Category
6 articles
Paul Giovanni’s songs are not background music; they are Summerisle’s operating system. We rank the eight proper songs from The Wicker Man and argue the earworms are the film’s real engine of dread.
Every few years someone restores another few minutes of Summerisle and we're all expected to be grateful. Here's the impassioned, slightly heretical case for the short cut — the version that withholds, edits and unsettles, rather than explaining itself into oblivion.
We book the cottage, we collect the key from the little box, and we become a guest in somebody else's rules. As 2026 staycation season looms, here's why UK indie horror keeps returning to the rental cottage, the caravan park and the glamping pod — and why it's the most folk-horror place we've got.
Forget the hooded figures and the altar: some of British folk horror’s most chilling moments are procedural. Votes, planning permissions and village meetings turn local authority into a quiet nightmare — and tap into very real anxieties about land, belonging and who gets to decide what happens to a place.
Sergeant Howie spends two hours being appalled by Summerisle while the audience quietly giggles at him. Rather than a flaw in Robin Hardy's film, that comic discomfort is the engine room — a case for reading The Wicker Man as a very British black comedy with a genuinely dreadful punchline.
Folk horror has become the laziest label in British cinema: if there is a hedge, a pint and one unsettling yokel, someone will slap it on the poster. Here is a Wicker-Man field guide to separating the real thing from rural horror, pagan thrillers and moody landscape cinema.