excalibur] I began to formulate the idea that the Grail cycle was a metaphor for the past, present and future of humanity. In the early chapters, the Uther Pendragon period, man is emerging. He still has an unconscious magical connection with nature, both its violence and its harmony. That could be said to represent the deep past. [Merlin’s summoning of Excalibur from the lake focuses] the chaotic unconscious that lie beneath the surface. [After Uther abuses Excalibur’s power, violence and anarchy reign and so Merlin arranges that the sword passes to Uther’s son, Arthur] and its power allows him to impose his rule and make peace. As law and order are imposed, Arthur gradually forfeits his connection with nature. Camelot is established, a place of learning and science and order. Man becomes the master of the world. He pillages the earth. He cuts down the sacred forest. He loses his way… [Which] feels like our present. What of the future? What was once profusion becomes a wasteland. The King is sick from a wound that will not heal. The only way to cure the King and save the land is to find the Grail, the feminine symbol of wholeness and harmony, to find again a oneness with nature.” (Quoted from Adventures of a Suburban Boy, John Boorman, 2003.)

While in Excalibur Arthur builds the gleaming silver Camelot with good intentions, as suggested in the above quote, its construction has a potentially darker portentous flipside. It is the cause and expression of Arthur’s detachment from nature and the land and it could possibly also be seen as an attempt to tame not just nature but also an early stage in clearing away more problematic, less easily governable woodland etc settlements and their beliefs in the old nature based gods. Alongside which, when viewed today, Morgana’s use of magic to defy the natural process of ageing, and the way this brings about her demise, seems like a prescient comment on a contemporary expression of breaking natural cycles, that of plastic surgery and related attempts to prevent (but actually merely semi-hide or obscure) the physical signs of ageing.

Similar, at times Arthurian, themes of the corrupting effects of trying to break the cycle of ageing and problematic issues around creating a “civilised” elite haven which sequesters its inhabitants from the natural world are explored in Boorman’s dystopian science fiction film Zardoz (1974). In that an elite, who live in an impenetrable dome that separates and protects them from the wastelands and suffering in the wider world, have broken the cycle of nature through the scientific attaining of immortality and everlasting youth. However due to this immortality they have become effete and the men impotent, and their lives are filled with an overprivileged ennui, which sometimes finds a literal physical expression in that some of their number fall into a permanent catatonic state. They and their world are eventually destroyed by one of the enforcers the elite relies on to control and exploit the resources of the wastelands, who infiltrates the dome and brings about their destruction. The birth of this enforcer has similarities with the transgressive creation of Arthur and Morgana’s illegitimate son Mordred and him therefore being a bringer of destruction due to his birth breaking natural laws; the enforcer was genetically engineered through a selective breeding process by one of the elite, in order that he would bring about the destruction of their enclosed world and end mankind’s stagnation.

Although Boorman continued to make films after Excalibur, there is a sense in the 2013 documentary Behind the Sword in the Stone (aka Excalibur: Behind the Movie) that after making this film he felt that his work in general was done having, as is said in the documentary’s introduction, turned “a legend into a light for all to see”:

“It had been a lifelong ambition of mine to make this film, and when I saw [the final scene’s] shot of Arthur in the ship going out into the horizon, I felt that I’d completed my work.” (Quoted from Behind the Sword in the Stone, as above)

As with Zardoz, a number of Boorman’s other films have contained elements of, or that have parallels with, Arthurian legend and questing, the mythology of which he has been drawn to since an early age:

“Boorman, as he often mentions in interviews, has been gripped by myth and legend from early childhood, and mythic elements have found their way into virtually all his films… [many of his films prior to Excalibur] are premonitions, or half-submerged echoes, of the central myth that has obsessed him: the cycle of Arthurian legends… that he finally brought to the screen in Excalibur.” (Quoted from “Gone to Earth”, Philip Kemp, Sight and Sound, January 2001.)

