The Myth of 'The Wicker Man'.

Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), a Scottish policeman of high Christian ideals and intolerant attitudes, is lured to the remote, godless island of Summerisle by a mysterious letter reporting the alleged disappearance of a schoolgirl.  Appalled by the loose sexual attitudes and pagan practices of the island’s inhabitants, he becomes the hapless victim of a sinister game orchestrated by the resident autocrat, Lord Summerisle (Sir Christopher Lee).  As events reach a horrifying conclusion, he comes to realise that the hunter is really the hunted...

The legends surrounding The Wicker Man are part of the film's mystique.  A victim of industry politics, it was despised by studio executives and met with blank incomprehension when it was produced in 1973.  With director Robin Hardy barred from the cutting room, it was crudely pruned back to support feature length and eventually released in a double-bill with Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Back.  Star Christopher Lee became The Wicker Man's greatest champion, claiming that it was the best film he had ever made and complaining to anyone who would listen about the desecration of his masterpiece.  Rumours and conspiracy theories abounded about missing scenes, boardroom machinations and cans of excised celluloid buried deep beneath the M3 motorway.

These mysteries were solved to a limited extent by the appearance of The Director’s Cut in 2006.  Rediscovered sequences (obtained from Roger Corman in the USA) were spliced back in to recreate what Robin Hardy claimed were his original intentions.   Taken from a video source, the restored scenes were of distractingly poor quality, but were nevertheless welcomed by fans, who continued to hope that even more footage was waiting to be found.   There was therefore much excitement when, after a well-publicised search for missing materials, it was announced that The Wicker Man – The Final Cut was to appear in time for the film's fortieth anniversary.  

Surprisingly, The Wicker Man – The Final Cut turned out not to be anything new.  Shorter than The Director’s Cut, it is the previously known 'middle version’, assembled by Hardy in 1979 for American distributors Abraxas.  Given a limited theatrical run in the States, it was later broadcast by BBC 2 as the opening part of its Moviedrome series introduced by Alex Cox in 1988.  The current release has been sourced from a good quality 35mm print found at the Harvard Film Archives and is intended to be definitive. In interviews however, 84 year-old Hardy has not ruled out making further changes, so it would seem that the title The Final Cut is a provisional marketing tag rather than a name that relates meaningfully to the film.

So how do the versions compare?  First of all it must be said that, although not perfect, the visual quality of The Final Cut is vastly superior to that of The Director's Cut.  Some graininess remains in the nighttime sequences, but this is tolerable.  While it is not so long as its predecessor, this 'new' version contains all the key elements and tells a coherent story; something that the Theatrical Cut failed to do.

The biggest difference from The Director’s Cut is the omission of opening scenes on the mainland that show Howie interacting with police colleagues, which it plain that he is an object of their derision on account of his sexually-repressed religious views.   While many miss this sequence, I am inclined to agree with Hardy's opinion that it unnecessarily spells out aspects of Howie's character that viewers will quickly pick up from his behaviour on Summerisle.  He is depicted as a freak, out of step with his peers, reflecting perhaps Hardy and Shaffer's concern about how such an austere protagonist would be received by a 1970s’ audience.  From a personal point of view, I find that having Howie's personality defined in this way at the outset removes the pleasure of learning about him as the film progresses.  Interesting though it is, this section is really just 'special feature' material.

Sadly, The Final Cut is missing the black title card that reads:

With its playful suggestion that we are about to watch a documentary, this announcement is typical of the quirky touches that make The Wicker Man so unique and points to the confusion of genres that make it the ultimate 'cult movie'.  It also indicates the ethnographic care with which Shaffer and Hardy constructed Summerisle's pagan community.  Its loss is mitigated slightly by the inclusion of the 'Nuada' sun god image that is used highly appropriately at the beginning and end as the film's logo.

Before he sets out for Summerisle, we are shown a flashback sequence of Sergeant Howie at Holy Communion.  In interviews, Hardy has explained that he considered it be important that this scene was included at the beginning of the film so that it connects to the climax, emphasising the theme of religious sacrifice. In the butchered Theatrical Cut, the shots of Howie taking the sacrament are added later on to illustrate his spiritual conflict during the attempted seduction scene with 'landlord's daughter' Willow MacGregor (Britt Ekland). I must confess a personal preference for the way the Theatrical Cut opens with Howie taking off in his seaplane and flying over the island. It is interesting to note how Hardy prioritises symbolism over pace.

Most importantly, The Final Cut clearly shows both nights of Howie's stay at Summerisle's inn 'The Green Man' and gives us an introductory sight of Lord Summerisle during his nocturnal visit with a young lad to be sexually initiated by the voluptuous Willow.   This includes his bizarre recital of a Walt Whitman poem over scenes of copulating snails.  An entire song that was criminally removed from Theatrical Cut, the beautiful 'Gently Johnny', has been restored.  On the negative side, there are some cuts that disrupt the music’s integrity, affecting the equally important 'Willow's Song'.

