Robin Redbreast, a seventy-minute TV production, pre-dates The Wicker Man by three years, yet shares a similar set-up and sensibilities.§§ It was written by John Bowen (who adapted the Christmas 1974 version of M. R. James’s ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’) and aired in December 1970 as part of the inaugural season of what would become a landmark BBC drama strand: Play for Today ran until 1984, and was responsible for many classics of UK television including Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills and Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party. It also gave us a number of now-seminal works that explore the eerie.
Notably, in addition to Robin Redbreast we have, from 1974, Penda’s Fen. Set in the shadow of the Malvern Hills, the play’s landscape shares little with my Lincolnshire upbringing beyond the ‘Fen’ of its title. It was directed by Alan Clarke, feted for gritty social realism like the borstal-based Scum. Scripted by David Rudkin (who went on to adapt M. R. James’s ‘The Ash Tree’, the 1975 ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’), this is very different in tone – lyrical, intense and strange. At its heart is Stephen, recently turned eighteen and coming to the end of his stuffy grammar school education, who is trying to make sense of himself and the world through visions of demons, angels and the ghosts of Edward Elgar and Penda – the last pagan king of England. With its complex concerns about society and class, sexual identity, religious faith, and perhaps above all, its search for answers about what it means to be English, Penda’s Fen carries enormous current cultural relevance.
I visit the small village where most of the play was filmed – Chaceley, part-way between Gloucester and Worcester – two weeks after coming to Scotland. When I arrive, the scene is like the beginning of The Children of Green Knowe, with several of the roads into the village flooded. I recognise a couple of buildings used as locations, including the Church of St John the Baptist. I unlatch its heavy, stiff door to be greeted by a circling black-winged apparition: a jackdaw that has been trapped inside for an unknowable measure of time. For the next few minutes I try to coax the bird out – fortunately it doesn’t take long, unlike a marooned pigeon or sparrow, for it to spot the gap of daylight and head for freedom. Relieved, I sit down at the same organ where Stephen practises Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, trying to recreate one of the play’s most striking sequences.
And I wait. Wait for a fissure to open up in the floor of the nave – or for the crucified Christ to speak.
At seventy minutes in length Robin Redbreast is only fourteen minutes shorter than the UK theatrical release of its better-known Scottish counterpart, The Wicker Man, though the difference in the look of the two could not be more different. Robin Redbreast was shot in grainy black and white, and takes place largely in and around a single location, adding to its sense of claustrophobia.¶¶
After the jaunty Play for Today credits the mood is set by the sound of the menacing, whistling wind that plays over a still photograph of a shabby cottage with boarded windows. ‘That’s the before picture,’ says television-script editor Norah Palmer, as she chats to two of her middle-class London friends, Madge and Jake. We learn she’s recently broken up with her boyfriend and is moving to a remote place in the Midlands that was meant to have been their bolthole. The same background wind is present more or less throughout, heightening our sense of unease as we try to work out what the busybody housekeeper Mrs Vigo, who’s always there with a handy piece of local lore, and, in particular, the learned village elder Fisher – who manages to make the wearing of glasses the epitome of sinister – are planning. On a weekend visit Jake attempts to put Norah off the cottage and hasten her return to the city by delivering a dramatic monologue about the breeze that blows outside, a speech that holds more truth than he knows: ‘Comes down the hills through the trees. Comes down that nasty little private road of yours, whipping in and out of the potholes. And you hear the voices. Drunken voices, singing. Shouting things. Frightened women. A child …’
‘I don’t hear any such thing,’ Norah replies, unconvincingly.
A supposed infestation of mice in the cottage roof leads Norah, at the insistence of Mrs Vigo, to seek the services of the handsome Rob, a young, ripped gamekeeper in his twenties (‘If you’ve got vermin, Rob’s your man’). Norah sees him practising karate outside his house in the woods – he’s wearing only his underpants and attacking a bare tree trunk with comic ferocity. She has a short-lived fling with him, but realises they have little in common besides their mutual physical attraction – and the pregnancy she is left with. Events subsequently take a turn reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby, though not perhaps quite in the way the viewer would guess.***
The programme’s enigmatic final shot, in which Norah, like Lot’s wife, looks back as she is driving off, shows the four principal villagers standing in a line outside the cottage. To begin with they are wearing their normal, everyday clothes, but when she stops for a last glance they’ve been transformed: the two hefty labourers now in archaic overalls, Mrs Vigo a witchlike black cape, and Fisher as a kind of stag-horned Herne the Hunter. It’s the perfect ending to this most sinister of dramas, which, despite its grainy footage, and being almost fifty years old, seems hardly to have dated.
