The False Martyr & The Wicker Man
BEWARE SPOILERS: We go into every post assuming you’ve already watched the film being discussed.
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Robin Hardy’s 1973 film, The Wicker Man, now widely touted as the crème de la crème of Pagan-themed folk horror, has become the center of its own set of folklore, surrounded by myths and legends. And we’re not talking about the religious mythology depicted in the film itself. We’re talking about lore that reaches into the real world. Take Christopher Lee’s firm belief that EMI (the studio that absorbed British Lion Films mid-production) sabotaged, destroyed, or hid away the original negative of the film. Or look at pretty much anything to do with actor Britt Ekland’s involvement in the movie. You can read about these vast and sometimes contradictory stories in this Independent article.
The film’s music, rooted in traditional folk songs and nursery rhymes, is performed by Magnet, a band featuring members of the cast specifically formed to record the soundtrack. The lyrics allude to painstakingly researched pre-Christian European culture. Moreover, nearly all of Wicker Man was filmed on-location in the Scottish Southern Uplands regions of Dumfries and Galloway. This dedication to craft and attention to historic detail, the infamously harsh weather conditions during filming, and Wicker Man’s religious critiques have left behind an enduring (and evolving) legacy in Pagan and folk horror and across the entire horror landscape.
As a result, a lot of people have written a lot of things about its complicated history and the confusing distribution of several differently-lengthed cuts (the short, medium, and long versions--AKA the “theatrical,” “final,” and “director’s” cuts). So, if you have no clue what we’re talking about because you don’t remember some scene or you recall a different opening sequence or whatever, that’s why. And if you’re looking for a breakdown of what’s included, omitted, and rearranged in the different cuts, check out Steve Phillips’ amazingly informative site dedicated to those very details.
(Personally, we’re still kind of confused about what we remember from which film, and it seems like too much work to figure it all out—not in a lazy way, but in an “Oh Lord! Oh Jesus Christ!” kind of way. So you’ll just have to bear with us in those moments.)
Other writers have focused more on protagonist Neil Howie’s hard-fisted Puritan values and the dangers of zealotry, like Nick Bugeja’s review in Film Matters. And those are the two threads most folks have tried to untangle in The Wicker Man: The contents of the various cuts and the depictions of religious zealotry, stubbornness, and denialism. That stuff factors into our thinking, of course, but we’re focused more on Sgt. Howie’s depiction as a false martyr—false because Sgt. Howie is not, in fact, the martyr Lord Summerisle proclaims him to be.
Plot Refresher
This British folk horror musical (yeah, we said it) follows Police Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), who’s come to the fictional remote Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate the alleged disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison (Geraldine Cowper) after receiving an anonymous tip from one of the island’s residents. Instead, what he finds is “Pagan barbarity, which I can scarcely bring myself to believe is taking place in the twentieth century.” His disdain is clear right from the start for the folks of Summerisle, who get into public orgies at night, dance naked around fires, and teach kids to venerate “the penis … as symbolizing the generative force in nature.” That disdain is only fed by their confusing and disturbing attitude toward him and the rule of Law (yep, with a capital “L”).
First, when questioned about Rowan’s disappearance, the residents deny the girl’s very existence. Then, after much double-speak, circular language, and what one might call low-key trolling, they gradually lead Howie to Rowan’s supposed burial spot, letting him think he’s unravelling the mystery of her death. Instead, the folks of Summerisle plant in him the belief that they’re going to sacrifice her during their May Day celebrations to appease the god of the sun and goddess of the orchards to ensure a successful harvest after last season’s crops failed—“disastrously so,” according to the island’s leader, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee).
Early in the investigation, the day before May Day, Howie goes to the local school, passing by a group of teens led in song by a man as a group of children dance around the village Maypole. As he enters the school mid-lesson, he learns that the Maypole is meant to be a phallic symbol (that’s academic talk for “penis,” but you probably know that already). He’s appalled by the lesson but tries at first to focus on Rowan, asking the class for information. When they deny that Rowan was ever a student, he walks to the only empty desk in the room and opens it up, expecting to find, perhaps, Rowan’s old schoolwork or some other sign that she was a student. Instead, he finds a beetle tied to a nail. One girl explains, “The little old beetle goes ‘round and ‘round. Always the same way, y’see, until it ends up right up tight to the nail. Poor old thing!” to which the indignant Howie replies, “‘Poor old thing’! Then why in God’s name do you do it, girl?” She lowers her eyes in apparent shame and doesn’t give an answer. Then a subtle smirk grows across her face as Howie turns and walks back to the front of the room.
