Travels Around Summerisle

This piece formed a part of my PhD thesis. The section this is extracted from dealt with the uncanny, the weird, the eerie, and my reactions to them. I illustrated these by revealing some of my thoughts and experiences on visiting the filming locations of The Wicker Man, Children of the Stones and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. As the PhD was in creative writing, a creative approach was taken. In line with Mark Fisher’s comment ‘The form that is most appropriate to the weird,’ says Fisher, ‘is the montage; hence the preference within surrealism for the weird combinations.’​ (Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016) I constructed a written montage. The poetry is based on cut-ups of sections of scripts from the Wicker Man, lyrics from the songs in same and various other sources. These were then tidied up and often re-written to the form you see below.

Travels Around Summerisle

i – Summerisle 

Summerisle is an idea, a wild fragmentation; a web of geographic realities that combine to create a cartographic anomaly. It is an expression of desperation and otherness occupying the space between the weird and the eerie; between the heimlich and the unheimlich. Its reality is an hallucinogenic fever dream, and its surreality etched solidly into the basalt of the Old Man of Storr. 

We find the evidence of Summerisle throughout the border region of Scotland, from Kirkcudbright and westwards towards Stranraer and Ayr, but it Is as if the isle we see onscreen had exploded, depositing its fragmentary likeness, too precious, too dangerous to be seen all at once. In each of the fragments the ghosts of Neil Howie and Lord Summerisle circle each other, endlessly; the earth and the moon circling the Sun of Rowan Morrison. Dark eclipses light, fire purifies the earth, and we move ever on.   

The Wicker Man, as already intimated, occupies a peculiar space. Whichever side you identify with, the heathen or the Christian, it is never quite certain who is the villain and who is the hero. The Christian would undoubtedly identify Lord Summerisle as a villain and the fate of Howie as shocking – not to mention unexpected. Pagans, or heathens, would identify Howie as the enemy, the arrogant oppressor, the outsider, and someone who would destroy their way of life without a second thought in the name of a God that is no longer believed in on the heathen Summerisle.  

ii – The First Time 

On my first viewing, watching in bed on a portable black and white TV while suffering from influenza, I could never work out if the palpable otherness was a result of the virus infesting my system or simply the movie being the movie. Some months later, I saw it at a midnight screening at the long-gone Anvil Cinema in Sheffield and its extreme otherness was confirmed. Stepping out into the rain sheened streets at 02:30 after witnessing that horrifying death, the manner of which gives the movie its name, I could only shudder.  

For a brief moment, I identified with Howie seeing the Wicker Man for the first time; realising his fate, despite his calls for divine intervention, was both unnerving and oddly energising. In my urban, concrete surroundings, I felt safe. I could not imagine anyone building a Wicker Man here not even on the road called ‘The Wicker’ which, post-movie, I had to traverse in order to get home. As I walked, the swooziness of the virus came back to haunt me. The unreality that seeped from the screen, swaddled and swamped me and I arrived home, not entirely certain of how I’d got there. 

And that, perhaps, is part of the joy of repeated viewings. It’s horrifying but, quite unexpectedly, it infects you, it become part of you, and you reach a mutual co-existence, a symbiosis; an understanding that all is not what it seems and that those who would be heroes, may yet be villains.   

Viewing on a black and white tv seems to have been the required method of introduction for maximum effect. Steve Pemberton, of the TV show ‘The League of Gentlemen’ and more recently, ‘Inside Number 9,’ said ‘A film like this is best viewed accidentally, tuning in after the first five minutes on a tiny black-and-white portable with no knowledge of what is about to unfold.’​ (Shearsmith, Pemberton, Dyson, & Gatiss, 2007)​ 

I would concur. And perhaps with the addition of a flu-like virus.  

iii – Cuckoo 

The air fills with spare curls  
of clotted cream falling  
as infant blossom. A chance    

wuthering and wistering 
stunts the stigma, curbs  
the style, holds the pistil 

to the temple and fires, 
damning the ingathering, 
rarefying the already spartan 

vintage, courting a dream  
of nocent cultivation, oh 
very quick quick quick 

‘Sumer is icumen in.  
Lhude sing cuccu…’ 

Cuckoo! 
Cuckoo! 
Cuckoo!

iv – Britt 

The fragmentary nature of Summerisle’s geography is echoed in both the manner of its release and the casting of one of the major characters. Initially seen by its distributors as worthless, it was released – in a much-truncated form – as a supporting B-feature with ‘Don’t Look Now,’ another horror-that-is-not-a-horror. Movie critic Mark Kermode confirms that two other forms exist, ​(Kermode, 2022)​ presumably c and d feature cuts, which ran for just over an hour and a barely worth it seventeen minutes, respectively. It wasn’t until much later that the full cut was released, although the director maintains that an even longer cut should exist. Criminally, the negatives were lost, having been sold as landfill scrap and used to support a new motorway. 360 cans of negatives lost, simply because the film company did not understand the remarkable artefact that they possessed. 

