NEW WICKER MAN BOX SET

Film historians usually point to three preeminent movies that characterize the sub-genre of Folk Horror: WITCHFINDER GENERAL (Tigon, 1968), BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (Tigon, 1971) and THE WICKER MAN (British Lion, 1973). In my opinion, THE WICKER MAN best exemplifies the elements that go into a classic folk horror film. Plus, it's very good, while WITCHFINDER GENERAL is overly sadistic and BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW is uneven. Make no mistake, however. These three films are crucial as the historical touchstones of the sub-genre.

Due in April from Imprint Films is a new box set that, based on the description below, could easily be titled, "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About 'The Wicker Man'". It's a little pricey at $119.95, but fans of this film are sure to get their full of the three different versions and scads of extras.

The Wicker Man (Imprint Collection #116)

RELEASE DATE: 27th April 2022

RUNTIME (IN MINUTES): 88

AN ISLAND LOST TO UNSPEAKABLE TERRORS OF PAGAN RITUALS!

Cult horror classic in which devout Christian policeman Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) finds himself summoned to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a child. On arrival, Howie finds himself increasingly isolated and humiliated by the actions of the island’s community, who belong to a bizarre pagan cult led by the charming Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). As preparations for a sinister ritual celebration reach fever pitch, Howie, whilst trying to fend off the advances of the local landlord’s daughter Willow (Britt Ekland), begins to suspect what role the islanders intend him to play.

“The Wicker Man is influential not just on subsequent horror cinema, but on the thriller genre in general in the way it sets an artfully composed series of traps for its unwitting protagonist, expertly wrong-footing both him and the audience until the devastating ending.” – The Guardian

For nearly 50 years critics and fans have hailed Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man as one of Cinema’s greatest horror films. This special limited edition set includes all 3 versions of the film in addition to a newly curated bonus disc featuring over 2 ½ hours of content along with the original soundtrack CD.

Limited Edition 4 Disc Hard box edition with unique artwork created by Author & Artist Richard Wells. 2000 copies.

Disc One: The Final Cut – (HD)

• NEW Audio Commentary by BFI film historians Vic Pratt and Will Fowler
• Burnt Offering: The Cult of the Wicker Man – 2001 documentary
• Worshiping The Wicker Man – featurette
• The Music of The Wicker Man – featurette
• Interview with director Robin Hardy
• Critic’s Choice 1979 interview with director Robin Hardy and actor Christopher Lee by Stirling Smith
• The Restoration Comparison – featurette
• The Final Cut Trailer
• Theatrical Trailer
• Aspect Ratio 1.85:1
• Audio English LPCM 2.0 Mono
• Optional English subtitles

Disc Two: UK Theatrical Cut (HD) and The Director’s Cut (HD/SD)

• NEW Audio Commentary by film critic and historian Kim Newman & author Sean Hogan
• NEW HD presentation of the Director’s Cut, using SD material for footage unavailable in the Theatrical Version or Final Cut
• Audio Commentary on the director’s cut by actors Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward, and director Robin Hardy, moderated by Mark Kermode
• Making the Audio Commentary – featurette

Disc Three: Bonus Disc

• Interview with director Robin Hardy on The Wicker Man
• Folk musicians discuss The Wicker Man
• The Wicker Man Enigma – 2001 Documentary
• NEW Video Essay on the Wicker Man counter-culture, hippie movement and rise of feminism by Kat Ellinger
• NEW The Music of The Wickerman – Video Interview by author David Huckvale
• NEW The Golden Bough – Video Interview about the pagan symbolism and the influences in British culture of The Wicker Man by author David Huckvale.
• Ex-S: The Wicker Man – 1998 documentary
• NEW Video Essay From Dr Adam Scovell author of “Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange”
• NEW Interview by Musician Robert Reed
• The Willow Song – Promo Video by Robert Reed featuring Angharad Brinn
• TV Spot
• Radio Spots

Disc Four: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD 

Imprint Films' website is HERE.

THE WEIRD HISTORY OF 'THE WICKER MAN'

"It stands apart from time and space." - Robin Hardy on "The Wicker Man"

The textbook cult movie, Robin Hardy's THE WICKER MAN, was 40 years old when it appeared in this article from the October 2013 issue of SIGHT AND SOUND. Unloved and even unwanted by the studio that produced it because of its difficulty to market, WM was embraced by US audiences before interest grew in its native UK. Paired with another weirdie, DON'T LOOK NOW on its release, it had been chopped, sliced and diced into numerous versions. Containing images never before published, this excellent article explains the odd history of the film that Christopher Lee said he did his best ever acting job.

