Apologies. Following an unsavoury trip to the dentist, I’m unable to bring you a new post. I’m really sorry. But, instead (and to celebrate May Day), here’s my take on The Wicker Man (1973), more or less as written back in 2024. And as ever, Sunday’s post is available to all. I hope you enjoy it.

… The Wicker Man defies definition. Directed by a first-timer, the television director and adman, Robin Hardy, with a script by Anthony Shaffer, The Wicker Man is, perhaps, best described as part horror, part mystery, and part musical: first shown as the B-movie in a double bill with Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece, Don’t Look Now (1973). Shaffer’s script is based on dodgy folklore, then fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s, so often the basis for the pop-occult paperbacks published by the likes of the New English Library: Sir James Frazer’s TheGolden Bough (1890-1915), Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948):fascinating, influential works, well worth reading for sure, but disowned today by serious academics, anthropologists and folklorists. Take the Druids. Did they really burn criminals alive in giant ‘wicker men’? Isn’t this, actually, Roman propaganda based on a single sentence in Caesar’s Gallic Wars?