Read today the above article on Excalibur is an early gathering together and linking of a number of the themes, films, television dramas etc which have become part of, and points of reference for, contemporary wyrd rural or otherly pastoral and folk horror orientated culture. To a degree the article presages, by almost a decade, the growth of interest in such culture that began to gather pace from approximately 2010 onwards, and through its discussion of related work it places Excalibur in a loosely interconnected lineage of post-war British mythic rural orientated cinema and television:

“In the 1940s and 50s the lush romanticism of such films as Canterbury Tale and Gone to Earth, [were] rooted in loving depictions of rural landscapes and a deeply felt quasi-pagan notion of Englishness… Nigel Kneale explored the interface between folk-myth and science fiction in his Quatermass cycle, as did (mainly for television) the playwright David Rudkin, whose Penda’s Fen… combines visions of such legendary figures as King Penda, the last pagan ruler of England, with a quasi-mystical view of the English landscape… Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man… gleefully pitted puritanism against paganism in the Scottish isles…” (Quoted from “Gone to Earth”, as above.)

The article comments on how Excalibur is something of an exception in “the realism-obsessed canon of British cinema” in its exploration of the “kind of myth and legend “that have haunted the British imagination in both art and literature for generations”but that “it tends to be left to children’s movies… to put us back in touch with the magical”. Similar could be said for children or young adult orientated British television, particularly in the decade or so that preceded Excalibur’s production, when, for example, Arthurian related myth and magic was more likely to be explored in the likes of the young adult television drama series such as The Changes (1975), Raven (1977), Moon Stallion (1978) and some episodes of the anthology series Shadows (1975-1978), rather than adult orientated dramas.

As with Excalibur, these are productions which seem to stand aside from an almost stereotypical British reserve and embarrassment in the country’s national adult orientated cinema and television, particularly in less genre orientated work, in relation to magical and mythical themes. That such young adult orientated television drama from previous decades as that listed above, and its often surprisingly left of centre and multilayered mystical themes, has become of cultural interest to adults drawn to wyrd rural, hauntological etc culture is perhaps, in part, a reflection of adult orientated television work often not providing all that much space in which mythical and magical themes are explored, or if they are, it is often in a fairly conventional or genre friendly manner. This may also be one of the factors which explain the ongoing and growing interest in the likes of The Wicker Man (1973) and its decidedly adult, heavily layered and research underpinned exploration of mythical folklore.

Boorman has spoken of how he did not set out to create an historically accurate tale but rather intended to set Excalibur in a more imaginary world:

“If there was ever an Arthur… he’s sited in about the sixth century. But the date is the least important thing really. I think of the story, the history, as a myth. The film has to do with mythical truth, not historical truth… So [when making the film] the first trap to avoid is to start worrying about when or whether Arthur existed… [I set] it in a world, a period, of the imagination… trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth, in Tolkien terms. It’s a contiguous world; it’s like ours but different.” (Quoted from “Excalibur: John Boorman – In Interview”, as above.)

In the above interview, and as also quoted earlier, Boorman says Excalibur’s story is about “man taking over the world on his own terms for the first time”. It is set on the cusp of when the old ways, magic, nature based belief systems, druids etc were receding, when Christianity became dominant and mankind becomes ever more reliant on technology. As Merlin says in the film:

“The days of our kind [i.e. wizards] are numbered. The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirit of wood and stream grows silent. It’s the way of things. Yes. It’s a time for men and their ways.”

Bearing this in mind, when famine and pestilence ravage the land in Excalibur it may seem slightly unexpected that it is not to agricultural etc techniques and technology that Arthur turns (although admittedly these would not have been all that advanced in the periods the film draws from) but rather he sends his Knights on a quest for the Grail. However, there is a sense at the end of the film, when he is mortally wounded and undertakes his mystical sea journey, that this quest was the last “hurrah” and reliance on magic, and his departure marks the completion of a changeover into the new ways and beliefs.

