There are horror movies you watch with the lights on, and then there are horror movies you watch with a drink in your hand, muttering, “Oh no, no no no,” as if you’ve just realized the babysitter is in a cult. The Wicker Man is firmly in the second category. This is not the bees-and-Nicolas-Cage fever dream; this is the 1973 original, directed by Robin Hardy, starring Edward Woodward as Sergeant Neil Howie, the most sexually repressed cop ever to step foot on a pagan island. Watching it now feels like finding a cursed vinyl in your older cousin’s record crate—folk horror pressed in dread and sunlit menace.
Howie arrives on Summerisle clutching his Bible like it’s a riot shield, determined to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Instead, he’s greeted by naked dancing, bawdy tavern songs, and a schoolteacher explaining phallic maypoles with the calm of someone describing crop rotation. The islanders, led by the magnificently oily Lord Summerisle (a silk-suited Christopher Lee), radiate a kind of agricultural hedonism that makes Howie’s Presbyterian rigidity look like a firmware bug. Every scene feels like it’s two theological operating systems trying to overwrite each other.
The genius of the film is that it unfolds in broad daylight. No thunderclaps, no gothic cobwebs—just wind, waves, and folk songs that feel like they were dredged up from the bottom of a cider barrel. The soundtrack is relentlessly chipper, which makes it more unnerving than any screeching violin sting. It’s horror by way of harvest festival, dread braided into sunlit cliffs and children’s choruses. Gen-X kids raised on latchkey afternoons and unsupervised cable will recognize the vibe: something is wrong, but the adults are smiling too much.
Woodward plays Howie like a man slowly realizing he has wandered into a joke with no punchline. His moral certainty curdles into panic as the islanders gaslight him with polite grins and ribald innuendo. Meanwhile, Christopher Lee—tall, amused, disturbingly reasonable—delivers pagan philosophy with the smooth confidence of someone who knows the harvest depends on it. There’s no cackling villainy here, just a clash of faiths, each absolutely convinced of its righteousness. That’s the hangover: the film refuses to tell you which belief system is “crazy.” It just lets them collide.
And then there’s the ending. No spoilers, but if you don’t already know about the wicker effigy looming on the shoreline, you’ve missed one of cinema’s most indelible final images. It’s less a jump scare than an existential punchline delivered with a folk hymn. The last act doesn’t explode—it crystallizes. By the time the credits roll, you feel less frightened than indicted, like you’ve just witnessed a ritual you weren’t meant to understand but absolutely can’t unsee.
Revisiting The Wicker Man in a post-ironic, meme-saturated era is like discovering that the joke was always on us. It’s sly, subversive, and way more punk than its pastoral setting suggests. For a Gen-X audience raised on skepticism and mixtapes, it hits that sweet spot between camp and cosmic dread. It whispers that belief—any belief—can be terrifying when it’s absolute. Pour another drink, hum along to the harvest song, and remember: sometimes the sunniest places cast the longest shadows.
This release - the 50th-anniversary restoration - is a full-on resurrection as all three major cuts of the film — the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, and the “Final Cut” that’s become the definitive 4K master — have been scanned and restored in glorious Ultra HD with HDR presentation. Scoop it up now!
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD - Best Buy Exclusive SteelBook / 50th Anniversary Edition
Home Video Distributor: Lionsgate
Available on Blu-ray - October 17, 2023
Screen Formats: 1.85:1
Subtitles: English; English SDH; Spanish
Video: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Audio: English: LPCM 2.0 Mono
Discs: 4K Ultra HD; Blu-ray Disc; Two-disc set
Region Encoding: 4K region-free; blu-ray locked to Region A
This sophisticated and erotic chiller, penned by Anthony Shaffer ("Sleuth"), stars Edward Woodward as repressed police sergeant Neil Howie whose search for a missing girl sends him to a remote island off the west Scottish coast. The island's residents, led by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), are members of a libertine pagan cult, and Howie fears that the girl is fated to be part of a harvest ritual sacrifice. Ingrid Pitt, Britt Ekland, and Diane Cilento co-star.
VIDEO
This 50th-anniversary 4K Ultra HD release takes Robin Hardy’s unsettling folk-horror classic and remasters it with a clarity that feels like watching Summerisle in the sun rather than through someone’s sweaty thumbprint, delivering gorgeous HDR colours and crisp detail that make the pastoral dread pop off the screen — even if some of the older material still shows its age, the result is the best this film has ever looked at home; extras and multiple cuts give cult fans fresh angles on the mystery, and seeing the wicker colossus loom in pristine Ultra HD makes this edition not just a rewatch, but an experience.
AUDIO
The audio on this 50th-anniversary 4K release stays true to the film’s roots with a clean, English 2.0 LPCM mix that might seem simple in an era of Dolby atmospherics, but it delivers wonderfully clear dialogue, well-balanced folk songs, and a surprisingly rich bed of ambience that pulls you into Summerisle’s weird world without hiss or distortion; while there’s no widescreen surround extravaganza here, the sound’s depth and bass handling ensure even the traditional musical numbers and creaking wind feel textured and alive, making the soundtrack feel like another character in the haunting ritual rather than just background noise.
Supplements:
Commentary:
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On the Director’s Cut there’s a commentary featuring director Robin Hardy, Christopher Lee, and Edward Woodward, originally recorded for an earlier DVD/Blu-ray release and carried over into the 4K set; there’s even a “making of the commentary” featurette that shows how that track was put together
Special Features:
This anniversary 4K set doesn’t just give you the three fully restored versions of The Wicker Man in HDR — it turns your living room into a mini film school crossed with a pilgrimage to Summerisle, with behind-the-scenes documentaries, interviews that range from cast reminiscences to academic dissections of the movie’s themes, and deep dives into lost scripts and locations that make the winding path from script to sacrifice surprisingly fascinating; the extras fill in lore, context, and creative process while the booklet, music EP and art pieces make this feel like a rite of passage for fans, not just a standard disc release.
- All three cuts of the film (Final Cut, Director’s Cut, Theatrical Cut) restored in 4K
- “Revisiting the Locations of The Wicker Man” — modern look at shooting sites with commentary
- “The Wicker Man at 50” — retrospective with critics and historians
- Robin Hardy’s Script: The Lost Ending — featurette on original screenplay content
- Interview with Britt Ekland — cast insights from the original production
- Worshipping The Wicker Man — in-depth documentary on film’s cult and influence
- The Music of The Wicker Man — featurette on the soundtrack and songs
- Interviews with Robin Hardy & Christopher Lee (archival from 1979)
- Audio Commentary with Robin Hardy, Christopher Lee & Edward Woodward (on selected cuts)
- Making of the Commentary featurette
- Behind-the-Scenes Stills Gallery and Trailers
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Composite Blu-ray Grade
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MPAA Rating: R.
Runtime: 88 mins
Director: Robin Hardy
Writer: Anthony Shaffer; David Pinner
Cast: Edward Woodward; Christopher Lee; Diane Cilento
Genre: Horror | Thriller
Tagline: A Robin Hardy Film.
Memorable Movie Quote: "Do sit down, Sergeant. Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent."
Theatrical Distributor: Summerisle Films
Official Site:
Release Date: August 7, 1974
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: October 17, 2023.
Synopsis: A puritan police sergeant arrives in a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl, who the pagan locals claim never existed.