WICKER MAN: BRITT'S BUM IS NOT HER OWN

I have to admit, the first time I watched the original version of THE WICKER MAN (1973) -- and, yes, there have been other times -- it left me with a number of indelible images. One was Christopher Lee sans Dracula ensemble and instead decked out in his best Druid duds. Another was the horrifying ending, which was, indeed, horrifying, and the single strongest element, I think, that qualifies it as a "horror film". Last, but certainly not least is what I call "Dance of the Drum", performed with a primal grace (and stark naked, no less) by Willow, the proverbial svelte and seductive innkeeper's daughter, played by Swedish beauty, Britt Ekland. And, as a result of this one scene, Miss Ekland was an automatic candidate to be ushered into the hallowed halls of the Horror Hottie Hall of Fame. Truthfully, that honor could technically go to not one, but two people!

What's that, you say? Am I committing horror hottie heresy here? Not at all. You see, during the notable, aforementioned scene when we watch Ekland prancing and swaying with naked abandon in the room next to the prudish and stuffy police inspector from the mainland (played to a tee by Edward Woodward), we are actually watching two individuals. It is when we see Willow turn her bottom to the screen, it is not Britt's bottom in view . . . it's someone else's.

I am sure that you are familiar with the concept of using a body double. The practice has been around for a long time. Well, that's exactly what's going on here. Ekland, who was 30 and pregnant at the time, said she would only allowed to be filmed from the waist up (and for me, that's enough!), so, to complete the intended effect, a body double was used for "the rest" of her.

So, who was the bodacious body double who wiggled her bottom to the secret delight of many 'a red-blooded movie-goer? Reports vary, but perhaps the most reliable source comes from the film's associate musical director, who writes about it rather authoritatively on his website:

"There was not a little of the mischievous about Paul [the film's composer - MMW]. Realising that it would bore him to death whilst at the same time I [21 years old, remember] would probably quite like spending some time alone with Britt Ekland, I was charged with insuring that Britt could mime Willow's Song accurately. So I would happily pop into Britt's room, where she would lie in bed [this, at the time, seemingly starry affectation has of course since been explained by her then pregnancy] and I would teach her the song - and since you ask, she was always very polite, kind and friendly. The extension of this 'care and attention' to detail was that Paul felt it necessary [after a lot of pleading on my part!!!] that I be on the set for the now infamous shoot of Willow's Song, thumping a drum to keep her in time with the playback when she danced and helping out with the lip-synch when she 'sang'. The shoot was tiresome - a 13 hour day by my reckoning. One of my other little jobs [invented out of sheer boredom and hard to find in any job description] was whipping Britt's towel away before each take. The much noted complications arose because of the need to covertly slide the 'bum'-double in, which was usually preceded by make-up asking for a small adjustment that needed Britt off-set. Actually, all the subterfuge was hokum, really. The story at the time was that the day before the shoot, the publicist distributed a note to each room at the Kirroughtree Hotel announcing that a body-double was being used and that on no account should Ms Ekland be informed. Sadly, he did not exclude Britt's room! I can categorically affirm that Lorraine Peters was the body-double - and if you are interested in comparing body-types, she is also the naked woman weeping on the grave, and credited as such. And if you wanted absolute proof of this, it happens that Ms Peters was having her period on that day and the camera angle, as is clear in the film, militated against the use of a tampon. Consequently, and despite the best efforts of the crew to swab up after each take, DNA evidence probably survives at the location to this day! As to Jane Jackson, who has it on record that she was filmed by a man in a sheepskin coat as the body double, I would venture to guess that her footage now resides safely in someone's private collection!"

The tale of Britt Ekland's body double (stand-in is an incorrect term if you ever see it used in this case) is not the only one where a mystery surrounds an actresses' baring her all on the screen. If we go back 13 years earlier, to the filming of Hitchcock's PSYCHO, we also later learned, long after its release, that the bare skin shots we see during the famous flash-cut edited shower scene were not Jane Leigh's at all, but a body double. Miss Leigh even mentions in her 1995 book, Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller (with Christopher Nickens) that it was her all the way.