At the beginning of this post I described how Excalibur was commercially successful but far removedfrom conventional mainstream blockbuster cinema and had an otherworldly quality. Part of this is its use of mythical and magical themes and tropes but also due to its visual character, which, as also referred to earlier, give it a lavish, unreal, dreamlike quality:

“Excalibur still looks incredible – all sparkling emerald greens and shimmering silver armour. The Excalibur sword itself glows… Boorman and his cinematographer Alex Thomson achieved the effect with green filters over the lighting and even shone [green] lights onto moss to give the film ‘a kind of luminosity… so it felt like a myth rather than a reality,’ Boorman [says in documentary] Excalibur: Behind the Movie. ‘That’s what we were consciously trying to achieve, a kind of mystery magical feeling about it that it was another world.’ (Quoted from “A dream to some, a nightmare to others: sex, magic and myth on the set of Excalibur”, as above.)

As also commented on by Boorman in Excalibur: Behind the Movie, the unreal nature created by the extensive use of coloured lighting was added to by the on location weather during the film’s shoot; it rained almost every day of filming and this meant that there was constant moisture in the air, which refracted the light and gave it a kind of softness. The resulting imagery in the film often creates a sense that you are viewing events through the subtle haze of a dream.

Accompanying these light related characteristics, there is an almost magical sense of the passing of time. At one point Morgana kisses her young son and as their heads part you see that a decade or so has passed and Mordred is now a young man; when Uther thrusts Excalibur into the stone and dies the film cuts straight to the same scene but almost two decades later, the season has changed from winter to spring and the trees have their leaves, and as the camera pans it reveals that a settlement has sprung up around the sword and stone.

Related to the sense of Excalibur creating and exploring an unreal and mystical world, is the previously discussed way in which the film stands apart from the tendency towards realism in adult orientated British cinema through its exploration of myth and magic. Connected to this, the film also stands at a remove from much of British cinema in the abovementioned use of non-realist lighting, the ambitious nature of its costume and set design and the general epic scale of the film and its story. In relation to some aspects of this, its creation of a mythical, dream-like world in the British landscape shares some similarities with Powell and Pressburger’s film Gone to Earth (1950), which was referred to in a previous quote about a loosely interconnected mythic rural strand in British cinema and television:

“[Gone to Earth] has a Wizard of Oz-esque, Hollywood coating of beauty, glamour and quiet surreality which in part is created by the vibrant, rich colours of the Technicolor film process that it shares with that 1939 film… Often cinematic views of the British landscape are quite realist, possibly dour or even bleak in terms of atmosphere and their visual appearance and so Gone to Earth with its high end Hollywood razzle-dazzle which is contained in its imagery is a precious breath of fresh air.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields.)

There is a further intertwining of Gone to Earth and Excalibur in their depiction of worlds where the old ways, beliefs and magic still exist but are being removed from view by new beliefs etc, as Gone to Earth centres around a free spirited young woman who is still very much steeped in older rural ways of life and folkloric spells and charms.

The epic scale and sense of a heightened or imaginary reality in Excalibur’s story and the world it creates is added to by the film’s use of music. The soundtrack includes

multiple instances of composer Richard Wagner’s often highly dramatic music, whose vast four opera Ring cycle, written from 1848-1874, Boorman says in his Adventures of a Suburban Boy biography that he went to see as part of his preparations for making Excalibur:

“[The Ring cycle’s] Germanic myth has many elements in common with the Grail legend. Wagner’s music… inspired my writing and eventually insinuated its way into the movie.” (Quoted from Adventures of a Suburban Boy, as above.)

The soundtrack also includes Carl Orff’s distinctive and both ominous and darkly uplifting choral work “O Fortuna” from his cantata Carmina Burana, which he composed in 1935-1936. This particular piece is based on a collection of 24 medieval poems, and in a possibly serendipitous manner with Excalibur’s story, the lyrics are a complaint about Fortuna, the goddess of fortune and personification of luck in Roman and Greek mythology, and the inexorable fate that rules both gods and mortals.

