Everybody Laughs Except Howie: The Case for The Wicker Man as Black Comedy

There's a moment about a third of the way into The Wicker Man when Sergeant Neil Howie sits in the Green Man with the expression of a man who has found a hair in his soup, while a room full of islanders serenade him with a song about the landlord's daughter and her generous habits. He does not laugh. He does not even blink in time. He performs, instead, a silent audit of everyone else's manners.

That is the joke, and it's been the joke since 1973. It's also the part of the film that a fair number of people — including plenty who would call it a favourite — still haven't quite agreed to notice.

Nobody on screen is in on it

The Wicker Man's comedy never arrives through winking. Anthony Shaffer wrote it straight; Robin Hardy directed it straight; Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward, Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pitt and Britt Ekland all play it as though the stakes were Greek. The humour is entirely a product of collision: a rigid Presbyterian policeman dropped into a working pagan parish where nobody considers his authority remotely interesting.

Summerisle is not a horror village in the usual sense. It's a functioning community with a tourism sideline, a good harvest, an unusual approach to healthcare and a pub with a frankly excellent repertoire. What unsettles is how reasonable everyone is. What amuses is how little all that reasonableness does for Howie.

A bawdy song is a plot device

Consider what the inn songs actually do. "The Landlord's Daughter" and "Gently Johnny" aren't decoration — they're a social test, and Howie fails them. Hospitality and bawdry arrive in the same cup. He takes the hospitality and glares at the bawdry, which tells the room everything it needs to know about him.

Played as pure menace, that sequence would be a threat. Played, as it is, with a smirk and a squeeze-box and a landlord who is also the local priest, it becomes the exact texture of British communal teasing: the specific horror of being the only sober person at a wedding. It's cruelty, but it's also comedy, and the film understands those are the same muscle.

Christopher Lee knew exactly what he was in

Lee's performance is the strongest evidence that the film is in control of its own absurdity. Lord Summerisle is monstrous, but monstrous in linen — explaining himself politely, offering a drink, behaving like a well-read uncle with an interesting hobby and a nice garden. Lee said for decades, right up to his death in 2015, that this was the part he was proudest of. You can see why. It's the only role in a very long career where the villain wins simply by being better company than the hero.

The missing footage makes the argument for us

The various reconstructions — the theatrical cut, the longer assemblies, the 2013 restoration of the Final Cut — have never fully closed the gap where the lost material went. What has become clear from piecing it together, and clearer still from watching it at a late-night repertory screening, is that the stuff we mourn is largely comic and carnal: the extended bawdry, the music, the sheer daftness of the island at play.

Audiences at a packed house — the Prince Charles in London, a BFI season, any painted-fronted cinema where the regulars can be trusted to recite the landlord's lines before he does — laugh, consistently, at precisely the points where Howie is most sincere.

Laughter is a folk-horror engine

Here's the argument. Much modern folk horror, and much folk-horror fandom, treats the subgenre as a matter of strictness: rural setting, ancient rite, closed community, outsider destroyed. On those terms The Wicker Man is both template and problem, because it keeps refusing to be solemn.

But the discomfort depends on the comedy. If Summerisle were simply sinister, Howie's fate would be tragic. Because Summerisle is funny, and welcoming, and in its own deranged way hospitable, his fate becomes absurd as well. He isn't undone by an evil he might have spotted. He's undone by a party he wasn't invited to enjoy.

Folk horror's real subject has always been the instant an outsider realises the rules are functioning exactly as designed and that he is the only one who hasn't read them. That realisation is frightening. It's also, in the specifically British way, mortifying — and mortification sits very close to farce.

The remake proves the point from the wrong end

The 2006 American version, the one with the bees and the bicycle and Nicolas Cage in a bear suit, is routinely filed under disaster. In fairness, it grasps something the original only implies: this story is ripe for ridicule. It simply can't govern the ridicule, which is why it dissolved into the internet's favourite GIF.

The original never loses control, because the absurdity is pitched at total sincerity. Nobody winks. Not even Christopher Lee. Especially not Christopher Lee.

The ending still lands, and lands harder

None of this argues that the final ten minutes are anything other than terrible in the old sense — as in, full of terror. The cage, the prayers, the animal heads, the great dying fall of "Summer Is A-Cumen In" all hit harder because we have spent two hours laughing at the man. We liked him because he was funny to be irritated by. Then he is gone, and there is nothing funny left at all.

That's the trick, and it isn't a flaw in the design. It is the design. The Wicker Man is a black comedy about a man who will not, under any circumstances, get the joke — and then it lets the joke finish him.

Come, they say. It's time to keep your appointment.