Leaving aside its obvious parallels with Robin Redbreast, what makes The Wicker Man stand out from other horror films of the time? (Its high-profile contemporaries include The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now – it was even shown as part of a double bill with the latter.) To begin with it’s much less polished, probably a result of having a debut feature-film director, Robin Hardy (he’d previously made television commercials), at the helm; I think the resultant idiosyncrasies add to its atmosphere. Above all, The Wicker Man is imbued with the folklore and rituals that dominate the lives of the islanders. From the children’s maypole and stone circle dances to the creepy costumes of the hobby horse procession, which culminates in a druidic vision similar to that laid down by Julius Caesar in his account of the Gauls (‘Others have figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men’), this is a film steeped in the land and a mythic past. Which is partly why it is now regarded as one of the three cornerstones of the ‘folk horror’ sub-genre, along with two other movies from the era, both set in England, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General.†††
Folk horror is a difficult term to pin down, but seems to have first been used (at least in cinematic terms, as there are a couple of earlier art-criticism references) by Piers Haggard, the director of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, in a 2003 magazine interview. Tellingly, Haggard has also commented on how he tried to bring ‘the sense of the soil’ into the picture – something he manages literally in the opening scene, where a seventeenth-century ploughman notices a flock of doves and a solitary carrion crow picking at an object in one of the furrows of the field; on closer inspection he sees a worm-ridden human-like eyeball in an exposed skull, along with several unidentifiable clumps of fur in the surrounding dirt. More recently, the writer and actor Mark Gatiss in his 2010 BBC documentary series A History of Horror gave the following definition, which would seem a good starting point:
From the late sixties a new generation of British directors avoided the Gothic clichés by stepping even further away from the modern world. Amongst these are a loose collection of films which we might call ‘folk horror’. They shared a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions.
Today, we seem to have reached a moment where society is increasingly attempting to find comfort in the simplicity and certainties of the past – Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle might even say the people have been roused from their apathy and are returning to old gods. Unsettling works that hark back to or evoke an earlier pastoral era, or esoteric traditional country beliefs, are once again in vogue. It’s tempting to wonder whether folk horror films awaken within us cultural memories of these imagined former times. However, I think much of their current power and relevance comes from their portrayal of the manipulative forces of authori
ty, which use individuals (such as Howie or Norah) as unwitting participants in their schemes.
Schemes that themselves, we realise, are ultimately futile and doomed to failure.
The thing that, to me, most separates The Wicker Man from its contemporaries (and more recent admirers) is its soundtrack.‡‡‡ It’s practically a musical in the way that key scenes involve songs, though that’s not to say other films in the genre don’t also use their scores to great effect. In particular, The Blood on Satan’s Claw has a sometimes beautiful, sometimes sinister Vaughan Williams-like orchestral accompaniment by the composer Marc Wilkinson, which utilises a discordant, descending ‘Devil’s interval’ (or ‘tritone’) refrain. In The Wicker Man, however, the song interludes are a deliberate part of the script, a quick means of avoiding long blocks of exposition about the unconventional lifestyle of the islanders. They could be considered a little jarring – they’re certainly not for everyone – yet are probably my favourite ingredient. Interestingly, the man behind these traditional-sounding tunes was a young American, Paul Giovanni, with no experience of having scored a film before; in an odd coincidence, he met with and was advised by Marc Wilkinson on how to go about the task. The musicians, who are billed as ‘Magnet’, were also not an actual, established folk group, but six youthful session players, recent graduates from London music schools.
‘The Landlord’s Daughter’ is a bawdy number based on an authentic eighteenth-century ballad that is performed in the aptly named Green Man inn shortly after Sergeant Howie turns up for the first time – the overdubbed Swedish actress Britt Ekland is the song’s object of desire. ‘Cornrigs and Barleyrigs’, which appears over the end of the opening titles, has an original tune but takes the words to a song, ‘The Rigs o’ Barley’, which Robert Burns himself had adapted from a ballad at least a century old at the time (‘It was upon a Lammas night, / When corn rigs are bonie …’). Likewise, the lyrics of three traditional pieces were melded together into ‘Gently Johnny’, a song about desire used to show the sergeant’s inner conflict as he prays to God while trying to rise above Summerisle’s worldly temptations (the scene was cut from the theatrical release but restored to the later ‘Final’ and ‘Director’s’ cuts).§§§ Similar in spirit is ‘Willow’s Song’, in which the naked Britt Ekland (and her body double) ratchets up the virginal Howie’s torment as she sensually knocks on the wall of his bedroom – this must be one of the few horror films where a character is punished for not acquiescing to their sexual desires.
The one jarring musical note (apart perhaps from Diane Cilento’s vocals on her duet with Christopher Lee) is an ill-judged piece of seventies funk that sounds more like something off the soundtrack of Get Carter and which accompanies Howie, fittingly dressed as the Fool, as he ascends the path above the cave near the film’s end. The scene was shot just a mile and a half around the coast from Burrow Head, at St Ninian’s Cave – tradition has it that the recess in the cliffs was used by the saint as a place of personal prayer. Ninian is the first recognised Christian missionary to Scotland, though little is known about the life of the man said to have built, c. AD 397, in the vicinity of nearby Whithorn, perhaps the earliest church in Scotland. (Whithorn was also a location for several scenes from The Wicker Man, including Howie’s visit to the library, where his comprehension of the islanders’ pagan beliefs and rites becomes solidified.)