As mentioned, The Final Cut is undoubtedly the best-looking version of the film and, whether or not one prefers it to The Director’s Cut (and a perfunctory survey I have conducted among Wicker Man fans shows that the majority do not), it provides an ideal opportunity to reassess the film on its fortieth anniversary.  

In recent years The Wicker Man has been badly served by an ill-advised remake and follow-up; Nicolas Cage's ludicrously misogynistic 2006 version swiftly became an Internet joke and Hardy's own 'spiritual sequel' The Wicker Tree failed artistically in every respect that the original succeeded in. 

So what makes The Wicker Man so special?  Hardy and Shaffer originally conceived of it as an extension of their mutual interest in 'game-playing' and as a break from the Gothic clichés of 'Hammer horror'.  Inspired by the ''Obby 'Oss' festivities at Padstow in Devon, Hardy turned his attention to Sir George Frazer's classic yet controversial work of comparative mythology, The Golden Bough.  Leapfrogging through twelve dense volumes, he and Shaffer lifted religious and folkloric customs from disparate times and places to create an anachronistic amalgam to fit their ingenious plot, changing things and adding their own inventions when necessary.  The result is surprisingly successful; a manufactured Pagan belief system that feels authentic and strangely familiar.  The solar-mythological theme lends the story a deep archetypal resonance that lifts it into another dimension.

In the key scene in which Howie eventually meets up with Lord Summerisle, we learn that the island's Pagan religion is a bogus imposition, introduced by Summerisle's grandfather, a free-thinking Victorian scientist.   Attracted by the island's volcanic soil and its 'profuse source of wiry labour', he decides ‘to rouse the people from their apathy by giving them back their joyous old gods' so that they can toil happily in his orchards growing the new strains of apple that, like a Victorian version of Monsanto, he has artificially developed to produce fruit in this unpromising environment.

The current Lord Summerisle lays claims to genuinely believe in the island's reconstituted Paganism:

'What my grandfather had started out of expediency, my father continued out of love.  He brought me up the same way; to reverence the music and the drama and rituals of the old gods.  To love nature and to fear it, and to rely on it and to appease it where necessary.'

Given that he is no ignorant villager and knows the real, scientific explanation of why apples grow on the island, is he to be trusted on this point?  Clearly the religion (in which he personally plays a key part) plays a huge ideological role in cementing the absolute control he seems to exert over the island's inhabitants.

Modern scholars have rejected The Golden Bough’s central thesis, along with the romantic notion that modern-day folk customs such as the 'Obby 'Oss are remnants of prehistoric religious practices.  The historical veracity of the 'Wicker Man' itself is open to challenge, as the only surviving account of Druidic beliefs and rituals is furnished by Julius Caesar, who may have had his own imperial motives for inventing or distorting things.  At any rate, Caesar's account of the 'Wicker Colossus' merely states that the preferred sacrifices were convicted criminals, whereas Hardy and Shaffer provide their own formulation:

'A man who would come here 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.'

Given the context, these things do not matter.  It is easy to imagine that Summerisle's religion may have been concocted by a Victorian patriarch from the folkloric materials available to him.

The casting of The Wicker Man is superb.  The role of Lord Summerisle offered Christopher Lee an ideal opportunity to climb out of his Hammer Count Dracula rut, and he does so effortlessly, combining urbane charm and creepiness in equal proportions.  He is splendidly matched by Edward Woodward, whose total immersion in the role of Neil Howie is so convincing that people are sometimes surprised to learn he was not a Scotsman in real life.  Woodward gives a physical performance, deliberately ordering his police uniform a size too small to give the impression of pent-up muscular stiffness that could be an object lesson in Wilhelm Reich’s theory of character-armour.  He achieves the feat of first alienating the audience, but then turning it around in the final scenes, so that viewers completely empathise with him in extremis.  He is the linchpin of the film.

The supporting actors are also excellent, from the Scottish locals recruited to play Summerisle fishermen to the splendidly odd choice of Lindsay Kemp (Britain's foremost mime artist and one-time mentor/lover of the young David Bowie) to play camp publican Alder MacGregor.  Despite the lack of family resemblance, 'big name' of the moment Britt Ekland is appropriately nubile as his daughter Willow (even if her voice needed dubbing and the bottom on display is not really hers).  Diane Cilento also stands out as Miss Rose, the village school teacher and apparent paramour of Lord Summerisle. 

The one talent to be wasted is that of 'Hammer Glamour' goddess Ingrid Pitt, allegedly brought in against Shaffer and Hardy's wishes as a backfiring ploy to curry favour with the distributors.  Cast in the frumpish role of the Librarian, her sexuality is only exploited in a surreal 'Carry On' style scene in which Sergeant Howie comes across her naked in an old-fashioned tin bathtub.

