The Wicker Man returns in glorious 4K for 50th anniversary summer solstice event

Overlooked on release back in 1973, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man has now taken its rightful place as the greatest British horror film ever made (though there’s still some argument over whether it actually qualifies as a horror flick). This timeless masterpiece is regularly revived, but fifty years after it first saw the inside of cinemas as a B picture on a double bill with Don’t Look Now, the ‘final cut’ of The Wicker Man has been given the full 4K restoration treatment for its anniversary. Now audiences can enjoy Sergeant Howie, Lord Summerisle and Britt Ekland’s stunt bottom in perfect clarity.

Appropriately enough given the Pagan shenanigans it depicts, the restoration is getting a special outing at the Watershed on the summer solstice (that’s June 21). Following the screening, there’s a recorded celebration from Picturehouse Central in London, hosted by Edith Bowman. This includes guest of honour Britt Ekland, the Independent’s chief film critic Clarisse Loughrey, associate musical director Gary Carpenter, director Robin Hardy’s sons Dominic and Justin, and Wicker Man superfan Reece Shearsmith (who paid tribute to the film with the excellent Inside Number 9 episode Mr. King).

The inclusion of Britt Ekland is particularly interesting given that there’s rather less of her in the film than might at first appear. Her voice was dubbed by Scottish singer and actress Annie Ross and several body doubles were brought in for the nude scenes. To this day, the debate rages over whose bottom actually appears on screen.

Alas, many of the key players in the Wicker Man story are no longer with us. Back in 1998, twelve years before her death, I interviewed jolly Hammer veteran Ingrid Pitt, who plays the librarian in The Wicker Man and had just published her Bedside Companion for Vampire Lovers. She was disparaging about her co-star when I brought up the subject of the film. “I must say that Britt was in a bad state when she worked on the film,” she told me. “She was pregnant and her lover wasn’t too keen on carrying on with the relationship, which is a terrible situation to be in. But she’s also a very selfish cow, and I think she disapproves of everything, all the time. She hasn’t got a sense of humour, which is very sad. But coming from a cold climate, she probably shivers when she thinks of laughter. She was just so difficult and tremendously bitchy.”

By 2006, director Robin Hardy (who died in 2016) was living in a village just outside Bath, where he’d written a novel entitled Cowboys for Christ. Naturally, I was eager to get him to talk about The Wicker Man. “I think it’s partly because people like to believe that societies like Summerisle exist somewhere,” he said of the film’s enduring appeal. “It’s like Shangri-La, isn’t it? It’s not the cruelty at the end they think about. It’s the joy at setting aside all the shibboleths about what is right and wrong. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s stayed in people’s minds and is so popular. I think the other thing – which has only recently come out with the DVD and it being repeated so often on television – is the music. When the film was first toured in the United States and became a cult hit, it got wonderful reviews but no one mentioned the music, which really rather surprised me. But recently, lots of pop groups and musicians have become interested in the music. A lot of people find it enchanting in the proper sense of the term.”

I pointed out that one of the most fascinating things about The Wicker Man is its inversion of the rigid moral code of most horror films. Characters are usually punished for having sex. And yet Edward Woodward’s Christian copper Howie is doomed precisely because he refuses to surrender his virginity to the horny Britt.

“Well that’s true,” he replied. “I think that’s also one of the reasons that we were interested in making the film in the first place. It turned the whole horror genre, as it was in the UK at the time, on its head. Instead of being about a very black and white society, in which the people who dealt in black magic were the baddies, this is about a propitiating society – like India, I suppose – where people do things to please the gods and not necessarily because it’s right or wrong. If it pleases the gods, then they may get the goodies the gods dispense. That’s really what our old religions were about. ”

He seemed sanguine about the film casting such a long shadow over his career: “I don’t mind at all. I’m sometimes a bit bewildered. There was a big academic study made of it at the University of Glasgow last year. All sorts of academics from all over the place – North America and other parts of Europe – attended and they’d written papers like ‘The Wicker Man and Wittgenstein’ and ‘The Wicker Man and Feminism’. And I was supposed to respond to this in an academic way. But of course I’m not an academic, so I find it difficult sometimes to take it all seriously.”

The 50th anniversary Wicker Man screening and celebration takes place at the Watershed on June 21. Go here for tickets and further information.

All images: StudioCanal