Little appears to have changed at the cave in the four and a half decades since filming took place – the scene looks barely different to that in the movie where the islanders pour ale into the sea as an offering, and where the sergeant breaks his cover to rescue Rowan Morrison. I approach via the inland route, which takes me through a tree-lined valley more akin to Cornwall’s Land’s End peninsula than somewhere I’d expect to find in Scotland; halfway along, a hare streaks up the bank on the opposite side of the swift-moving stream, which seems fitting given the abundance of hare imagery and motifs that occur throughout the film. Emerging abruptly onto the beach it’s a long walk across flattened over-sized stones before I reach the sheltered, half-hidden hole. If I were from Summerisle I might well see the cave – with its vagina-like cleft recessed into the rocks of its back wall – as some sort of monument to fertility. In fact, here on the real mainland, paganism doesn’t seem to be obviously on display; this is still an active site of Christian pilgrimage, a shrine to the enigmatic St Ninian. Crossed pieces of driftwood tied together with washed-up lengths of blue binding twine are stacked inside – some with accompanying messages (‘May there always be an angel by your side’) – or placed prominently on the cliffs above.
They remind me of the makeshift symbols a vampire-hunter in a horror film might employ as an ineffective last-ditch measure.
Beyond the football pitch at Burrow Head the land slides towards the sea. The cliffs at this point are more stunted, and at my feet I find what I’ve been searching for – the final visible remnant of the film’s production. Two tree trunks protrude above a rough base of weathered concrete that bubbles over the grass like cooled lava. Almost illegible is the date, 1972, drawn in with a stick at the time the concrete was poured. These sorry-looking stubs were once the supports of the secondary wicker man statue that was built here, using woven hurdles like those you can buy in any garden centre, for close-up cutaways – and the film’s fortuitously captured end sequence where the figure’s head drops off to reveal the flaming, setting sun behind. The primary structure, thirty-six feet high, was constructed further back on higher ground (I later think I have located the flattened area on which it was situated, though cannot be entirely sure I’m in the exact spot).
The mess before me now is not much of a monument – the two wooden stumps previously rose to around four feet in height, before, in 2006, souvenir hunters chainsawed them away as illicit keepsakes. But these rotten remains do at least provide a tangible memento of the long-ago production.
Driving back, I pass through Wigtown, designated in 1998 as Scotland’s official ‘National Book Town’, home to an annual literary festival and a variety of second-hand bookshops strung along its grey-stoned high street. At the edge of the town lies its wide bay. A couple of white-faced barnacle geese are feeding out on the saltings, a tiny fraction of the entire 35,000-strong population that breeds in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and winters around the Solway Firth. The twelfth-century Topographica Hibernica, written by the Welsh cleric Giraldus Cambrensis, maintains that these geese, which he had observed on a visit to Ireland, grew out of some kind of seashell (hence their name). It’s a belief that persisted widely until the seventeenth century, and even later in some parts of County Kerry – though there it was likely a knowing way of continuing to eat meat during Lent, by taking advantage of the birds’ supposed maritime origins.
A boardwalk leads across the merse – the grass and marshland – of the bay. The tide’s out, but I can see that at high water it would inundate the surrounding vegetation. In times past the River Bladnoch scored a deep channel through the marsh. It was into this mud, in May 1685, that two local women, sixty-three-year-old Margaret McLachlan and eighteen-year-old Margaret Wilson – painted two centuries later as a beautiful Pre-Raphaelite redhead by John Everett Millais – were tied to stakes and left to drown.
Their ‘crime’ was that they were so-called Covenanters – a movement engaged in a nearly fifty-year struggle to maintain Presbyterianism as Scotland’s sole form of religion. The consequences for those caught up in the Galloway protests had a brutal conclusion: you know that events will not end well in a period (which finally concluded in 1688) labelled ‘the Killing Time’. A granite stake by the narrow dyke of the channel roughly marks the spot where the two women – the ‘Wigtown Martyrs’ – were executed, an event that’s every bit the equal of the pointless cruelty carried out in The Wicker Man or Robin Redbreast in order to appease a god of the harvest, or enacted in Witchfinder General by Vincent Price’s archly misogynistic hammer of witches, Matthew Hop
kins.
Set against the acts we inflict upon each other, or the things that cause us harm over which we have no control, the horrors of fiction and film feel inconsequential.
Next day I stop off at nearby Creetown. Here, the interior of the Ellangowan Hotel was used as the bar of the Green Man, though it’s hard to see any vestigial resemblance on my brief visit; an unpromising sign pasted to the door warns that there’s ‘No food available until April 9th’, making me wonder whether the harvest has finally failed.
I move on to Gatehouse of Fleet, where the white-walled estate offices doubled as the exterior of the inn. Finding locations from the production is becoming addictive. I worry that visiting these places will shatter the spell, but it doesn’t seem to be the case – if anything it makes me more appreciative of how the film was put together, of how the topography of such a convincing fictional island was conjured from these disparate mainland sites. I end up further up the coast – back in Burns’s Ayrshire – at the grand Culzean Castle, which functioned as the outside of Lord Summerisle’s ancestral home. Then down along the deceptively distant Rhins of Galloway peninsula to Logan Botanic Gardens, whose tropical palm trees were used to illustrate the island’s surprising floral bounty. At last to Anwoth, the hamlet that provided Summerisle’s graveyard.
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