Alongside Woodward and Lee, The Wicker Man's third star is undoubtedly Paul Giovanni, the composer of the soundtrack.  His contribution is so large that the film has been mischievously described as a 'stealth musical'.  It would not be the same without the songs and tunes that convey plot and atmosphere so effectively.  Eclectic and innovative, the soundtrack is inspired by everything from Scottish 'mouth music' to Victorian parlour songs and is distinguished by some unusual instrumentation and arrangements.  

Mainly diegetic, the music’s organic qualities are enhanced by the fact that its performers actually appear in the film.  Generically, it is a prime example of the type of folk rock explored by Michael Faber in his flawed yet fascinating book Electric Eden. The two songs recorded by Pentangle for Roddy McDowall's psychedelic folk-horror Tam Lin (also filmed in Scotland and released in 1970) are predecessors, but Giovanni's work is original and groundbreaking. Not all the songs are truly traditional, and some contain 'de-Bowdlerised' versions of folk lyrics penned by Anthony Shaffer's more famous playwright brother, Peter.  The tone varies from the coarse ribaldry of 'The Landlord's Daughter' to the haunting nuances of 'Willow's Song' and 'Gently Johnny', both of which exquisitely convey sensual yearning in keeping with a prelapsarian era of sexual freedom. 

Throughout most of the film, Sergeant Howie acts as a distorting lens, his rigid and unsympathetic personality colouring our view of the people and events he witnesses. Amused by his bumbling attempts to solve the mystery of Rowan Morrison, we are drawn into complicity with the islanders, although it is only at the end that we discover the extent of their manipulation.  Everything has been preplanned and scripted at Lord Summerisle’s behest to entrap their victim.

Still, from a modern perspective, are Howie’s responses really so unreasonable?  In many ways Summerisle harks back to the sexist values of the 1970s.  Would we feel comfortable when the male customers of 'The Green Man' crudely regale young Willow MacGregor with 'The Landlord's Daughter' and she smilingly plays along with them?  Would we really be happy to stumble across a graveyard full of what now would be called 'doggers' on an evening stroll?  How would we rate a school where a segregated class of pubescent girls is taught the virtues of phallic worship?  How on earth, in the post-Sir Jimmy Savile era, would we respond when Lord Summerisle leers out of the window at a group of naked teenagers and urges us to 'be open to the regenerative influences'?  

We may smirk at Howie's sexual discomfiture when he hears the landlord's daughter slapping her shapely physique against his bedroom wall, but would it really be sensible for him to succumb to her advances?  Quite apart from his religious beliefs, not only has he recently become engaged, but he is also a police officer on active duty.  If he gave into temptation, he would be opening himself to blackmail on an island where everyone is potentially a suspect in the case of a missing young girl.

An intriguing aspect of The Wicker Man is the way in which it inverted the social attitudes of its time.  The ‘traditional’ community of Summerisle mirrors the so-called ‘permissive society’ that was seen as a threat to public morals by religious conservatives in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  In September 1971, the ‘Nationwide Festival of Light’, led by Christian luminaries such as Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford and Cliff Richard, lit bonfires and torches on hilltops across Britain and culminated in a 400,000 strong rally in Trafalgar Square.  In the words of journalist and Christian convert Malcolm Muggeridge;

The purpose of the festival is that… the relatively few people who are responsible for this moral breakdown of our society will know that they are pitted against, not just a few reactionary people, but all the people in this country who still love this Light – the Light of the world.

By way of contrast, on Summerisle it appears to be Sergeant Howie who is the interloper whose alien values threaten the established order.  That is until the final scene, when we learn that the islanders have carefully selected him for his very peculiar characteristics.

The Golden Bough caused much controversy when it first appeared in 1890 because Frazer dared to include the Christian story in his ‘Study of Comparative Religion’, inviting the reflection that Jesus was merely another example of the dying and reviving god that he believed to have been central to most mythologies. Wedded to the earth goddess, this solar deity symbolised the agricultural cycle, dying at harvest time and being reborn in Spring.  His story was enacted through the sacrifice of a sacred king.  Shaffer and Hardy make this proposed link between Christianity and Paganism the centrepiece of their plot.

Shortly before Howie is bundled off to be burned in the Wicker Man, there is a short exchange between him and Lord Summerisle that shows there is a serpent in the latter’s twisted Eden.  Semi-mockingly, Summerisle offers Howie a religious ‘win-win’ scenario that makes the parallel between Christianity and Paganism explicit:

'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.'

Rejecting this, Howie directly challenges the watching crowd:

 'You can wrap it up any way you like; you are about to commit murder!'

Pointing out that killing him will not restore their crops, he adds:

'Well, don't you understand that if your crops fail this year, next year you're going to have to have another blood sacrifice?  And next year, no one less than the King of Summerisle himself will do.  If the crops fail, Summerisle, next year your people will kill you on May Day!'