But, according to investigative journalist and author Robert Graysmith, in his colorful book, The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower, it was a little known photographer's model  and Vegas girl (and avid nudist) by the name of Marli Renfro that was Leigh's body double in the shower scene. Leigh mentions Renfro in her book (pg. 75), acknowledging her hiring at $400 a week and presence on the set, but says she was only a stand-in, and denies that she was in the film at all. In Graysmith's book, it is mentioned that Hitchcock wanted the mystique of PSYCHO (he even had his staff go out and snatch up all the copies of Robert Bloch's novel on which the movie was based so the public was kept in the dark about what would eventually become one of the most famous few seconds in movie history) to endure at least through the production, and it was implied that Janet Leigh, in respect for Hitch, never gave away the "secret". Renfro, of course, in her moment of fame gushes, and gives her side of the story in detail. Her version is quite believable.

Robert Graysmith's self-admitted obsession with Marli Renfro began when he first saw her on the September 1960 cover of PLAYBOY (just three months after the premier of PSYCHO). Much like the literary technique used in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, in his book he parallels two stories, Renfro's and the man who for many years was thought to be her murder. It turns out to be a classic case of mistaken identity, as Renfro turns up alive and well and living in California's Mojave Desert.

WICKER MAN STILL WEAVES ITS SPELL

One of the hidden gems of the long storied history of horror films is the 1973 release of Robin Hardy's THE WICKER MAN. Critics are polarized as to its importance in the genre (some not calling it a "horror film" at all), but it has also been hailed as the "Citizen Kane of horror films" by CINEFANTASTIQUE mangazine. There's no denying, however, that its plot is seductive, the acting superb, and the ending, if you weren't hit with a spoiler, is a guaranteed shocker.

Legend has it that the entire production was a result of Christopher Lee wanting to shake the shackles off of his Hammer persona. Later he is said to have claimed that both his role and the movie itself were his favorites. Ironically, the film has a familiar feel to it, and it's no wonder that some people mistook the British Lion film as a Hammer production.

Nevertheless, THE WICKER MAN is generally described as a favorite "cult" film by its fans and supporters. I believe it to be one of the most important horror films of the 1970's. Had it been released in the 1960's, say, right after ROSEMARY'S BABY, I would venture a guess that it would now be regarded as a classic.

THE WICKER MAN is not a lost film, per se, but the original, longer cut went missing for many years. The full version was discovered at the Harvard Film Archive and has been restored to it's never-before-seen glory, fully endorsed by the director Robin Hardy, with a current UK theatrical run and a Blu-ray release forthcoming. Of course, like the recent release of the restored HORROR OF DRACULA and a slew of other Blu-ray Hammer re-issues, this is all happening across the pond. So American fans, unless you have a region-free DVD player, you will have to wait a while.

Following are three online news stories about the resurrection of THE WICKER MAN. Each one takes a slightly different angle, but they all acknowledge the fact that the release of "The Final Cut" of this film is definitely newsworthy.

From ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

'The Wicker Man -- The Final Cut': Director Robin Hardy on the re-release of his cult classic

By Clark Collis on Sep 24, 2013 at 4:31PM

Rejoice, fans of cult British horror films, twist endings, and big-screen nudity! On Friday, The Wicker Man will return to the big screen in a newly restored and recut version largely scanned from a 35mm print recently discovered at the Harvard Film Archive.The work of British director Robin Hardy, the 1973 horror classic stars the late Edward Woodward as a devoutly Christian policeman named Howie hunting for a missing girl on a remote Scottish island. Our hero soon discovers the burg’s inhabitants — including Christopher Lee‘s sinisterly welcoming Lord Summerisle and Britt Ekland’s frisky barmaid — practice a form of lubricious paganism very much at odds with the moral code of the virginal investigator.

The film was originally released in a savagely truncated form, and over the years, the number of versions of varying lengths has almost overtaken the number of copulating couples Woodward’s appalled copper discovers outside the island’s pub (which is saying a lot). This latest version, The Wicker Man — The Final Cut, comes after a Facebook-based quest by the European company StudioCanal to locate original film materials and, according to Hardy, is vastly superior to a previous restoration which played cinemas in the late ’70s. “What we can do, and have done now, in restoring it is 100 times better than what we were able to do then,” says the director. “The whole technology is miles ahead of what we could do then.”