“O Fortuna” was first used in cinema on Excalibur’s soundtrack and has since gone on to be widely known after being used in dozen’s of films, television programmes, video games etc, alongside being extensively sampled. In Excalibur it rousingly soundtrack’s the revitalised Arthur and his Knights on horse back as they ride over Camelot’s drawbridge and then through a surreally heavily white blossomed corridor of trees on the way towards Arthur’s final battle with his son Mordred’s army.

Elsewhere:

• Excalibur HMV Blu-ray Premium Collection edition
• Excalibur trailer
• “O Fortuna” sequence in Excalibur
• Excalibur memorabilia that you’ll need to break open a fair few piggy banks for at the Prop Store…
• Further Excalibur memorabilia at the London Film Museum

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• John Boorman, Excalibur And Celluloid Myths / Realism
• Zardoz, Phase IV and Beyond the Black Rainbow – Seeking the Future in Secret Rooms from the Past and Psychedelic Cinematic Corners
• Zardoz, Space 1999 And Psychedelic Strands In 1970s Science Fiction
• Zardoz Ephemera / A Revisiting Of Fading Vessellings
• Zardoz and ways out of the maze
• Zardoz… in this secret room from the past, I seek the future…
• The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation
• The Changes, Threads, the bad wires and the ghosts of transmissions
• Gone to Earth / The Wild Heart, the Haunted Region of Wild Wales and a Sidestep into Talking Pictures TV’s Broadcasts of the Overlooked, Shadowed Archives of Cinema and Television
• Harps in Heaven, curious exoticisms, pathways and flickerings back through the days and years…
• Gone To Earth – “What A Queen Of Fools You Be”, Something Of A Return Wandering And A Landscape Set Free
• Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth and Forebears of the Layers Beneath the Land
• Gone to Earth – Earlier Traces of an Otherly Albion
• Zardoz, Gone to Earth, The Owl Service, The Village of the Damned, The Prisoner, Quatermass, The Wicker Man, The Touchables, Sapphire and Steel, The Nightmare Man, Phase IV and The Tomorrow People – A Gathering of a Cathode Ray Library and Rounding the Circle
• Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart – Revisiting Stories from the Haunted Region of Wild Wales

 

The Nightmare Man is a British science fiction horror tinged four part mini-series originally broadcast in 1981, adapted from David Wiltshire’s 1978 novel Child of Vodyanoi.

It is set on a small-ish remote Scottish island where the inhabitants start to be attacked and murdered by an unknown assailant with the beyond human strength to literally tear their victims apart and non-human characteristics and for a while during the series there is various debate about whether the attacker could be of alien origin or even a previously undiscovered sea creature or monster.

As the series progresses the island becomes almost completely isolated from the outside world and any possible external help as a heavy fog descends making nagivation to or from it impossible. Radio signals appear to possibly be jammed and the phone lines are cut; as is often the case in fantastical horror orientated work remote rural areas are shown as being the “other” and detached from civilisation and its extensive infrastructure and support of the forces of law and order, something which is further enhanced in the series in a Wicker Man-esque manner by the island location.

Four local police officers are left to try and contain and capture the killer on 35 miles of largely rural landscape made inaccessible due to the inclement weather conditions, although there does appear to be a curious amount of near-military and armed support for them; the local dentist is an ex army-partrooper, one of the local holiday makers is a military man, the local coastguard are armed and their hunt for the attacker the police are able to collect together and lead bands of nearly forty locals who possess their own firearms.

In the UK the ownership of firearms has traditionally been largely heavily restricted and limited, particularly in urban areas but the fact that so many of the locals in this rural coastal area have easy access to them subconsciously provides a further sense of remove from more mainstream mainland society; although the ownership of such weapons is likely to have been largely due to sport and/or agricultural pest control reasons, this is not made implicit in the series and so the viewer is left with a sense of such areas being almost frontier like places where normal societal restrictions and expectations do not hold such a sway as in urban areas.

Shot largely on location and recorded on video the series’ imagery and colour palette has a murky, low definition appearance and is all subdued greys and greens that are distinctive of a large proportion of drama from the 1970s and 1980s; also much of the series is shot at night, in daytime shadowed underlit locations and/or through heavy fog and it is often difficult to fully make out what is happening onscreen. This is accompanied by the viewer being kept in the dark about the attacker’s origins, rationale or even what it is and for a large part of the series the attacker is also not shown onscreen which adds to the sense of menace and tension.