The ‘Christian copper’ has done his research well in the island’s library.  We see Lord Summerisle’s features momentarily cloud over with fear and uncertainty as he realises, evidently for the first time, the precariousness of his position.  Summerisle’s feudal system is as riven by contradictions as any class-based society.  The future of a ruler who claims 'to love nature and to fear it' is dependent on the continuing ability of his Victorian grandfather's science to grow fruit in an unnatural environment.

It is only in its closing scenes that The Wicker Man truly becomes a horror film.  The contrast with the preceding comedy creates an abrupt disjunction that emphasises the sheer ghastliness of Howie's fate.  He rises in moral stature as we empathise with his shock at the way he has been betrayed and his emotional pain as he realises he is about to die.  The Wicker Man itself is a hideous and stunning artifact, its blank, featureless head gazing sightlessly out to sea from its cliff top location.  The terror of the ending is total.  Howie's desperate prayers and psalm-singing rage against the rising conflagration, hopelessly competing with the sound of the roaring fire combined with the screeching of terrified animals as the islanders sing their rounds of ‘Sumer Is A-Cumen In’ with determined heartiness.  

It is the totality and the paradoxical innocence of the wickedness that are horrifying.  All of the islanders participate in the sacrifice and not one of them shows any awareness that what they are doing is wrong.  Instead, they are positively enjoying the party atmosphere.  It is reminiscent of a 1930s lynching postcard from the American Deep South; young courting couples holding hands and smiling for the camera as black bodies swing from a tree.  A grand day out for all concerned – apart from the victims.

Right at the end of The Wicker Man, something remarkable happens.  In a serendipitous feat of filming, cinematographer Harry Waxman captures the colossus’s head collapsing into the fire to reveal the evening sun behind, just as it is about to sink down into the sea.  It is an iconic shot, achieved without any special effects.  On the soundtrack, the roaring of the flames subsides and a fanfare of trumpets cuts through. In an awe-inspiring moment, we are drawn away from the human drama and like primitive man, are exposed to the primeval force of nature that creates and destroys all life.   Here is the source of the solar myth that has refracted through different cultures to create the scripts played out by all the characters of the film.

Reviled at its creation, The Wicker Man is now recognized as a seminal piece of cinema.  As Howie himself might choose to put it: ‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.’ (Psalm 118:22)  Although it has come to be seen as a defining example of the newly invented genre of ‘folk horror’, it really stands alone in its cross-generic strangeness and magnificence.  With its death at the hands of conniving studio bureaucrats at the nadir of the British film industry, followed by its subsequent cult status as a ‘midnight movie’ and rebirth as an established classic, it has acquired a solar myth of its own.  Even after the release of The Final Cut there is a lingering feeling of incompletion, as though further mysteries are waiting to be solved, greater glories to be uncovered.

Photograph found in old book.

‘The Witches’ by Peter Curtis

The Witches (1966) is one of Hammer’s lesser-known productions.  Lacking the Gothic trappings most commonly associated with the studio’s horror output, it was designed as a star vehicle for Joan Fontaine (an Oscar-winner for her performance in Hitchcock's Rebecca over a quarter of a century earlier), who had acquired the rights to film a novel called The Devil’s Own by Peter Curtis, a pseudonym employed by bestselling historical novelist Norah Lofts.  

The movie, scripted by Nigel Kneale and based around the survival of a Satanic witch-cult in a contemporary English village, is chiefly of interest as a precursor of (and apparent influence on) The Wicker Man.  In its best moments it conveys an air of creepy menace and growing paranoia although it fails to maintain the terrifying tone of classics such as the The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw.  Joan Fontaine, as its middle-aged head-mistress heroine Miss Mayfield, bears an unfortunate resemblance to one Margaret Hilda Thatcher and is arguably upstaged by an outrageously camp performance from supporting actress Kay Walsh as high priestess of the coven.  The final, stylised Black Mass / orgy scene rapidly descends into unintentional hilarity, like some piece of experimental art-theatre improvised by over-zealous GCSE drama students. 

The Devil’s Own has been reissued in paperback as The Witches by the renascent Hammer, as part of a series of movie tie-ins and novelisations (it has also previously appeared as The Little Wax Doll under Norah Lofts’ own name).  Unfortunately, Hammer has chosen to saddle the book with an embarrassing generic cover which bears no relationship to its contents and is evidently designed to mislead fans of Twilight and similar 'young adult' sagas.  Anyone seeking ‘supernatural romance’ in The Witches is in for a cruel disappointment; a more sexless tale could not be imagined; the novel, first published in 1960 and set in 1959, is a relic of an era in which an unmarried woman in her forties had to accept that she was a hopeless ‘spinster’ and destined for a solitary life.  The compensation was that she was allowed to pursue a career; hence Miss Mayfield’s willingness to take on the role of headmistress at the remote East Anglian village of Walwyck.

