“Written as a melodrama, shot as a musical by the director, and won the science fiction award of the year.” This is the confounding summary of The Wicker Man, the British cult classic that has inspired multiple generations of horror and mystery filmmakers and took the ‘outsider-enters-a-small-town-with-strange-goings-on’ to horrifying extremes in ways that reminded us “shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent.”
A Mark Kermode-hosted, behind-the-scenes documentary from 2001 has now surfaced that dives into the making of the beloved cult classic, with eerie footage of locations and a multitude of retrospective interviews from cast and crew, and pre-production photos and videos, including iconic imagery of the wicker man himself.
Titled Burnt Offering: The Cult of the Wicker Man, the special gives insight into how some of The Wicker Man’s chilling choices were made, including scraping the idea for a face on the titular, massive figure and instead leaving it as just the shape of a head. “[This] contained more mystery than any face I could devise,”states art director Seamus Flannery. Another of the talking heads is the late and wonderful Christopher Lee, who discusses how audiences had seen nothing like the film before, and how he had many trepidations himself upon first seeing a screening.
Honor the recent passing of director Robin Hardy by checking out the full documentary below.