Further heightening this when the attacker does appear the viewer is shown the scene from its viewpoint and the image becomes heavily tinted with a red haze, accompanied by laboured, heavy and unnatural sounding breathing.

This is a technically simple device that is far removed from today’s CGI-heavy large budget special effects and although the physical aspects and dismembering are referred to by the characters there is little onscreen violence and no gore but the presence of the attacker still creates a strong sense of threat and terror utilising minimal resources and without the use of overly explicit graphic imagery.

Although the rural coastal landscape is presented in a somewhat bleak or dour manner this is still the type of area associated with calm, rest, a steady way of life and vacations, which is referred to in the series in particular by one of the lead characters who has returned to live there after London and says that she knows she will live on the island forever as it is home and where she belongs. The contrast with such day-to-day calm and normal expectations and the sudden almost alien seeming appearance of the attacker’s red hazed vision makes for shocking and unsettling viewing.

The contrasting aspects of the restorative nature of the landscape and the events that take place there is given further expression in the closing sections and credits; the ends of the first three episodes freeze on a still of these red hazed attacks, the discovery of a victim and the fear of an onlooker seeing an attack who is also a potential victim, all of which then fade into the gentle waves of a grey misty rural cliff top coastline as the credits roll. Once the theme music fades out there are a few brief seconds where the only noise is a very lonely and isolated seeming recording of the wind.

Later on in the series the attacker’s origins are discovered to be rooted in the international tensions and arms technology research of the time, which adds a plausible period aspect of Cold War related paranoia and also layers the sense of threat in the series with real world worries and fears; it is explained that a NATO submarine was trailing a Soviet submarine and there was a collision and a nuclear accident, the fallout from which caused the malfunction of a small Soviet experimental craft called a Vodyanoid and the irradiation of its pilot, who has been genetically modified to increase his strength and was cybernetically connected via a brain implant with his craft.

The Vodyanoid’s pilot had made an emergency landing on the island; it is explained in the plot that disconnecting from the Vodyanoid normally required skilled handlers, who because of the situation are not present and so when the pilot disembarks he literally leaves part of his brain in the craft’s cybernetics, with him being left as a deranged madman operating only on a remaining instinct to kill that has been honed and enhanced over years of military training.

This is told by the holidaying military man who after attempting to present himself as a British military leader and placing the island under martial law in an attempt to control the situation is ultimately revealed to be the leader of a specialised Soviet military unit, which comes to the island in order to reclaim the Vodyanoid craft and hopefully avoid an international incident. The craft is revealed to be carrying a biological warfare weapon which has leaked and the Soviets supply the local population with an antidote.

This aspect of the plot further heightens the series’ connection with Cold War paranoia; the “nobody wins” aspects of suspected biological warfare and the sense of hidden subterranean international activity by the Soviets, alongside which UK national sovereignty is invaded with impunity and without effective resistance by a a Soviet military taskforce. Also the pilot of the Vodyanoid leaves a radioactive trail due to his being caught in the blast from the nuclear submarine collision and when in the series a geiger counter is activated by his presence there is a sense of the nuclear dangers of the Cold War coming into contact with the day-to-day world…

To be continued in Part 2 (which, depending on when you are reading this, may not yet be online).

 

Elsewhere:

1. The Nightmare Man DVD
2. A very particular period snapshot: the opening and closing continuity announcements for the opening episode of BBC1’s 1981 thriller series “The Nightmare Man”, posted by The TV Museum

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

1. The Nightmare Man Part 2 – Frankenstein-like Meddling, Vodaynoid Myths and Exploratory Portals: Wanderings 43/52
2. Day #183/365: Steam engine time and remnants of transmissions before the flood
3. Day #212/365: With but a tap and a swoosh; the loss of loss and paper encapturings of once fleeting televisual flickerings…