Miss Mayfield is a quietly idealistic character who has not long returned from a twenty year stint teaching at a mission school in Africa.  She wishes to escape from the drudgery and squalor of working at her most recent appointment in an inner-city school and living in ‘digs’ with another woman teacher.  As the story progresses, we learn that she has survived an unspecified mental breakdown in Africa which led to her return to England.   Apart from a chilling reference to ‘the Mau Mau oath’ (colonial ethnopsychiatry held Kenya’s Mau Mau rebels to be ‘an irrational force of evil, dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism’, which aided the killing of more than 20,000 of them and the torturing of suspects by the British) much less is made in the novel of African voodoo than in the film.  In his newly commissioned introduction, Cyril Franke, the film’s director, proudly refers to his ‘production of Man of Africa and first-hand experience of witchcraft among the natives’.  It therefore seems likely that Franke was responsible for emphasising this element, which is crudely-presented and adds nothing to the film apart from an unpleasant and unnecessary injection of racism.

Another difference to is that Canon Thorby (Bax in the film), who runs the private school to which Miss Mayfield is appointed, is a genuine cleric, rather than an eccentric imposter.  Unlike the ruin depicted in the film - so reminiscent of The Wicker Man - the village church is intact and still functioning as a site of Christian worship (alongside the occasional Black Mass).  Thorby’s sister Isabel is eventually revealed to be the coven leader; could it be that Hammer shied away from depicting a churchman so closely implicated in Satanism, for fear of censorship from the BBFC?  The Canon and his sister are much more boring characters in the novel, with the latter hardly seen until the climax.

Much of the novel runs the same as the film, with the addition of extra characters and a number of pointless plot digressions.  After Miss Mayfield becomes suspicious that a death in the village has been caused by witchcraft and vows to reveal all at the inquest, she bangs her head on a desk in a mysterious ‘accident’ and conveniently (and unconvincingly) loses her memory.  This leads to her being parcelled off for a rest cure at a Fawltyesque boarding house in Hove, inhabited by bridge-playing old ladies and a retired General with their attendant nurses (there's not much fun to be had for the Twilight crowd here!)  Eventually she escapes back to Walwyck and regains her memory just in time to rescue Ethel, a teenage girl who, Rowan Morrison-style, has been secreted away prior to being the focus of Walwyck’s ‘All Hallowse’en’ sabbat which is to take place in the church itself.

 

The fate that has been planned for Ethel – defilement at the hands of a pantomime-clad ravisher - is much less horrific than the Ed Gein / Elizabeth Bathory gruesomenesss threatened in the movie, during the nastiest moment of which we observe the village butcher, who has already been graphically shown skinning a rabbit, whetting his knives in readiness.  This was possibly not expected to be the case in the minds of Ms Lofts’ genteel lady readers; any suggestion of nakedness or sexuality is couched in terms of the utmost horror and repulsion.  As she hides in the church, the mere sight of the villagers’ uncovered bodies at the start of their ritual causes Miss Mayfield so much distress that she is forced to pretend to herself she ‘is back home, in bed’, rather than face up to ‘the fat round haunches… the pendulous breasts like empty paper bags…’ paraded in front of her.  This scene is prefaced by a jaw-dropping reflection about her time in Africa; ‘she had time to think that black skin was, in itself, in some strange way, a kind of raiment; no black-skinned people could look as naked as these Walwykians did.’  

The film suffers from a preposterous conclusion in which Miss Mayfield is finally invited along to the human sacrifice by Thorby's sister for no apparent reason and then manages to sabotage the proceedings via supernatural means. By way of contrast, the novel’s ending is plausible enough but dull.  Besieged in the church tower with the hypnotised girl, Miss Mayfield finally realises that ’she was, in a fashion, the victim of her own faith’ and that the witches are without any supernatural capabilities; ‘if they had any power other than their own, they wouldn’t throw themselves against the door.’  Miss Mayfield saves Ethel by human means, Isabel Thorby bangs her head against the font and dies and, in a final ‘twist’, the girl destroys out of modesty the cine film that her rescuer has made of the ritual so that no record remains of Walwyck’s lurid Satanic revels.

The Witches, with its unquestioning depiction of post-war attitudes and morals, is a snapshot out of time. Although its premise is a promising one, the story is poorly paced and offers little of interest by way of characterisation.  It might have been rendered more interesting had the heroine been less strait-laced and old maid-like (the word 'dowdy' is used to describe her appearance throughout).  A frisson of attraction between her and the Canon would have offered an additional pole of interest; instead all we have is her fending off the attentions of a mildly louche, elderly wine-dealer in a purposeless distraction to the main story.  

As we have seen, The Witches doesn’t really count as supernatural fiction, although Ms Lofts was not averse to including spooky passages in her 'modern gothic' novels such as Gad's Hall (1977) and even published an entire collection of ghost stories; Hauntings (1974).  Written prior to the mainstreaming of Wicca and modern paganism, the story’s depiction of witchcraft comes straight from the pages of Malleus Maleficarum, although in Miss Mayfield’s sensibly modern, rationalistic brand of Christianity, witchcraft is seen as an atavistic survival rather than an active force of evil and most of its adherents are to be pitied rather than condemned:

‘And she remembered a phrase… “God has no hand but man’s to work with.”  It was equally true of the Devil.  Everything else – black magic, white magic, miracles, answered prayers – they were left-overs, dregs, the vestigial remains of primitive man’s bewildered recognition of things beyond his control.’

