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The Wicker Man is a musical. A police procedural folk horror mystery musical. It opens with a mainland copper (Edward Woodward) flying to a remote Scottish island to investigate a missing child, and within twenty minutes he's watching a schoolteacher explain to children that the maypole is a giant penis while a naked woman awaits in a graveyard next door.

It’s a horror film that commits almost entirely to not feeling like one. There are no shadows, no jump scares, no ominous scores creeping under the dialogue. It looks like a tourism video for a very progressive Scottish island.

The film works as a trap, and crucially, it traps you the same way it traps Sergeant Howie. You follow his investigation, and you don't notice until quite late that you've been given absolutely no reason to trust his version of events. Howie is not a reliable moral compass. He's a rigid, sexually repressed, self-righteous man whose own certainty makes him exactly the instrument the island needs. The horror is that nobody forces him into anything. His faith, his pride, his refusal to compromise. He brings his fate upon himself.

In the new FolknHell podcast, we pay a visit to Summerisle.

https://www.folknhell.com/the-wicker-man-review

Hail the Queen of the May!

Managed to catch the preview screening at BFI Southbank last night, ahead of the film going on general release today.

A trawler that vanished thirty years ago reappears in a Cornish harbour, undamaged, unexplained. The locals respond not with horror or amazement, but with dread. There's a strong undertow of wrongness in the village wrong that everyone can feel but nobody wants to name. It's deeply unsettling.

As well as the technical tropes of a Jenkin film, the story treads familiar ground. A Cornish village that's had its heart ripped out: the post office is a food bank, the pub stands empty, the houses ramshackle. The film keeps asking what it costs to want back a version of your community that no longer exists. What do you owe the dead?

Jenkin, George MacKay and Callum Turner did a Q&A afterwards and were great company. Jenkin spoke at length about his process (16mm film, TV-aspect ratio, short intercuts and gorgeous saturated images): “The celluloid holds things in a way digital doesn't, which felt right for a film about things that refuse to stay gone.”

George MacKay (playing Nick, one of the fishermen) talked about the challenge of playing someone trying to apply logic to a film that's actively dissolving it. Callum Turner (Liam) described his character as someone who has so little waiting for him in the present that an inexplicable situation starts to look less like a trap and more like an offer.

It's a coastal ghost story, a time-slip drama, and a film about community and loss. It’s also Jenkin’s most powerful and shocking film to date. I loved it.

Full blog at https://www.folknhell.com/blog/field-notes-rose-of-nevada