Now, because you’ve already seen the film (otherwise, why would you be reading this very, very spoiler-y blog about it), you probably already know Howie is the beetle, walking round and round with the thread of Rowan’s mystery until he finds himself right up tight to the nail. The villagers, in a series of carefully plotted interactions with Howie, drop all the breadcrumbs he thinks he needs to solve the mystery of her disappearance. He soon learns that she is alive and comes to believe that she is to be sacrificed. He then tries to save Rowan, whisking her away through a series of caves until the two of them emerge at the top of a cliff.
“Welcome, Fool,” says Lord Summerisle on his arrival. “You have come of your own free will to the appointed place,” where he is bound and taken to be burned alive inside the Wicker Man.
The False Martyr
Just before the final horrific scene, we get the following exchange, in which Howie proclaims his Christian faith to Lord Summerisle and all of the gathered villagers:
Sgt. Howie: I believe in the life eternal as promised to us by our lord, Jesus Christ!
Lord Summerisle: That is good. For believing what you do, we confer upon you a rare gift these days: A martyr’s death. You will not only have life eternal, but you will sit with the saints among the elect. Come, it is time to keep your appointment with The Wicker Man.
There it is, the key point we’re getting at. To Sgt. Howie, and to a lot of the folks who’ve written about The Wicker Man, this story is about how a devout Christian is led to slaughter, martyred, by Pagan cultists. And lots of others take it as a story about one Christian zealot losing his fight against a group of Pagan zealots. To us, though, The Wicker Man is about an unbending, Puritanical Christian realizing at the moment of his death that his faith will not be his salvation because he will die without having confessed his sins. What’s more, he won’t get the martyr’s death that Lord Summerisle suggests because, the fact is, he’s not killed out of religious persecution. To the people of Summerisle, his Christianity is incidental. As blogger Bill Ryan puts it in an article for The Bulwark, “The citizens of Summerisle just wanted apples.”
There’s an argument to be made that we’re totally wrong, that Howie is chosen as a sacrifice specifically because of his rigid Puritanical Christianity. The Summerisle residents even test his dedication to his beliefs on his first or second night on the island—depending on which cut you’ve seen. In one of the film’s more surreal moments, the innkeeper’s daughter Willow (Britt Ekland), something of a love goddess to villagers, tries to seduce Howie by dancing naked in the room next door while banging out rhythm on the walls and furniture as she sings an invitation to “come say, ‘How do?’” so she can show him,
How a maid can milk a bull!
And every stroke a bucketful.
(The first time we saw this scene, Eric texted the friend who had turned us on to The Wicker Man to ask, “What the hell is going on in this weird musical horror softcore porno?” It’s since become one of our favorite scenes in all of horrordom.)
As she goes on, Howie’s in the other room, beads of sweat roaring down his face, his hands up against the door as he tries desperately to resist Willow’s seduction song. When she asks the next morning why he denied her invitation, Howie replies, “I’m engaged to be married.” He goes on, “It’s nothing personal. It’s just that I don’t believe in it before marriage,” confirming his virginity and, therefore, part of his acceptability as a sacrifice. So if you’re into that argument, the one that says Howie’s a martyr, you’d probably point to this scene and say:
See that? They’re testing his faith. That means they’re killing him because he’s a Christian, which makes him one of the three kinds of martyrs enumerated by Pope Gregory I in Homilia in Evangelia, during his papacy in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Specifically, Gregory designated those killed in religious persecution as red martyrs. Sgt. Howie was definitely a red martyr. … What are the other two kinds of martyrs, you ask? Well, there are white martyrs, who are basically hermits and ascetics, and there are blue martyrs, whose lives consist of fasting and penitent labors. Look, though, it’s not really important. If you need more, it’s all here in this Wikipedia page.
And that argument makes a good bit of sense. But here’s the problem: The folks of Summerisle didn’t choose Sgt. Howie because he’s a Christian. They chose him because he’s “the right kind of adult”:
A man who would come of his own free will. A man who has come here with the power of a king by representing the law. A man who would come here as a virgin. A man who has come here as a fool.
They allow him to call them heathens without so much as batting an eye. They patiently explain their beliefs to him, often noting similarities between their faiths, including a shared belief in immaculate conception, as Lord Summerisle explains that the naked ladies jumping over the fire outside are trying to get pregnant through parthenogenesis, “reproduction without sexual union,” just as Jesus was “the son of a virgin, impregnated, I believe, by a Ghost.” The schoolteacher Miss Rose (Diane Cilento) also points to shared belief in transubstantiation (or as she calls it, transmutation), connecting Rowan’s transformation into a hare with the Last Supper, in which bread and wine consecrated by Christ were transformed into his flesh and blood.
Clearly, the folks of Summerisle take no offense at Howie’s Christianity. They express no animosity whatsoever toward his beliefs. They even claim to teach Christianity to their children as part of studies in comparative religion. When it comes down to it, they’re far more tolerant of Christianity than the good Sgt. is of not only Pagan belief, but in any religion that doesn’t accept Jesus as its lord and savior. In fact, there’s a case to be made that Howie himself threatens Miss Rose with religious persecution when he announces his intention to file a report on “the filth taught here in this very schoolroom” to the authorities.