So what can have inspired such a tale?  In the mid-1950s, witchcraft and murder had been linked in the public mind with the publication of Detective-Superintendent Robert Fabian’s sensational memoirs Fabian of the Yard (1955).  In these, he offered a grippingly embellished account of an unsolved murder that had taken place in 1945.  In a case which became known as ‘the Lower Quinton Witchcraft Murder’ an elderly Warwickshire farmworker named Charles Walton was found savagely slain in a manner described by Fabian as ‘like the kind of killing the Druids might have done in ghastly ceremony at full moon’.  Alternatively, the manner of Walton’s death, pinned to the ground by a pitchfork through the chest and slashed across the throat with a billhook, closely resembled the 19^th Century execution of a suspected witch by a mentally deranged young man in the same area.  Fabian found his investigations blocked by obstructive villagers and reported an eerie encounter with a ‘Big Black Dog’ that related to local legendry involving Walton.  He secretly concluded that the murder was committed by a farmer with a financial motive (he could not record this while the suspect still lived due to libel laws) but the idea of a present-day hideous crime linked to the survival of ancient beliefs in a backward rural community is a powerful one that may well have provided an impetus for The Witches.

It is on record that Nigel Kneale’s original screenplay included elements of humour that the producers rejected.  It is easy to see why he would wish to satirise this material and the completed film retains camp elements that are absent from the novel.  It is impossible not to snigger, for example, at the prurience with which Ms Lofts alludes to a bodily act which she is primly unwilling to describe yet nonetheless invites us to guess at and imagine:

‘Then she lifted the cup, and saying, “Here is his blood,” offered it to Granny Rigby, who did with it something so degrading that Miss Mayfield shut her eyes and released her finger’s pressure on the camera, hoping that she had been in time.  Not even for purposes of evidence did she want a picture of that!’

So - who is going to enjoy this book?  Well, no one who is attracted by the cover, that seems certain.  Its appeal will mainly be limited to diehard Norah Lofts fans (who will probably have read it already) and Hammer completists. Wicker Man scholars and may also wish to check out both the book and the film.  For myself, I am always intrigued to read the book that inspired a film I have enjoyed and The Witches was a thought-provoking, if somewhat dull, read

Emanations: Second Sight

Volume II of Emanations, International Authors’ engaging anthology series is now available.  Edited by the ever-intrepid Carter Kaplan, it follows the tripartite plan of its predecessor, showcasing English language fiction, poetry and prose from around the world. 

Resolutely battling the fads and fashions of academia, Emanations: Second Sight plots a perilous path through the morasses of postmodernism, as it seeks to discover what might constitute the avant-garde in this rapidly-changing age.  Readers fazed by Dr Kaplan’s somewhat inconclusive introductory manifesto (the fruit of an impromptu online symposium) will gain much from persevering, as the collection features some solid and original contributions, supporting the good doctor’s  assertion that “the avant-garde announces that there is before us something actually original.”

Fictional highlights include “Sequences”, a haunting short story by Michael Butterworth and “The Bottomless Bottle of Beer” a Bulgakovian satire carried out with aplomb by Horace Jeffery Hodges.  Verse occupies over a third of the volume and includes substantial work such as Dario Rivarossa’s self-illustrated Milton-influenced piece "PL575".  The non-fiction section is shorter, but traverses a diverse range of themes from the decline of American technological supremacy observed through the prism of an artistic “Space Program: Mars” installation, through to an interesting appreciation of Gaston Leroux’s “Phantom of the Opera”.

Emanations: Second Sight is available from US and UK Amazon and the call is already out for submissions to Volume III!

Fat controller runs out of steam - "Hell Train" by Christopher Fowler

Hammer horror, the romance of travelling by steam train; what can possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot, it seems. Despite the framing device, in which an American screenwriter pitches it to Michael Carreras, Hell Train's main story just doesn't bear much resemblance to a Hammer film (although it does borrow elements from Horror Express, which many people seem to think is a Hammer film). Considering the ending, it could be argued that this is part of the joke, but all it does in reality is render the Hammer link gratuitous. A cynical person (not me, of course...) might even view it as a blatant attempt to cash in on the reborn studio's resurgent popularity.

The story, taken by itself, is an acceptable piece of pulp, but it's easy to see why Fowler should want to "distance" himself from it - another reason for the framing sections.  He clearly, for instance, hasn't bothered to find out anything about trains; how is it for instance, that passengers manage to get from the train on to the footplate of the locomotive (annoyingly called the "engine room") when it's moving?   The Americanisms are irritating; I know the story-within-a-story's supposed to have been written by an American, but the author doesn't even know the meaning of at least one of the words. On p.229, one of the characters, "in the engine room", watches the "stoker" whilst "trapped against the caboose" (i.e. the brake van - famously found right at the back of an American freight train)!