Britt Ekland is similarly fragmented. Playing, Willow McGregor, she appears as herself in the majority of the film but has an unnamed body double for the writhing naked dance shots (a formative sexual experience, to those of an age and sexuality, second only to Barbara Windsor losing her bra in Carry on Camping.) Britt was less than pleased, saying “They brought in a body double one day when I was away from the set. No one told me, neither before nor after it happened. The first I knew about it was when the film came out and then I was in a state of shock. Her [the body double’s] bottom was much bigger than mine and she wore a blonde wig that was longer than my own hair. It was ridiculous and I was very upset.”​ (Britt Ekland: Being in The Wicker Man was a real horror , 2021)​ 

To add to the hurt, Annie Ross dubbed both Ekland’s speaking and singing voices. Three people, one body. A fragmented character and an unexpected illustration of the duplicity of the townsfolk. Perhaps even an unintended manifestation of the triple aspect – Maiden, Mother, Crone. 

Of course, the notion of using a body double isn’t of itself a radical or unheard-of idea, neither is the dubbing of voices, another development she was unaware of until the premiere, but in a movie about – among other things – duplicity, it does add an extra resonance. She was, perhaps, as misled as Howie. 

v - Vague Wisdom

I'll show you. Tell you again of the wondrous day; tell you  
tales of midnights cold and clear; days of caustic sun.  
I’ll call your name in red and white - a tender voice  
that ends hoarse and ties the broken threads I gave  

to you. Wassail! Rejoice! He called me by my life and fed  
at dusk, comforting me with the words: “In wood and withy,  
I am here.” I say “How do you do, to whit, to woo, and come  
by the stream to sip the meað I offer. I'll give you things  

- soft clothing, woolly bright, soft as feather; a cow as mild  
as milk and a bull as meek as children; a liar, hard as basalt rock.  
I know who you are - a god lamb blessed; a thing that is true;  
a bow from the sky and an arrow from the earth that sings.”

vi – Folk Horror 

What marks out ‘folk horror’ from its parent genre is an element of separation, a rural setting and in intrusion from the past. Often, ‘the old ways,’ –  a religion or a superstition stumbled upon by an outsider – or an artefact rediscovered, are the driver of the narrative. Rarely, if ever, does the encounter – a corruption of van Gennep’s ‘rite of passage’ arc – have a positive outcome for the protagonist(s) with death and mayhem the usual denouement. Detective Howie, in The Wicker Man, for example, becomes the object of sacrifice. 

What is interesting is that Folk Horror is rarely about supernatural forces, per se, rather they are about human action and their consequences. The supposed supernatural element is passive. The Wicker Man sees the introduction of a new religion that leads to people making a choice to  commit an act of human sacrifice. The Blood on Satan’s Claw see human’s finding an artefact and acting on its implications, There is no suggestion that the found object – a deformed skull – is evil in and of itself, it simply brings out the negative aspects of a human horde. The apparent demonic possession may simply be the result of hysteria rather than an actual possession, and it is here, in the psyche and the rural, that folk horror resides. In  [Liminality and the Uncanny] I state that ‘the human response to something that is unfamiliar, and intangible is to attempt to categorise, ritualise and fetishise it.’ In ‘The Blood On Satan’s Claw,’ this idea is taken to homicidal extremes.  

Even stories such as ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ (and  the wider works of Alan Garner,) and ‘Children of the Stones’ fall under the aegis of ‘Folk Horror’ as they take ordinarily urban people and place them into unfamiliar, uncanny rural settings. They are then exposed to an ancient artefact – the ‘Firefrost’ or ‘Weirdstone’ in the former, and the Milbury stone circle and ‘Hendricks Supernova’ in the latter, representing the past as an uncanny influence on the present. 

Where ‘the past’ is usually defined as ‘ancient’ in this sort of movie, The Wicker Man breaks the mould in an unexpected way. The ‘old ways’ are not very old at all. To whit, the former Lord Summerisle imposed the beliefs on his fiefdom a mere two generations prior to the narrative, utilising a reconstructed version of the ‘old ways.’ The ‘New Old Ways’ of neo-paganism if you will. 

Whereas in, say MR James ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You My Lad’ requires a rediscovered artefact to propel the narrative, the titular whistle, the Wicker Man’s narrative is driven by something that is relatively new. Moreover, the beliefs that  demand the actions leading to the climax of The Wicker Man are artificially and deliberately introduced, rather than being the product of social evolution.  

James’ commonly wrote stories involving archives or libraries; repositories of knowledge, often hidden, unread or lost for vast tracts of time.  The disturbing of these archives, the disturbing of a calm psyche, results in horrors from the past resurfacing. We are minded not to look into that abyss.  

