Paganism in film: The Wicker Man

 Paganism in Film

The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man is a 1973 British folk horror film directed by Robin Hardy and starring Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pittand Christopher Lee. The screenplay is by Anthony Shaffer, inspired by David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual, and Paul Giovanni composed the film score. 

It has become a cult classic even though it didn’t do well on it’s original cinema release partly due to the awful original cinematic edit and partly due to its subject matter in a still quite stuffy 70s Britain or saw it as irreverent and too dark in tone despite its lighter elements.

The Wicker Man (1973 version not the later Nicholas Cage rubbish)  is not merely a horror film; it is a shimmering, sun-drenched mystery play disguised as a police procedural, a pagan psalm sung in the key of dread, a joyous and terrifying meditation on what it means to believe.

Picture this: a tiny Scottish island called Summerisle, where the air tastes of apple blossom and sea salt, where the sun seems to linger longer than anywhere else on Earth, and where the people have turned their backs on the grey stone churches of mainland Christianity to embrace something older, greener, more alive. Into this paradise steps Sergeant Neil Howie — stiff-collared, virgin-hearted, a man whose faith is as rigid as the handcuffs on his belt. He arrives hunting a missing girl, but what he finds is a mirror held up to his own soul, and to ours.

Here is the moment the mask begins to slip — Sergeant Howie, already unraveling, dressed unwittingly as Punch the Fool for the island’s May Day procession.

Whilst Summerisle itself was a fictional island the film was filmed on some truly stunning Scottish and Somerset locations adding to the film’s naturalistic charm.

The film’s spiritual heart beats in its songs. Paul Giovanni’s folk score — lilting, lusty, ancient — is no mere soundtrack; it is liturgy. Villagers sing of the maypole as a phallic symbol, of hares running through the corn, of summer’s coming in. The music wraps around Howie like ivy, seductive and mocking, reminding him (and us) that the body too is holy, that desire is not sin but sacrament.

And then there is the dance — children weaving ribbons around the maypole in perfect, joyful geometry, while adults couple in the graveyard below, death and life braided together in one continuous spiral.

Movie trivia: Paul actually is one of the musicians in the film)

Behold the maypole rite, where innocence and eros entwine without shame

Lord Summerisle himself — played by Christopher Lee with velvet menace and paternal warmth — presides over it all like a gardener tending rare orchids. He is no cartoon villain; he is a philosopher-king who has bet his people’s survival on the turning of the seasons. When the apple harvest failed, they needed a sacrifice — not out of cruelty, but out of desperate faith in renewal. The island’s paganism is not chaos; it is order, cyclical, agricultural, utterly sincere.

Here stands Lord Summerisle, elegant and enigmatic, the architect of both paradise and pyre:

The climax arrives at sunset, that golden hour when the veil between worlds is thinnest. Howie, trapped inside the towering wicker effigy, screams psalms while the islanders sing “Summer is icumen in” with radiant faces. Animals bleat in terror beside him. Flames rise. The camera pulls back, and the burning giant silhouette stands against a sky on fire.

Few images in cinema carry such raw spiritual weight — horror, yes, but also ecstasy, sacrifice, the terrifying beauty of total commitment to something greater than the self:

What makes The Wicker Man spiritually alive, even playful in its darkness, is the way it refuses easy judgment. Howie is brave, principled, devout — and utterly blind to the sacredness of the flesh, the wisdom of the earth, the laughter in ritual. The islanders are kind, communal, joyful — and capable of murder in the name of fertility. Neither side is cartoonishly evil or saintly; both are fully human, fully believing, fully dangerous.

The film whispers: perhaps every religion is a horror story to the outsider. Perhaps every faith requires its own kind of sacrifice. Perhaps the true terror is not the burning wicker man, but the realisation that belief — any belief — can make monsters of us all, and yet also make us sing.

So light a candle (or a bonfire, if you dare), pour a glass of mead, and watch The Wicker Man not as horror, but as invitation. It asks us to dance between the maypole ribbons of our own contradictions — Christian and pagan, body and spirit, fear and wonder — until the last note fades into the sea wind, and summer comes in once more.

The music sets the tone beautifully 

Paul Giovanni’s folk score for The Wicker Man (1973) is nothing short of alchemical—a luminous thread that weaves the film’s sunlit pagan paradise into something both intoxicating and profoundly unsettling. An American playwright, actor, director, singer, and musician (born in 1933 in Atlantic City, New Jersey), Giovanni was given just six weeks to research, compose, arrange, and record what would become one of cinema’s most enduring cult soundtracks. Drawing deeply from Celtic traditions, ancient verse, and the earthy pulse of British folk revival (think Pentangle’s shimmering strings and breathy flutes), he crafted a sonic world that feels timeless yet dangerously alive.

Assisted by Gary Carpenter and performed by the ad-hoc folk ensemble Magnet (a group of six musicians including violinist Ian Cutler and bassoonist Michael Cole), Giovanni blended traditional material with his own haunting originals. The result is a liturgy of fertility, harvest, and ritual—songs that seduce with gentle melodies while hiding thorns of eroticism and sacrifice beneath their surface.

Spiritual Resonance

What elevates Giovanni’s work beyond mere accompaniment is its spiritual sincerity. The music doesn’t mock paganism; it embodies it. Flutes sigh like wind through barley, lyres and harmonicas evoke hearthside gatherings, and the harmonies carry the weight of communal belief—joyful, fertile, cyclical. To outsiders like Sergeant Howie, it’s sinister; to the islanders, it’s salvation. The score invites us to feel both: the warmth of belonging and the chill of what belonging demands.