Indeed, Hardy describes this latest cut as “definitive” and says he is particularly pleased that, after it debuts at New York’s IFC Center this Friday, the movie will screen at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, where the film played way back in 1979. “We had protesters outside, which one should always have,” he laughs. “[They were] pagans, with piercings through every orifice, complaining that we were giving paganism a bad name.” (In addition to New York and and San Francisco, the new Wicker Man will also play Santa Fe, Nashville, Duluth, Chicago, Dallas, and San Diego, among other cities.)

Of course, many people will only be familiar with the infamous Neil LaBute-directed, Nicolas Cage-starring 2006 Wicker Man remake, which since its release has gained a reputation as one of the truly awful movies of our time — and deservedly so, according to Hardy. “I’ve been to some of LaBute’s theater stuff, very good indeed, and I admire Nicolas Cage too,” says the director. “So how they could have possibly thought what they were getting into was good, I cannot imagine. Absolute disaster.”

Hardy himself directed a companion piece-cum-spiritual sequel to his original, 2011’s The Wicker Tree, and has plans to wrap up the Scotland-set trilogy with another film, Wrath of the Gods. “It’s got a certain amount of sex, it’s got some lovely music, and it’s got a very Wicker Man-ish ending,” he promises. Given Nicolas Cage has a house in the U.K., maybe the director should pop along and ask if the seemingly always working Ghost Rider star is interested in taking a role. “Yes, I should. Except for he’s pretty un-Scottish.” 

From THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

The Wicker Man: The Final Cut: Film Review

10:04 PM PDT 9/24/2013 by Stephen Dalton 

Digitally restored with the blessing of director Robin Hardy, this vintage British shocker retains its potent mix of pagan horror and trippy hippie weirdness 

Returning in a new restoration to mark its 40th anniversary, The Wicker Man is a cult classic of left-field British horror whose reputation has only deepened over the decades. The film’s most obvious cheerleaders in contemporary cinema are Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright – who paid indirect homage in their fanboy genre spoof Hot Fuzz – as well as the acclaimed comedy thriller director Ben Wheatley, who tapped a similar seam of pagan weirdness in Kill List and Sightseers. Teasingly dubbed The Final Cut, this latest digitally restored edit returns to theaters later this week before its deluxe DVD and Blu-Ray release next month.

Loosely inspired by David Pinner’s novel Ritual, which itself began as a rejected screenplay for Death Wish director Michael Winner, the script was written by Sleuth author Anthony Shaffer and directed by young first-timer Robin Hardy. TV tough guy Edward Woodward, later to find U.S. fame as The Equalizer, plays Howie, a straitlaced and devoutly Christian policeman investigating the apparent ritual murder of a young girl on a remote Scottish island, which is run as a kind of giant free-love hippie commune by the saturnine Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). Thwarted at every turn by the cheerfully unhelpful islanders, whose pagan worship of nudity and sexuality arouses conflicted passions inside him, Howie learns too late that he has been lured into a terrifying trap.

Initially an obscure midnight movie, The Wicker Man has become more culturally resonant during its 40-year afterlife. The notion of a spiritually inclined death cult run by a charismatic guru has since acquired plenty of real-life parallels, from Jim Jones to David Koresh to Osama Bin Laden. The film’s spellbinding score of haunted folk ballads, composed and arranged by transplanted American songwriter Paul Giovanni, has also earned evergreen cool status among generations of bearded acoustic hipsters. In some scenes it feels like a psychedelic hippie musical, in others a creepy soft-porn thriller.

Watched today, however, some of the performances look comically hammy. Lee is the chief offender here, closely followed by Lindsay Kemp – former mentor and lover of David Bowie – as a camp pub landlord. While the picturesque Scottish locations are authentic, the locals speak a preposterous polyglot gumbo of accents. The colorful cast of unlikely Celts includes Swedish starlet Britt Ekland, Australian-born Diane Cilento and Polish horror-movie veteran Ingrid Pitt. Ekland’s Nordic vowels and naked bottom both required stand-ins. Cilento was in the final stages of her marriage to Sean Connery during the shoot, and later married Shaffer.

