Eight Hymns for a Burning Man: The Wicker Man’s Songs, Ranked

The Wicker Man is often remembered for its final image: the giant figure, the singing, the smoke. But the film’s real engine is running long before that. It is in the songs. Paul Giovanni’s arrangements take the British folk revival and bend it towards something older, stranger and much less comforting. These are not mood pieces. They are instructions, invitations and warnings, all set to tunes you will hum on the way home.

This is a ranking of the eight proper songs, not the instrumental cues. It is opinionated, as all rankings are. But the argument underneath it is simple: the music is not atmosphere. It is the film’s dread made catchy.

8. ‘Chop Chop’ — the sound of labour turned nasty

A short, grinding fragment that feels less like a song than a work detail. It is low on the list because it is more texture than tune, but it earns its place by showing how Summerisle turns ordinary activity into ritual. Work, in this film, is never just work. It is participation.

7. ‘The Landlord’s Daughter’ — a music-hall wink with a leer

Bawdy, knowing and deeply uncomfortable. The song introduces sex as bait and as a test. It is the sound of a community enjoying a joke that the outsider does not quite understand. That is a very Wicker Man kind of threat: not a monster in the dark, but a room full of people laughing at something you have just missed.

6. ‘Fire Leap’ — the chant that makes a game out of danger

There is something genuinely unsettling about hearing children’s voices used for ritual. ‘Fire Leap’ has the rhythm of a playground game and the function of a spell. It is not the scariest song on the soundtrack, but it is one of the clearest examples of the film’s method: take something innocent, give it a second use, and watch the innocence curdle.

5. ‘Maypole’ — the earworm that traps you

This is the one that gets in first. Bright, springy and almost triumphant, it sounds like a celebration because it is one. The horror is that we are invited to enjoy it. By the time the maypole ribbons start moving, the song has already made us complicit. It is folk horror’s most effective bait-and-switch: a tune so pleasant you forget what it is for.

4. ‘Gently Johnny’ — the pub song that turns a room into a trap

A communal performance that is also an interrogation. Howie sits in the pub, surrounded by singers, and the song becomes a way of testing him. It is bawdy, repetitive and just the right side of threatening. The genius of it is that everyone else knows the words. The outsider does not. In folk horror, that is always a bad sign.

3. ‘Corn Rigs’ — the opening spell

The first proper song sets the tone: pastoral, old, and slightly off. ‘Corn Rigs’ sounds like it could drift out of a folk club or a field at dusk. It welcomes us to Summerisle while quietly warning us not to get too comfortable. It is the sound of a landscape with its own memory, and it does not care whether we understand it.

2. ‘Willow’s Song’ — the most famous, and still the most unsettling

Yes, it is beautiful. Yes, it is the one everyone remembers. But the reason it works is not just the melody. It is the way the song turns seduction into ritual. It is a performance with a purpose, and the audience is made complicit in it. The tune is gentle; the context is not. That gap is where the dread lives.

1. ‘Summer Is A-Coming In’ — the perfect folk-horror earworm

This is the one. A traditional-sounding song of renewal that sounds like it has been sung in the same place for centuries. It is bright, communal and almost childlike, which is exactly why it is so frightening. Summerisle’s logic is built into it: the season returns, the harvest comes, the community survives. The song makes that cycle sound natural. It makes sacrifice sound like gardening.

That is why the music is the film’s real engine of dread. The Wicker Man does not just show us a community with strange beliefs. It gives them a soundtrack we can sing along to. By the end, the songs have done their work. They are in your head, and Summerisle is in there with them.