By J.C. Aldred in folk-horror — 05 May 2026

The Wicker Man and the Archaeology of Folk Horror

In the final scene of Robin Hardy's 1973 film, a police sergeant from the Scottish mainland stands inside a giant wicker construction on a clifftop on a fictional Hebridean island, watching it burn around him. The island's inhabitants sing and dance in a circle outside. He prays. The structure collapses. The sun sets behind the standing stones on the headland.

It is one of the most disturbing endings in British cinema, and what makes it disturbing is not the violence — the death itself is largely implied — but the confidence of the people watching. They are not monsters. They are not performing cruelty. They genuinely believe they are doing something necessary and good.

The Wicker Man works as horror because it takes its own folk material seriously. The question worth asking is: how much of that material is genuine?

What Is Folk Horror?

Folk horror is a term that has been applied retrospectively to a body of British film and television from roughly the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, and to the broader tradition of literature and art that draws on rural folklore, folk custom, and landscape as sources of dread. The term itself was used by the director Piers Haggard to describe his 1971 film Blood on Satan's Claw, and has since been adopted by critics and scholars to describe a loose but recognisable genre.

The core elements of folk horror, as identified by the critic Adam Scovell and others, are a particular combination of landscape, isolation, skewed morality, and the presence of a community with beliefs or practices that the protagonist — usually an outsider — cannot understand or escape. The horror comes not from a monster or a supernatural force in the conventional sense, but from the realisation that the community's logic is internally consistent and that the outsider's rationalism provides no protection against it.

The Wicker Man is the most fully realised example. It also draws on more genuine folklore than most accounts acknowledge.

What Hardy and Shaffer Got Right

The film is based on a novel by David Pinner and was scripted by Anthony Shaffer, who drew on two significant sources: James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) and the actual folklore of the British Isles.

Frazer's Golden Bough — a vast, sprawling work of comparative mythology and anthropology that spent decades arguing that ancient religion was built around cycles of vegetation, sacrifice, and renewal — provided the film's ideological backbone. The islanders' beliefs in The Wicker Man are essentially Frazerian: they believe that the land's fertility depends on sacrifice, that the old ways work, that the corn will not grow without the right intervention. Frazer's thesis has been substantially revised by subsequent anthropologists, but it was enormously influential in the early twentieth century and fed directly into the folk revival and folk horror traditions of the 1960s and 70s.

The specific folkloristic elements in the film are more grounded. The maypole, the bawdy songs, the ritual processions, the burning effigy — all of these have genuine antecedents in British folk custom, though not necessarily in the form or combination the film presents them.

The burning of large wicker or straw figures is attested in European folk practice. Julius Caesar's account of the Gauls describes a giant wicker man used for human sacrifice, though Caesar's reliability on this point is disputed by modern historians — he had reasons to make the Gauls seem barbaric, and his account cannot be verified. In Britain, the burning of straw effigies survives in various Guy Fawkes Night traditions, and large-scale bonfire effigies appear in several regional customs.

The maypole and the associated songs and dances in the film are based on real traditions, some of which survived into the twentieth century with their more explicit elements intact. The folk revival of the 1960s recovered a great deal of this material, and Shaffer drew on it directly.

What the Film Invented

The fictional island of Summerisle, governed by a lord who has deliberately revived pagan religion as a social experiment, is an invention. There is no evidence of any British community that maintained an organised, coherent pre-Christian religion into the modern period in the way the film depicts.

This matters because one of folk horror's persistent myths — amplified by The Wicker Man and the Frazer tradition behind it — is the idea of survival: the idea that beneath the surface of Christian Britain, the old religion continued, hidden and waiting. The historiography of this idea has been largely dismantled. Ronald Hutton's work, particularly The Triumph of the Moon (1999), demonstrated that modern Wicca and contemporary paganism are largely nineteenth and twentieth century constructions, not survivals of pre-Christian practice.

The folk customs that do survive — the maypole dances, the mummer's plays, the agricultural festivals of the calendar year — are real, but their meaning has changed so many times over the centuries that tracing them to a specific pre-Christian origin is largely impossible. They survive because communities found reasons to maintain them, not because they preserved an unbroken thread of ancient belief.

The Wicker Man knows this, in a sense. Lord Summerisle explicitly tells the sergeant that the old religion was revived by his grandfather as a practical measure — a way of motivating the island's workforce. The film is more historically honest than it is often given credit for, embedding the survival myth within a frame that acknowledges it as a construction.

The Folk Horror Revival

The term folk horror has generated a genuine critical and creative movement in the past two decades. Adam Scovell's book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) was the first sustained academic treatment. The Folk Horror Revival collective, formed in 2013, has published anthologies, organised events, and created a community around the tradition.

The revival draws on a wide range of British material: the films of the early 1970s (Blood on Satan's Claw, Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man), the television plays of the BBC's Ghost Story for Christmas strand — particularly those based on M.R. James — the novels of Alan Garner, and a broader tradition of British weird fiction that runs from Arthur Machen through Algernon Blackwood to the present day.

What connects these works is less a specific set of supernatural beliefs than a particular relationship to landscape and community — the sense that the rural English or Scottish or Welsh countryside contains something that the modern, rational, urban world cannot account for, and that encountering it is dangerous in ways that rationalism cannot prevent.

Why It Endures

The Wicker Man has been in continuous cultural circulation since its release — mocked, quoted, remade badly, cited in academic papers, and watched by successive generations of viewers who find it as unsettling as the first audiences did. It has become a cultural shorthand for a particular kind of uncanny: the horror of the community that knows something you don't, that has decided you are necessary, that smiles at you.

The folk horror tradition it represents endures for the same reason the folklore it draws on endured: it names something real. The isolation of the outsider in a community with its own internal logic. The landscape that does not share your values. The customs whose meaning you cannot access no matter how long you watch.

British folklore is full of this experience. The creatures of the Lancashire waterways, the phantom dogs of the Suffolk coast, the figures that know the path and will not share it — they all operate by the same logic as the islanders of Summerisle. They have their reasons. They are not concerned with yours.

What Is Folk Horror?

What Hardy and Shaffer Got Right

What the Film Invented

The Folk Horror Revival

Why It Endures

Further Reading

Subscribe to The Chalk & Thorn