A commercial flop on British cinema screens back in 1973, The Wicker Man began its slow journey to global cult status in the U.S. Having acquired the film as part of the ailing studio British Lion, EMI unceremoniously hacked down Hardy’s original edit from 102 to 88 minutes for U.K. release as the B-picture in a double bill with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. But across the Atlantic, the film received positive interest from the legendary cult movie mogul Roger Corman. Warner Bros. marketed it unsuccessfully to drive-in audiences, then sold the rights to a smaller connoisseur outfit called Abraxas, who worked with Hardy to restore the film back to a near-complete 94-minute cut. Finally re-released to critical acclaim in 1979, it was dubbed “the Citizen Kane of horror movies” by Cinefantastique magazine.

Over the decades, The Wicker Man has accumulated its own potent mythology, including oft-repeated claims that the elusive full original negative had been buried in the concrete foundations of an English motorway. Hardy insists these nonsensical rumors originated with EMI as a fanciful excuse for losing the negative. The film’s reputation even survived Neil Labute’s disastrous 2006 U.S. remake, starring Nicolas Cage and set on a matriarchal island commune off the Pacific Northwest coast, which was fatally low on tension and bombed at the box office. Hardy himself did the film no favors with his “spiritual sequel” The Wicker Tree, released in 2011, a little-seen low-budget misfire notable mainly for its brief cameo by Lee.

In assembling this latest restoration, the current rights-holders Studiocanal tracked down a print in the Harvard Film Archive that once belonged to Corman. This print became the source of several long-missing scenes that have now been reinstalled into the shorter U.K. theatrical cut, expanding it to 94 minutes. The most significant revived scene is Howie’s first sighting of Lord Summerisle, performing the erotic ballad Gentle Johnny under Ekland’s bedroom window, and reciting Walt Whitman lines over close-up scenes of copulating snails. Of the brief early sequences set on the Scottish mainland, Howie’s thematically significant church scene remains, while the superfluous police station section has been dropped with Hardy’s blessing.

As any serious fan will tell you, none of the restored footage is new material, all of it having appeared in previous edits. But Hardy is claiming this latest remix is as close to definitive as possible, and concedes his long-lost 102-minute “Director’s Cut” is most likely gone forever. The cleaned-up picture and sound mix is not perfect, with some grainy third-generation transfers, but scenes struck from the original negative look as crisp as if they were shot yesterday. Most importantly, The Wicker Man retains its occult power, and remains as bizarre and bewitching a fable as when it first appeared four decades ago. Once seen, never forgotten.

From THE INDEPENDENT

The Wicker Man and the cult movie myth

As yet another version of The Wicker Man is released, Geoffrey Macnab argues that most long-sought directors' cuts are not the masterpieces that fans hope for

Geoffrey Macnab Friday, 27 September 2013

You could call it the Orson Welles syndrome. The film director delivers the final cut of the movie. Then come the previews and the financiers panic. The film is re-edited behind the director's back before being released in a bowdlerised version that does patchy business and gets lousy reviews. Years pass. The film is rediscovered by critics and fans and the hunt is suddenly on to track down the original version, which has mysteriously vanished. Its champions scour the labs and the archives but the original film never turns up.

There are many, many films that will never be seen in the way their directors intended. That, though, arguably, adds to their mystique. Their fans are desperate to see them in their original cuts but, at the same time, wary that if these films do surface in an archive somewhere, they might prove just a little... anti-climactic.

Erich von Stroheim's silent movie Greed (1924) is the most celebrated of the lost masterpieces that we can only see in our imaginations. Von Stroheim's first cut was over eight hours long. The version viewed by the public after MGM had pared it down was a quarter of the length. We have to rely on von Stroheim's own testimony and on that of the few of his contemporaries who saw Greed as he intended that it really was one of the greatest films ever made. Given that MGM reportedly burned much of the original footage to extract the silver in the nitrate, it would be a miracle if Greed turned up now.

Posthumous restorations of films that were butchered during their directors' lifetimes are invariably slightly unsatisfactory. Whether it's Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) or Donald Cammell's Wild Side (1995), the restorations are fascinating in themselves and far richer than the botched studio versions but we're never quite sure whether they are really what their directors intended.

Robin Hardy, director of cult favourite The Wicker Man (1973), has seen several different versions of his film released over the years. Dubbed by some critics as “The Citizen Kane of horror movies”, it is now about to be re-released yet again to mark its 40th anniversary in what its distributors are calling its “final cut”. This isn't the version that Hardy first delivered but the 83-year-old filmmaker reckons it is true to his intentions.