With the Unholy Trinity reaching cult status, a new generation of film makers, influenced by these movies, has taken up the mantle, producing works such as ‘Midsommar,’ ‘The VVitch’ and even a skewed take on the genre in the form of an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space.’ This sees the artefact as an alien ‘colour,’ and the refusal to leave the area affected by this passive alien incursion alters the humanity of the isolated residents. Lovecraft, of course, is no stranger to the weird and the eerie, and folk horror falls firmly within that spectrum. 

vii – St Ninians Cave 

It’s a long walk from the car park to the beach; a muddy slope, swollen and uncertain, makes me doubt my step. A chortling stream guides the way, and then just before the beach, it promptly vanishes underground, reappearing halfway between the smoothed rocks of the desolate shore and the high tide mark.  

The simple act of walking is made difficult; the clacking stones shifting underfoot, the colloidal slip of the mud echoed in the pebbles. Although quite beautiful, this hidden beach does not lend itself to comfort, relaxation, or childhood idylls. It comes, instead, with connotations of wild horror, misted time, and a point of no return. 

We reach the monolithic rocks that guard the entrance to St. Ninian’s Cave. The path to it is dangerous and involves an element of climbing. The wind and rain intensify the danger, and we decide against risking it. Instead, we sit on the rocks that crowd the entrance and wonder. 

I thought this might annoy me, to get so close to the cave and then be thwarted at the last moment… but this is a movie location. It is not the cave; it is not even a true cave, but rather a large ‘cleft’ in the rock, so small that the interiors had to be filmed elsewhere. Regardless, it’s existence still holds a morbid fascination for luring a pompous policeman to his death.  

viii – Hubris

This is the place. The point of no return. At any point in the movie, prior to this one, Howie could have turned on his heel and run, but his arrogance and his parochial outlook; his dogged insistence that HE IS RIGHT, that his God is the only God, is severely tested at the exact moment of exiting the cave; of leaving to womb; the harbinger of new life. It’s enough to make both Jung and Freud swoon. 

ix – nemesis

It seems cruel to trap and ultimately kill Howie in a space of rebirth, but it is his hubris has led him here His Nemesis awaits.. .

“Jesus Christ,” he cries, and being a righteous man, his outburst isn’t intended as profanity.  He is calling on his saviour to intervene, but the power of belief is against him. Christ has no place here. The old gods – with their meagre two generations of belief powering them – crush the upstart Nazarene with little more than a charged word and a wry smile. 

x – Do Not Enter 

I decided to take some photographs and noticed through the zoom that there was police tape across the entrance to the cave, with ‘Police – Do Not Enter’ emblazoned on the plastic. I smile and wonder if Howie should have taken notice. We walked as close to the entrance as we could and confirmed that it isn’t really a cave at all. The cave scenes were filmed at Wookey Hole in Somerset. Summerisle stretches across two countries.

Knowing the location from various TV shows, I wonder if Howie might have met up with Cybermen from Doctor Who, had the movie been filmed a few months later. I wonder which fate would be more horrifying.  I decided it would be a long, slow, fiery death by Wicker Man. Death by Cyberman is mercifully quick.

xi– Sequel 

A sequel to The Wicker Man was planned. In it, Howie was rescued by a police team, arriving in the nick of time by helicopter. Once recovered from his ordeal, a badly scarred Howie led a team back to Summerisle to destroy the pagan ‘monsters.’ 

It was never made. 

Thank the Gods.

Such a sequel would normalise the uncanny element by making the inhabitants of Summerisle ‘abnormal’ in the eyes of the viewer. It would become just another ‘outsiders are evil’ story with an entirely expected denouement. Part of the reason The Wicker Man is so successful is the ambiguity. There are no definitives in the movie. Howie’s death is either right or wrong depending on which side of the ideological fence you fall. A rescue implies an inherent ‘wrongness’ to be rescued from, that instantly paints the denizens of Summerisle as villains. The ambiguity is lost, and folk horror relies on and is successful because of an inherent ambiguity, which is why movies like ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ do not rank alongside the Unholy Trinity as examples of folk horror.  Despite containing the necessary elements – isolation, rurality and an artefact/religion/superstition – there is an external force that instigates the horror; the Necronomicon literally ‘contains’ evil in the Evil Dead, and the actions of the cannibalistic Hardesty Family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that separates them from the more psychological nuances of the Unholy Trinity and their ilk. 

xi  – The End of the Beginning 

The ending of The Wicker Man, even for a Horror movie, is shocking. It is not gore or death by kaiju or by tortured soul with a grudge against American middle-class teenagers; it is something far more terrifying because, in many ways, it is a simple death. I don’t mean the subterfuge or planning; I don’t mean the trickery or the way in which manipulation plays its part. I merely mean it is a man and a fire. A man placed into a fire. No complex machinery, no supernatural intervention, no monsters, ghouls, or ghosts.  

Man.  

Fire.  

It is the achievability that shocks. 

The mundanity of its execution. 

The horror, like much of folk horror, is fully human.