The characters are stock ones and don't interact in a particularly interesting way. They are all given their own separate little story, leading some reviewers to compare the plot to a that of a portmanteau horror film such as Doctor Terror's House of Horrors , but those were made by Amicus; nothing to do with Hammer. The idea of each person being "tested"by the train itself for some moral flaw in their character is rather boring. It would have been much more interesting to see their characters develop as they responded to a mutual threat together. So far as the monsters are concerned, there are way too many zombies (oh, how bored I am with zombies!), once again decidedly un-Hammerlike as the studio only ever made one zombie movie in its huge output.

I  quite enjoyed the framing sections which convey the "feel" of Hammer reasonably well, although there are a couple of sloppy mistakes. Nigel Hawthorne was never in a Hammer film and Ingrid Pitt didn't join the roster until 1971. Also - I can't imagine a writer who had previously worked for the notoriously miserly Roger Corman making the mistake of turning out a script that would go over budget for Hammer.  Overall, there is so much more could have been done with the setting of the studio and the wonderful people who worked there.  Fowler employs one of his characters to make observations about the company's declining fortunes and how these related to changes in society; but these do not go beyond the journalistic insights reflected in a work such as Sinclair McKay's A Thing of Unspeakable Horror.

By the time I had got near the end and was introduced to the "bloated" Controller, complete with his stovepipe hat, I started to feel that I really had been taken for a ride and had alighted on the Island of Sodor. At least the Rev. Awdry did his homework properly and was scrupulously correct about railway operations!  I can only assume that this is a deliberate joke, but it is irrelevant and only serves to undermine "suspension of disbelief" at a crucial moment.

Fun, but nothing special, Hell Train is on a level with the type of writing that used to be churned out in industrial quantities by paperback houses such as NEL in the '70s and '80s. As I rarely read much modern horror, could it be that the high praise dished out to this book is a measure of how far the genre has deteriorated since that era?

Full praise however has to be given to Graham Humphreys' gorgeous cover painting. In these days of photoshopped blandness, it is a sheer delight to see work of this standard adorning a paperback. Let's hope it starts a revival of high quality pulp art.

Shadows of Darkness (1975)

I wonder if there was ever a No. 2?

"Highgate vampire" hysteria was obviously still raging, five years on (or somebody hoped it was). And people were expected to pick up on references to "The Communist Party Manifesto" in a trashy comic...

From Pan's People to Pony Play:"Ringstones"

Sarban's Nightmares - Part One(Warning - spoilers ahead)


John William Wall (1910-1989), who wrote under the name of "Sarban", has had something of a renaissance of late. This is largely due to the stalwart efforts of the Tartarus Press in publishing high-quality hardback and e-book editions of his long-out-of-print and unpublished works, plus a biography by Mark Valentine. Unfortunately, however, I have had to rely on a typo-riddled P.O.D. edition of The Sarban Omnibus. Two of the the three novels contained therein (Ringstones, The Sound of his Horn and The Doll Maker) are also available in free online editions.

Ringstones (1951) is centred on the first-person narrative of Daphne Hazel, a trainee gym teacher who accepts a holiday job at Ringstones Hall from an eccentric academic named Dr Ravelin. At this isolated moorland residence she is tasked with tutoring three mysterious "foreign" children of undisclosed nationality. In response to her questioning, Dr Ravelin is decidedly unforthcoming about the origin of his mysterious charges.

Idyllic to start with, the tale gradually becomes sinister as Miss Hazel discovers more about her mysterious charges and their surroundings. It becomes apparent that she is entrapped by the power of Nuaman, the fifteen year old boy (or is he?) who also dominates his younger female peers, Marvan and Ianthe, and Katia the Polish maid. Eventually, she is vouchsafed a disturbing revelation of where this domination is leading.

These events are punctuated by conversations with the reclusive Dr. Ravelin, who stays cloistered in his study for most of the daytime. An amateur archaeologist, he speculates that the ancient house occupies the site of a Roman arena set out for chariot races and other games. The moorland stone circle from which the Hall takes its name feeds wilder ruminations on history and mythology. Reflecting on the reuse of sacred sites by successive religions, Ravelin concludes "Perhaps these ancient stones hold down something far more ancient, something far stranger than the men who placed them understood. Some queer feet have danced here, I feel."
Ringstones is suffused by the spirit of Pan and "his representatives on (the) moors", who may or may not be the indigenous inhabitants of the land, driven out to desolate places but still recalled by folklore and superstition. The myth is of "the gift of the fairies" which, as Dr Ravelin observes "always has some disastrous condition attached to it. Their gold, in the morning, is a stone, or their invitation to a night's revels holds the unfortunate mortal in a century's slavery."