Don’t get us wrong, sacrificing people to get apples is bad. Obviously, the residents of Summerisle are engaged in horrific barbarity. But keep in mind, Howie attacks their religion before all the killing and badness are revealed. It’s his second day on the island. He suspects murder, but not widespread conspiracy, and he doesn’t yet have reason to connect Rowan’s disappearance with their Pagan beliefs. The worst things that have happened to him so far is a woman tried to seduce him with a song and he ate some canned peaches.
So, he’s not a red martyr—the persecuted kind. But what about those other kinds of martyrs? What about a white martyr, the kind who are hermits and ascetics? Well, we don’t know of any good reason to think Howie lives in worshipful seclusion, so that one’s out. As for the blue martyr, who fasts and endures penitent labors, it’s possible you could say, by maintaining his virginity, he’s denying himself the pleasures of the flesh. That seems like a pretty low bar for martyrdom, though, right? That would mean anyone who died a virgin while awaiting Christian marriage would die a martyr.
A Test of Faith
So Howie’s not a martyr. He doesn’t get to “sit with saints among the elect,” as Lord Summerisle would have us believe. Still, he dies a good Christian, right? Well, that depends on who you ask and how you look at it. We would argue that, from Howie’s perspective, the most horrific part of this sacrifice isn’t that he gets burned alive inside a giant wicker man with a bunch of screaming animals. The worst horror for Howie stems from his own belief that he will be denied “the life eternal as promised to us by our lord, Jesus Christ.”
Allow us to explain.
As the Wicker Man burns around him and the wails of pigs, geese, and chickens drown out his prayers, in a bitter, terrified frenzy, he curses the Summerisle Pagans in a warped version of the Word of Forgiveness, spoken by Christ in several gospels, including Luke 23:34, as he dies upon the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And in Peter 2:23, it is said that “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.”
Where Jesus is thought to have begged forgiveness for those who crucified him, ultimately, Sgt. Howie has only damning words for his murderers. We noted above that, before he’s taken to his death, he tries to stand defiant and proclaim his belief in the life eternal. But, once Howie is inside the Wicker Man, awaiting his horrifying fate, he (very understandably) starts to lose it. We’re talking subtext at this point, trying to read between the lines of Edward Woodward’s performance, so it’s all subjective or whatever, but if you think it through, it’s reasonable to conclude that Howie himself realizes as the Wicker Man burns that he is not about to die for his beliefs but for the beliefs of the Summerisle Pagans.
There is no forgiveness or mercy here, only rage and condemnation, “because the truth is withered away from the sons of men. Desire shall fall and ye shall all die accursed!” Only a failed last ditch attempt at self-preservation and a biting curse of damnation on the singing crowd around him as he perishes slowly and painfully alongside the poor, ill-fated farm animals while trapped inside the giant burning effigy.
After his curse, the Pagans begin to sing about the rebirth his sacrifice will bring. Howie, in response, sings loudly, “The Lord’s My Shepherd,” a hymn asserting once more his faith in the promise of life eternal. But here too he falters, succumbing to fear and agony after the first few lines:
The Lord's my shepherd; I'll not want.
He takes me down to lie
in pastures…
He then stops singing and yells, “Oh, God!” Given the contents of the prayer that follows, it would seem this is the moment he realizes that he will be denied life eternal:
I humbly entreat you for the soul of this, thy servant, Neil Howie, who will today depart from this world. … Let me not undergo the real pains of Hell, dear God, because I die unshriven, and establish me in that bliss which knows no ending, through Christ, our Lord.
The camera then cuts away from Howie as he wails either “Jesus! Jesus!” or “Damn you! Damn you!” We actually can’t decide. Meg hears “Damn you!” Eric hears “Jesus!” And other sources claim that he yells “Failure!” or, hell, maybe even “Daniel!” … for some reason.
In any case, for Christians, to die as Howie dies, unshriven, is to die without having undergone the last rites and without, therefore, having been absolved of their sins. In this moment, not only has he invoked the name of God as a curse, taking His name in terrible vain, but Neil Howie will also die unshriven and, thus, by his own beliefs, condemned to Hell. In the end, we are presented with Howie praying to God to forgive him and grant him life eternal, and we are presented with the Pagans praying to their god of the sun and goddess of the orchards to accept their sacrifice and return their crops to prosperity. Whether either prayer is answered, we don’t know, but the spectacle is terrifying: That of a man alternately engaged in prayer and curse being burned alive amid the screams of dying animals inside this giant effigy while a community of pleasant-looking people happily sings of the bounty his death will bring.