What happened to The Wicker Man first time round was precisely what happened to Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) 30 years before. These were movies caught up in studio politicking. Senior executives stood to gain if they failed.

In Welles's case, The Magnificent Ambersons previewed in front of a roughhouse Saturday night audience in Pomona in 1941 in a double bill with a Dorothy Lamour romp called The Fleet's In. The response was mixed at best and gave the studio RKO the excuse to whittle down the film from 131 minutes to less than 90.

Even now, the circumstances in which Ambersons was re-edited remain shrouded in controversy and mystery. The editor Robert Wise (later to direct The Sound of Music) defended the studio's changes in light of the supposedly disastrous preview. Others claim that RKO (then undergoing management changes) was simply looking for an excuse to end Welles's contract. Whatever the case, Welles was known to have had a print of the long version of the film with him in Brazil where he was making his equally ill-starred documentary It's All True. Welles fans have long dreamed that this print will one day turn up somewhere in Brazil.

Hardy's battles were with the businessmen at Shepperton Studios. The Wicker Man had been financed by British Lion, then under control of young tycoon John Bentley, “a takeover and break-up merchant” as he was styled by the press. The unions were intensely suspicious that Bentley was going to end film production at Shepperton (then run by British Lion).

“In order to prove to the unions that Shepperton and British Lion were still in business, he [Bentley] hunted around on his desk for a script that they could make into a film,” Hardy explains the haphazard way that The Wicker Man was greenlit. “We were the lucky ones. He signed a cheque and we made the film.”

However, before The Wicker Man was released, Bentley had sold on British Lion/Shepperton. The new regime didn't care for the film at all. “They planned simply never to show it.” Hardy recalls.

The director credits the film's star Christopher Lee (who called The Wicker Man “the best-scripted film I ever took part in”) with rescuing it from total oblivion. “Christopher, not an easily bowed chap, put the film under his arm as it were and went off to Paris to submit it to the Festival du Film Fantastique.” The film won the Grand Prix and its critical reputation began to grow.

Even so, when The Wicker Man was released in the UK, it had been “butchered” (in Hardy's words.) The running time had been winnowed down to less than 90 minutes and the film was put out as the bottom half of a double bill with Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now.

As with The Magnificent Ambersons, the original long cut of The Wicker Man appears to be lost. However, a 1979 version assembled from the 35mm print of the original edit Hardy made in 1973 was recently discovered in Harvard's Film Archives. It is this version that has been restored and is now being released.

Hardy is sanguine enough about the new “final cut” of The Wicker Man. He accepts that the long version he first delivered in 1973 will never be found. (One much repeated myth/theory is that when the studio cleared its archives, the original reels were used as landfill under the M3 motorway.) However, he is happy that Christopher Lee's character, the pagan Lord Summerisle, is properly foregrounded and that the image and sound are now so pristine. Some of the mainland scenes have been removed. (“In retrospect, they don't particularly help the film,” the director suggests). However, audiences can still see dour Christian policeman Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) in his own church on the mainland before he is introduced to the devilish rituals on the Hebridean island.

The director is currently beginning to raise finance for a new feature, Wrath of the Gods. This will mark the third and final part in the “Wicker” trilogy, following on from The Wicker Man (1973) and The Wicker Tree (2011.) He now seems resigned to the fact that the original edit of The Wicker Man will never turn up.

“As far as I am concerned, I am completely satisfied,” Hardy says of the latest, supposedly “final”, release of The Wicker Man. It's a surprising remark given that this still isn't quite the film he first delivered. However, it's a version he endorses and approves. “If somebody wants to re-cut it, it's up to them!” Besides, perhaps he realises the myth of the missing masterpiece is better served if the original Wicker Man doesn't turn up. That way, fans can still dream of the perfect movie without any risk of anti-climax.

ANATOMY OF A PAGAN RITUAL

Some could say that the filming of the original version of the THE WICKER MAN was cursed. Bad weather, misinformation and public outrage all became stumbling blocks in what eventually became one of the most interesting films of its kind (you know, the pagan, human sacrifice kind).

Included in the October issue of TOTAL FILM is a two-page spread that dissects some of the challenges that befell the director, actors, and crew during its production.