The Wicker man is a strong recommendation. It's intriguing, entertaining and suspenseful. Even better if you know absolutely nothing about it. So don't read my stupid ramblings just go and watch the original film.
Everyone's performance is just wonderful they all act strange and slightly over the top but not so much that it pulls you out of the film. And it's got a good Slow Burn to it. It doesn't immediately start with some action scene or throw a bunch of Supernatural nonsense at you. It's just the fear of the unknown and the mysterious mixed with a superstitious and insane.
It's also a good example of nudity and sexuality used to the betterment of the story. It's not just there for titillation, in fact I'd be very concerned and worried if you got any form of of arousal out of this film*.
A surprisingly simplistic story of a Scottish police officer investigating a missing child in some isolated island town.
A film with Simplicity on the surface. If you wanted you could look at it as nothing more then a man brought from the mainland tricked into looking for a little girl who he presumes is the victim of a sacrifice yet to come. Who then is Fooled Again into becoming the sacrifice itself.
Sergeant Neil is a devoted religious man. A firm believer in Jesus Christ and the convictions that he suffered under. Virtuous in his actions and Sexual abstinence in his relationships.
In a way he is something of a Puritan viewing the old paganistic views of The Villages something of a heresy.
The great irony of all this is it's his devotion to his religious views that make him so ideal for sacrifice in the first place. He is represented as a king with his authority, he's a fool for being tricked by the villagers and a virgin because of his hesitancy towards sexual desire.
If at any point he had given into his lustful desire then he may have been spared the torment of flame.
although I suspect there would have been some loophole made by the local townsfolk to burn him anyways. I just can't foresee bringing somebody in from the mainland putting in all the effort to make sure that he gets the right place at the right time for your grand sacrifice and then ultimately decided not to use him because he fell through.
But then on the other hand if they were so willy-nilly as to just throw out their own values for the sake of convenience then it probably wouldn't have mattered to them to sacrifice in the first place. Why then wouldn't they just use a goat.
There's a strange connection between the Christian viewpoint and is neo-pagan Mystic View.
The Pagan viewpoint is that if your crops don't work you require sacrifice, the better the quality of the sacrifice the better the outcome. Sacrificing an animal is okay, child is better and the ideal man is best.
Then you consider that Christianity is built on the basis of the perfect man (a God even) sacrificing himself for the betterment of all Humanity.
Creates this great image in the Wicker Man film I kind of do meaning to everything.
but I think what intrigues me most is how similar this form of paganism is to the old the Jewish faith before the days of monotheism. Back in the time when child sacrifice was the norm (Exodus 13) for a very different group of Jewish believers. For it used to be that you would sacrifice your first born son to Yahweh.
There's even an argument to be made that the Genesis 20 story of Abraham sacrificing his son was added into the popular scripture as a way of convincing people to give up human sacrifice. Something tells me that wasn't a very difficult thing to do.
. Then you have the origins of Christianity in which certain Gnostic groups view Jesus Christ as a kind of corn God who would help raise the crops every year. This would kind of make sense with his sacrifice happening at the time of Easter a kind of Crop Festival in which the old corn God dies and resurrect again to grow another cycle.
So in a way you could argue that the sacrificing of this one Scottish police officer with convictions of Christianity in his heart mirrors the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross and at the same time is also reminiscent of an even older story involving Jesus as the corn God himself. Thus you are sacrificing Jesus to Jesus to guarantee the salvation of humanity both in spirit and in health.
Then there's just the horrible reality that one overly Pious man is going to be sacrificed by a group of nutjobs because he was too committed to his work and unwilling to break his principles to sleep with some random woman.
*Yes I get it, this is a movie where you can see Britt Ekland stark naked dancing around like a weirdo, but it's still not arousing, it's baffling. Go watch ''The Man with the Golden Gun''. I won't judge you for finding anyone attractive in that.
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