Critics have called it everything from “risibly silly and total genius” to a cornerstone of alternative music’s evolution, influencing freak-folk artists decades later. Released properly only years after the film’s troubled distribution (once thought lost forever), it now stands as a standalone masterpiece—a pagan hymn that still makes hearts race and skin prickle.

In the end, Paul Giovanni’s folk score doesn’t just underscore The Wicker Man—it is the island. It sings of summer’s coming in, of bodies and earth entwined, of sacrifice offered with open arms and radiant faces. Listen closely on a quiet evening, and you might hear the maypole ribbons still whispering through the wind. Summer is icumen in, inde

But is the film remotely based upon fact?

The themes and characters in The Wicker Man (1973) are not based on real historical events, people, or a living pagan community—they are a masterful work of fiction. Yet they draw from genuine historical sources, folklore, and early 20th-century scholarship in ways that give the film its haunting authenticity and spiritual depth. The result is a brilliant invention: a “what if” scenario that feels eerily plausible, even though Summerisle, Lord Summerisle, Sergeant Howie, and the island’s revived Celtic paganism never existed.

The Island and Its People: Pure Invention

Summerisle is entirely fictional—a remote, sun-kissed Hebridean paradise conjured by screenwriter Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy. No such isolated Scottish island has ever sustained a secret, thriving community of neo-pagans who abandoned Christianity in the 19th century to revive ancient Celtic worship for better apple harvests. The story’s backstory—Lord Summerisle’s Victorian grandfather breeding climate-adapted fruit trees and reintroducing pagan gods—is a clever narrative device, not history.

The characters are archetypes rather than portraits:

•  Sergeant Neil Howie embodies rigid, puritanical Christianity—devout, judgmental, and sexually repressed.

•  Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) is the urbane, paternalistic pagan philosopher-king, blending charm with ruthless pragmatism.

•  The islanders represent joyful, communal earth-worshippers who accept human sacrifice as necessary for renewal.

These figures serve the film’s deeper exploration of clashing faiths, not real individuals.

The Pagan Religion: Inspired by Scholarship, Not Direct History

The island’s practices draw heavily from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), a hugely influential (though now dated) study of myth, ritual, and fertility cults. Frazer compiled global folklore on sacrificial kings, maypole dances, harvest rites, and seasonal renewal—elements Hardy and Shaffer wove into Summerisle’s world. The film’s folk songs, maypole ceremony, graveyard couplings, and phallic symbolism echo British folk revival traditions (via collector Cecil Sharp) and ancient seasonal festivals like Beltane or Midsummer.

The wicker man itself—the giant effigy for burning a sacrificial victim—is rooted in a single ancient source: Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (1st century BCE), where he describes Gaulish druids constructing massive wicker figures filled with living men (often criminals or prisoners of war) and setting them ablaze to appease the gods. Other Roman writers like Strabo echo this, but modern historians view these accounts skeptically—likely Roman propaganda to portray Celts as barbarians. Archaeological evidence shows Celtic human sacrifice existed (e.g., bog bodies like Lindow Man), but rare, and no physical proof of giant burning wicker men has ever surfaced.

So the film’s climactic ritual is a dramatic amplification of a dubious, one-line historical claim, blended with Frazer’s ideas of fertility sacrifice. It’s not “true” in any literal sense, but it captures the primal terror and ecstasy that ancient sources (biased though they were) evoked.

Influence on Real Neopaganism

Ironically, the film has shaped modern paganism more than it reflects it. Since 1973, some neopagan groups and festivals have adopted symbolic wicker man burnings (without sacrifices, of course)—think the Wickerman Festival in Scotland or echoes at Burning Man. The movie helped popularize the idea of revived Celtic rites centered on human-like effigies, even though real ancient practices were likely far less theatrical or extreme.

In the end, The Wicker Man isn’t documentary—it’s myth-making cinema. Its power lies in how convincingly it imagines a living, breathing alternative faith, forcing us to confront the beauty and danger in any total commitment to belief. The islanders’ radiant songs as flames rise aren’t historical reenactment; they’re a spiritual mirror, reflecting how faith—pagan or Christian—can justify the unthinkable while feeling utterly sacred.

Movie trivia: Britt Ekland refused to do the fully naked film scenes. That is a stunt bottom in the film!

The film whispers: belief itself can be the true wicker man—beautiful, terrifying, and capable of consuming us all.

So, in a way, The Wicker Man wasn’t technically based upon fact but in a strange twist ended up shaping pagan and new age culture.  You can buy Summer Isle merchandise and the film is adored by the many people who fell in love with the movie and its take on spiritually and morality. Carrie’s cabinet of curiosities also has an almost complete set of the original Wicker Man collector cards as well as an original 70s Wicker Man button badge.

It is best to watch the complete Director Cut of the film as it mass a lot more sense and avoid the Nicholas Cage remake at all costs: it’s crap!! There is also a film called The Wicker Tree based on the book by the same author which is also worth watching though it’s not as as good frankly.

The film is available in a wide variety of formats and box sets as well as the original soundtrack which is well worth checking out. 

There’s a box set which features both the cinematic and director cuts versions as well as the soundtrack.