Death in the Countryside: The British Pastoral Horrors of The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General

 There is a heavy fog upon the moor as the sun rises -- in the distance, the dark and ominous treeline of the forest looms menacingly, much like a boundary between two worlds: the known and the unknown. Ancient hamlets serve as islands in the vast ocean of agrarian emptiness. And though these communes may serve as bastions of civilization in an otherwise desolate countryside, the insular ways of the townsfolk and the derision with which they leer at outsiders inform us that though these villagers may be Englishmen, there is something, all together, wicked about them. 

The “pastoral horror film,” perhaps, bears fewer traits, in common with films such as Psycho (1960) or Halloween (1978) than they do with the picturesque American Westerns of John Ford. “Landscape is absolutely crucial to American genres like the western and the road movie, and even informs fantastical styles such as science-fiction and horror...[b]ut English landscape is too often taken for granted...concerned with fractured families rather than forces of nature” (Newman).  For two such films, Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), the films’ rural English setting serve just as much to capture a snapshot of British cultural heritage just as much as the wide-open plains and canyons of The Searchers (1956) idyllises the American frontier.  But while the latter prompts feelings of opportunity, the former a sense of dread and paranoia.

Filmed primarily in Norfolk and Suffolk, Witchfinder General is set amidst the backdrop of the English Civil War, while Cromwell’s Roundheads and the Loyalists sow distrust among the populace, leading many to eye each other with suspicion. Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) plays an aristocratic lawyer who has proclaimed himself “Witchfinder General,” and makes it his solemn crusade to uproot heresy and witchcraft from the shadow of Orford Castle... using, perhaps, the most sadistic means possible.

There is a pall that hangs over the film’s locations -- as though the fictionalized elements of the narrative give a temporal echo of the very real horrors that occurred in the places in which they occurred. As we witness Hopkins, followed by an entourage of local villagers, dragging a hapless woman to her death by hanging, we cannot shake a sense of authenticity from the proceedings. It doesn’t feel so much as a fictionalized narrative as it does a reenactment of a particularly brutal and bloody time in English history. “Through the weight of its very real history, the [setting] seems to resist the artifice of the fiction” (Scovell).

Reeves’ unwillingness to cut away from such gruesome violence forces its viewers to sit with the discomfort of having witnessed it. It is no mistake that most acts of sadistic torture and execution portrayed in the film are done so in front of a cheering, taunting crowd. To English viewers, there is an escapable knowledge that to their ancestors, the viewing of a public execution was their version of going to the cinema. “Though ostensibly about the archaic subject of the persecution of witches, the film raises the broader issue of the abuse of authority.” At the time of its production, one need not be a witch, per se, to receive such brutal treatment -- in many cases, one need only be a native of a colonial territory of the British Empire.

Yet the brutality of England’s history has often seemed at odds with its popular culture, one need not look far to find the two existing side-by-side. One of the most popular tourist attractions in modern England being such macabre locations as the ominous Tower of London, where guests can take photographs of themselves in facsimiles of the shackles and torture devices inflicted upon countless innocent (and not-so-innocent) people for centuries. As demonstrated in Witchfinder General, viewers are more than happy to sightsee in these unenlightened eras, if perhaps, it makes their shared history slightly easier to digest. Reeves shows us an unblinking, unapologetic look at the barbarity of the ages. Gone are the loveable tramps enclosed in the stockades -- nobody is pelting rotten fruit and vegetables at the prisoners on screen. “Perhaps it was the discomfort caused by this unsentimental approach to something that has so often been glossed over and stylized beyond recognition that so offended the reviewers” (Senn.) The need to reconcile the horrors and traditions of the past with the sensibilities of the present is seen not only in the audiences of English horror films, but also in the subject matter of many of its films.

In 1973’s The Wicker Man, a mainland Police Sergeant (Edward Woodward) arrives on the small Scottish island of Summerisle, having come to investigate the disappearance of a young girl.  What he finds is a society mired not only in secrecy, but in the superstition of the village’s pre-Christian, paganistic rites. Around him, a vast conspiracy surfaces, revealing that not only has the missing girl been, apparently, sacrificed to their agricultural deity, but that he himself is to be burned within the film’s eponymous effigy during the islander’s May Day Celebration.

Sergeant Howie, a devout Christian, balks at the acts of Paganistic mirth that appear to be commonplace upon the isle. Maidens galavant, skyclad, around rings of standing stones, and lovers couple in orgiastic displays of public eroticism. Children are instructed in the heritage of their island, and the worship of polytheistic deities and the teachings of the Anglican and Catholic churches are all but defunct. “Because of Howie’s overt Christian belief, the ending of the film is often characterized as a final clash between Christian and pre-Christian ideologies, the latter coming out triumphant” (Scovell). Howie attempts, unsuccessfully, to exert his mainlander will upon the people of Summerisle, acting as a personification of an Imperial Colonizer, seeking to bring modern and Christian ethics to ancient Celtic practitioners of a far older faith. If Witchfinder General is a story about inflicting cruelty and sadism under the auspices of Christian authority, The Wicker Man is, perhaps, the paganistic response to such overreach. Though in the case of The Wicker Man, payback seems to be long overdue. The heathen population of Britain, having seen its last heyday in the 7th Century, was more likely to be tied to the stake than the ones lighting the fires.

What further differentiates Wicker Man from Witchfinder General, is that while Witchfinder tells the tale of days gone by, being set in the 17th-Century, Wicker Man partners the most ancient of British culture with a contemporary setting. “[T]he 'old ways' sit like vivid fissures in the surface of modernity... The present is piled on top of the past, evoking a distinctly plausible world of folk tradition. We can enjoy it all, vividly alive before our very eyes” (Pratt). Indeed, the film’s early 1970s aesthetic seems to add more to the strange, paganistic practices, rather than detract. In an age where New Age religion had started to firmly take root within the Western world, the juxtaposition of godheads baked into bread amidst psychedelic posters and clothing seem less clashing and more complementary.

But just how authentic are these ritualistic practices? In truth, the notion of maidens blithely gallivanting around a maypole while various townsfolk are given roles and characters in yearly pageants has less to do with reality, and more to do with the practices detailed in  James George Frazer’s 1890 treatise on paganism: The Golden Bough . “In this respect, the film attempts to diegetically revive an unselfconsciously Victorian perception of Celtic Paganism” (Koven). Even the titular “wicker man” is based more upon popular folklore than having any real basis within historical truth. The authenticity, however, becomes largely immaterial when discussing matters of cultural and national identity. Though there may be no historical basis for a figure such as Robin Hood, or, to a lesser degree, Sherlock Holmes, one cannot deny the unequivocal “Britishness” of both of these figures.

Horror, though perhaps not as praised as the dramas of Shakespeare or the comedies of Chaucer, is not a new phenomenon in Britain. Indeed, its tradition is just as long and hallowed -- arguably, it can be said that one can trace the roots of the genre back to Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley, only to be later refined by the likes of Stoker, Stevenson, and Doyle. The repression of Victorian society led to the violence of Jack the Ripper, whose bloody work would echo in the ghoulish stylings of penny dreadfuls.  Yet, traditionally, British horror had largely remained within the confines of the urban hell of industrialized London. Films such as The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General confirm to us that one need not limit such gruesome and macabre fare to the East End, with its labyrinthine, cobblestone alleys and streetlamps haloed by fog thick as soup. Darkness and evil is not barred by geography or even era. Terror can be found anywhere -- in any cultural history and legend. However... one must have the courage to look upon it.