Come. It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man.
Those words, uttered in the stentorian tones of Christopher Lee, echo through the history of horror cinema. And it is, indeed, time that we come to The Wicker Man. It, alongside The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Witchfinder General, makes up what is often termed “The Unholy Trinity” of folk horror. It is the Ur Text of the genre. The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that even the name of this website is an homage to the film, and its stunning final scene.
Full disclosure before we begin: I want to like this movie so badly. I can’t say that I actually do. I am, in the truest sense of the word, deeply ambivalent about it. There are moments that I think are perfect. The shape of it appeals to me immensely. The rest of the time it is weirdly groovy, kind of a mess, and feels like it gets in its own way.
None of this has stopped me from watching it multiple times, trying to nail down what about it remains compelling. And, clearly, I am not alone in being intrigued. There is a wealth of writing about The Wicker Man, ranging from densely scholarly essays to enthusiastic rambles to harsh film criticism. But we do all keep coming back to Summerisle.
While the imagery and afterlife of the film are ubiquitous, I’m not sure how many people have actually seen it. So, we are going to take a moment for a brief synopsis.1
I have so many longer pieces that I have bubbling away on the back burner, and in the meantime, I’ve probably had the attentive capacity of a gnat this past week. So I’ve watched some horror movies! Here’s a barrage of brief reactions.
In a Violent Nature (2024, dir. Chris Nash)- This one generated a bunch of chatter earlier this year with its slasher-from-the-viewpoint-of-the-killer gimmick. Quite often, the gimmick works, but not really to implicate the viewer in the deaths which unfold at the hands of the Jason Voorhees-alike undead stalker. His victims, like those of so many slasher films, are just there to die; with no uncertainty as to where the killer is- we’re always with him- the movie is more an excuse to film those deaths from some interesting perspectives. One kill, at a pond, was particularly beautifully shot. By the end, too, the film abandons its whole schtick by shifting perspectives to follow the Final Girl, which… why? Worth it for some exceptionally gory kills (the yoga girl! The log-splitter!) and for some strangely relaxing nature photography, but, kind of like Skinamarink, this is more an occasionally inspired thought-experiment curiosity than a fleshed-out movie.
Longlegs (2024, dir. Osgood Perkins)- Oh, Longlegs. Another buzzy horror movie from the year of our lord 2024, this is… a mixed bag for me. It is nigh-on impossible for me to ever see Nicholas Cage as anything but himself, and I can think of, like, two movies in which that works. This is not one of them. He drags the whole movie into camp territory, less scary than hammy, a kind of cartoonish mash-up of Buffalo Bill (hasn’t that character aged well) and Marlon Brando in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Everything around him really is a vibe I enjoy, where banal surfaces are stretched over inexplicable or rotten cores; a nun’s habit hides a Satanist, a planned development houses a serial killer, a young FBI agent contains weird psychic abilities. The movie’s fever-dream distrust of the familiar lends it a really unnerving atmosphere. It’s just a shame it’s punctuated by Cage careening into farce.
Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023, dir. Emma Tammi)- Look, I can’t fully defend this, I just like this movie. FNAF has always intrigued me, both as a game and here, in this movie, more for what it does unintentionally than what it does deliberately. The franchise communicates an ambivalent, dangerous millennial fixation with nostalgia; we really love what we loved as kids, but those objects don’t love us back, both by ontological necessity and, in this case, because they are possessed animatronic mascots turned murderous because they couldn’t protect children from adults. So, yes, it’s silly on the surface, but horror can say a lot sub rosa. Anyway, this movie completely falls apart by the end, but great production design and practical effects, plus some good performances, save it from being way more of a mess than it could (should?) have been.
The Substance (2024, dir. Coralie Fargeat)- Hoo boy. I think this one has gotten under the skin of many audiences for its unflinchingly nauseating depiction of the often uneasy relationships women have with our bodies. It’s a difficult thing to see portrayed so viscerally, but also deeply entertaining for the sheer lunacy with which the movie treats it. Is the film very on the nose in how it deals with aging, beauty, female hunger? Yep, but that doesn’t take any of the sting out. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualey are both outstanding here, offering raw, angry, unglamorous performances which only make the increasingly dreadful stakes of their character(s) choices more unnerving. The comparisons to David Cronenberg are obvious, but I think to belabor them kind of diminishes what is an outstanding body-horror film in its own right. I also love any movie which depicts Hollywood as a surrealist nightmare where it is way too easy to vanish, and the lurid, too-bright, Barbie-from-Hell look of LA here is right up my alley.
This is a slight change from our usual posts, and I hope you will bear with me as I muddle my way through. I have been thinking a lot this week about the link between hope and horror. I am not going to lie and claim that it was an intentional and organized framework for an article — like many of us in the United States I have mostly been trying to keep my head above water and make sense of where we are right now. In fact, I had forgotten about this website entirely until I was already in bed last night. But here we are.
the shadowes are icumen in 