A Different Island: Reassessing the American Wicker Man at Twenty

In 2026, Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man turns twenty. For most UK cult cinema fans, that anniversary is less a cause for celebration than an excuse for the same old clip: Nicolas Cage in a bear suit, a woman on a bike, and the immortal line about the bees. The 2006 remake has spent two decades as a punchline, and fair enough. It is not the 1973 film. It is not remotely the 1973 film. But a bad film does not usually generate twenty years of affectionate ridicule. A bad film gets forgotten. This one has stuck, and not only because the internet loves a meme.

So consider this less a rehabilitation than a change of shelf. The American Wicker Man is not a sacred text desecrated by Hollywood. It is a strange, misbegotten artefact — a cover version that misunderstood the original so thoroughly that it became something else. For fans who know Summerisle best, that is precisely why it is worth another look.

The Punchline Problem

The 2006 film arrived with the wrong kind of gravity. Robin Hardy's original is a British folk horror landmark: a police procedural that turns into a musical, a comedy of manners that turns into a sacrifice. It is tied to landscape, class, Calvinism, pub culture and the awful politeness of a closed community. LaBute's version moves the action to a private island in Washington State, replaces Lord Summerisle with a matriarch played by Ellen Burstyn, and swaps the maypole for an apiary. Cage plays Edward Malus, a highway patrolman drawn to the island by a former fiancée and a missing child.

On paper, the ingredients are there. On screen, they curdle. The film was widely dismissed, and not without reason. It is heavy-handed, tonally chaotic and often unintentionally funny. But the meme has flattened it into a single joke. The bear suit, the bee helmet, the shouted dialogue: these are now the film's public face. Behind them is a movie that is genuinely odd — not good-odd, necessarily, but odd enough to be interesting.

A Cover Version, Not a Desecration

The mistake is to judge the remake as a remake. It is more useful to treat it as a cover version: a familiar song performed by someone who has heard it once, in a noisy room, and is now guessing at the chords. It keeps the outsider detective, the missing child, the isolated community and the sacrificial ending. It loses the music, the humour, the erotic tension and the sense that the island is an extension of the British mainland rather than a theme park of paganism.

That loss is instructive. The original's power comes from ordinariness: the village shop, the schoolroom, the pub, the landlord's daughter singing in the next room. The remake replaces all that with a commune. It makes the community exotic, which is exactly the wrong move for folk horror. British folk horror works best when the strange thing is next door, not on a private island with a ferry timetable.

But a cover version can still reveal hidden contours. LaBute takes the original's latent gender conflict and makes it explicit. Summerisle becomes Summersisle, a matriarchy where men are mute and women run the honey economy. Is that a reading of the original? Not a convincing one. But it is a reading, and it says more about American anxieties than British ones.

What LaBute Gets Wrong

The film's biggest failure is not that it changes the story. It is that it does not trust the story it has. The bee motif is a good example. In the original, the natural world is part of the ritual texture: apples, fire, water, the maypole, the animal masks. In the remake, bees become a blunt metaphor for a hive mind. The island's economy is honey, the women are workers, the queen bee rules. It is almost science fiction. That could have been fascinating. Instead, it is delivered with a straight face and a lot of buzzing.

The sexual politics are muddled, too. The matriarchy is presented as monstrous, but the film never quite decides what it is accusing it of. Is it a critique of separatism? A fear of female power? A simple genre twist? The result is not a coherent argument but a queasy atmosphere. That queasiness is not nothing. It is just not the same thing as a good film.

The Fever Dream Defence

Watch it late at night, after the original has worn off. The remake makes more sense as a fever dream than as a narrative. Its logic is dream logic: the bear suit, the bee helmet, the flat ritual dialogue, the sudden violence. It feels like a film assembled from a half-remembered pub conversation about The Wicker Man. Someone has described the original to LaBute, and he has gone away and built a different island from the description.

That is where the film becomes genuinely strange. It is an American nightmare of a British film. The community is not a village but a cult; the paganism is not a survival but a lifestyle; the sacrifice is not a bargain with the harvest but a piece of theatre. The famous bee scene is silly, but it is also unpleasant. The film's horror is of a society that has reorganised itself around a single organism. It is not subtle, but it is a vision.

What It Says About Exporting Folk Horror

British folk horror exports badly when it is stripped of landscape and class. The original is terrifying because it feels local. The remake is set on an island that might as well be another planet. That is a very American move: take a genre about belonging and turn it into a genre about cults. It is also a warning. When UK folk horror travels, what survives is often the iconography — the wicker man, the masks, the fire — while the social texture gets left behind.

That does not mean the remake is secretly a masterpiece. It means it is a useful bad object. It shows us what is load-bearing in the original by removing it. The music, the ordinariness, the humour, the ambiguity: take those away and you get a bee-themed cult thriller with a great meme and a confused soul.

Reappraisal, Not Rehabilitation

At twenty, the American Wicker Man does not need to be declared good. It needs to be allowed to be strange again. Put it on a double bill with the original, not as a rival but as a conversation. Watch it as a distorted echo. Laugh at the bear suit, by all means. But notice the film underneath: a wrong-headed, feverish, occasionally compelling attempt to make folk horror American. It is not Summerisle. It is a different island. And for UK fans who know the original best, that difference is worth arguing about.