the burning wicker man
5 titles
Folk horror films that build to a big fire in front of a crowd. The wicker man is a giant figure of woven twigs, filled with people and burned, and it comes from Julius Caesar, who described it in his account of the Gallic wars in the 50s BCE as a rite of the Gauls. Some historians read Caesar as Roman propaganda and no archaeological find has confirmed it, but the image stuck. Aylett Sammes engraved a wicker giant for a book on British antiquities in 1676, and James Frazer's The Golden Bough set European fire festivals beside ancient sacrifice.
Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer took the figure from Caesar and the village rites from Frazer for The Wicker Man (1973). Sergeant Neil Howie flies to the Scottish island of Summerisle to look for a missing girl and finds a community that follows an older religion, and the film builds to the burning of its wicker man. The Wicker Man (2006) remakes it, with Nicolas Cage as a police officer sent to a neo-pagan island for a missing girl, and builds to the same fire.
The three films since keep the fire and burn something other than a wicker man. In Apostle (2018), a former missionary named Thomas Richardson travels to a Welsh island in 1905 to rescue his kidnapped sister from a cult that believes blood sacrifice keeps the island fertile. In Midsommar (2019), Dani, a grieving American, goes with her boyfriend and his friends to a midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village. In Lord of Misrule (2023), a vicar's daughter disappears from the harvest festival in the village of Berrow. You spend each of these films waiting for the fire.