It will be clear from the above that we are in Arthur Machen territory. As with many of the Welsh master's accounts of the" Little People" Sarban's tale exudes an air of unwholesome sensuality. It starts off with in "Health and Efficiency" style with the well-toned Miss Hazel donning her "skimpy gym trunks" for a day's "romping and tumbling" with her shirtless young charge, whilst wondering at "the perfection of his physical development". Likewise, the clothing of the two little girls is of a type unlikely to be approved by the Mother's Union; "Like Nuaman's, their dress seemed more than is usual with English children to set off their figures rather than to cover them".

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, no explicitly carnal sentiments are expressed in the novel; things remain chaste even when Nuaman "caressingly" strokes Miss Hazel's arm in a "soothing, persuasive way". Sarban's eroticism runs underground and is focussed on male control and dominance. The measures that Nuaman (jokingly nicknamed "the Slave Driver" by his tutor) takes to impose his will on females very slowly become apparent, until the point at which Miss Hazel realises she has misheard the Polish maid Katia's broken English as "he weep" and that what she really meant was "he whips".

Miss Hazel also starts to realise that it is physically impossible for her to leave Ringstones. An attempt to reach a nearby village by crossing the moors results in her becoming lost and going around in circles until she returns to the Hall ("I want to keep you here for ever" observes Nuaman in a later conversation). She also receives a creepy indication that the two girls may be representatives of a larger group on the moors, as she spots some of them playing with Nuaman by the stream. Meanwhile, the Polish maid expresses her fear of lies-schi, which Dr Ravelin explains to the means "demons of the forest".

The conclusion of Miss Hazel's retelling of her adventures finds her arising on a moonlit night and finding herself mysteriously cast back in time to the Roman era, when the Games are being held on the site of Ringstones Hall. Preparations for track events are taking place in the arena and she encounters the Armenian servant Sarkissian with a special chariot. She had previously dreamt of him constructing this device with Nuaman in the stables.

It appears that Miss Hazel is about to be forced into an unconsenting act of what is termed "pony play" by modern devotees of the Aristotelian Perversion. Already leashed, she is to be stripped and manacled to the pole of this vehicle alongside the already-harnessed Katia in order to take part in a race. Then she sees the charioteer; "Nuaman gazed at me, and before I dropped my eyes I saw his expression begin to change… I dared not look at his face, but I saw the lash…" On this climactic note, her memoir comes to an end.

Daphne Hazel's story is framed by the sceptical account of an unnamed male narrator accompanying his friend Piers, who has received her manuscript and is keen to discover more about the extraordinary events described in it. When they arrive at Ringstones Hall, they discover it to be an uninhabited ruin. Tracking down Miss Hazel (placed as a tutor to two Egyptian girls in more normal accommodation), she explains her story to them as "a sort of dream, or a lot of dreams" which came to her after she injured herself at the ruin and was left there alone for several hours whilst medical assistance was sought for her.

One is reminded of the gift of the fairies, but the young woman seems, superficially at least, undamaged by her experiences, imagined or otherwise. Just before the narrator and his friend part company with her, they observe her making a movement which shows this is not the case;
"She held out both her hands … with a curious gesture of surrender as if offering the hands and wrists to someone. I saw a newly-healed long cut on the inside of her left wrist plain against the sun-browned skin. She seemed to offer her wrists a moment and then, yielding to an unknown compulsion, reluctantly turned down her palms, curling her fingers round something invisible to us."
Our narrator concludes "I was shocked to see how far behind Piers I had been in understanding the depth of her distress … I think we were all looking with a slowly rising fear at those two drooping hands, so helplessly waiting there." They respond in a reassuring way, but it seems clear that both believe that Pan's representatives have found a victim.

It could be argued that the extent to which Sarban's fantasy edges over into pornography is a measure of how it fails as literature. It could be that Sarban got away with so much kinkiness because he was writing in a more innocent time. Reaching the end of Ringstones, modern readers may feel that they have stumbled into one of John Norman's notorious Gor novels.

What saves Ringstones from being mere BDSM fare are its mysticism and atmosphere. Whilst it falls short of the bar set by Machen, there is a strangeness about the tale that captures the imagination in a similar way to The Hill of Dreams. It is very slow-moving and replete with detailed descriptions of the countryside and meditations on arcane subjects. The prurient person that James Branch Cabell dubbed "the pornoscopic reader" will have a laborious time finding the juicy bits.

Seen as a trilogy, the component novels of The Sarban Omnibus share the theme of male dominance. Ringstones introduces it as an archetypal principle arising from the mythic depths of the collective unconscious to ensnare a modern, independent young woman. The message is that, despite her superficial recovery, Daphne Hazel will remain permanently marked, physically and mentally, by her mysterious experiences. "Everything has end. Except a circle" she pleads to "Sir No Man" at one point. "Ringstones is a circle", he responds "You can never come to the end of Ringstones"…
(Next: The Sound Of His Horn)