Best known to readers of SFB for her contributions to The Battersea Poltergeist, The Witch Farm and Uncanny, Evelyn Hollow is hosting BBC Radio 4 Extra’s special celebration of The World of The Wicker Man airing from 1700-2200 on December 2nd (repeated from 0100-0600 the next morning). Paul Simpson caught up with her last week during a brief break in the Uncanny tour…

The Wicker Man programme: is this something that you wanted to do or did they approach you?

They approached me. The producer, Stuart Ross, got in touch with me and said that they were doing a special programme that was celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man, which was this year, and they wanted it to coincide with the anniversary of when the film was released in cinemas, in December.

They needed someone to present it and to do interviews; they asked if I’d be interested in it and I said yes. It’s an iconic piece of culture; I’m a big fan of Christopher Lee; it was filmed in Scotland where I’m from; and it’s got this big cultural impact in terms of folk horror. It also cherry picks things from different aspects from different pagan cultures.

It’s nice to be doing something that isn’t strictly paranormal.

When did you first see the film?

That’s a good question. I think I first saw the film when I was a teenager, I was maybe fifteen or sixteen. I think I actually watched it at a party, at someone’s house and we were bingeing horror films. Someone picked older stuff, from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s; everybody picked a different film. I think I picked Hitchcock’s The Birds and someone else picked The Wicker Man.

So we watched it and I was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this was filmed in Scotland.’ I sort of knew about it, I knew the premise but I didn’t realise it had been shot in Scotland and stuff like that and Christopher Lee just being absolutely unhinged in it.

As you said earlier, it draws from a lot of different pagan cultures; do you now find yourself slightly bristling at the amalgamation of things, rather than it trying to be one particular element?

Yes, a little bit. I think when I was younger watching it, I was just enjoying that it was set in Scotland and there were ritualistic aspects that were reflections of Celtic paganism. I’ve been a Celtic pagan since I was a child.

But then obviously coming back to it as an adult, once you understand more about the xenophobia and misunderstandings of pagan beliefs, it is a little bit harder, because there are aspects of not just Celtic paganism, there’s also Cornish paganism, there is stuff from traditional Suffolk witchcraft, there’s even aspects of Welsh stuff as well. They cherry picked, which is fine, honestly, it’s a film for entertainment purposes.

It was a little bit harder to watch when I was older because I endured lots of people saying to me, ‘Oh, you’re pagan so you must sacrifice people’ and I was like, ‘Where does that come from?’ Yes, obviously hundreds and hundreds of years ago, there were rituals where things were sacrificed but that’s true of just about any religion, not just paganism. So having people constantly living with the misrepresentation of it and realising that The Wicker Man is probably the most well known pagan-adjacent film and that it might actually have done some damage because everybody thought it was people living on remote islands, sacrificing children and things like that, I was like, ‘This film might have put us back a couple of decades.

When we’ve talked before, we’ve discussed the urban myths that have grown up around paganism. Are your segments in the middle of this special programme an opportunity to set the record straight or have you focused far more on what was done in 1973?

We’ve talked about the film and the music, the drama surrounding the film, of different cuts and all the material that was cut from it, that it wasn’t received very well and things like that. I’ve also talked about the women in the film – Britt Ekland didn’t have a very good time on it – but I have touched on the film’s importance in folk horror and also its cherry picking stuff from different pagan cultures and what that means now. Also looking at what have they actually picked from, in terms of themes like fertility and changing of the seasons, what we would call ‘the turn of the wheel’.

I think the horror aspect is fine because it’s that classic remote, small town horror where you’re the outsider, essentially, and something about the village is slightly off… and you get drawn into this kind of underbelly of a secluded culture.

The issue is not even actually to do with the burning of the man [at the end], it’s more to do with the whole reason Sergeant Howie is there is because they’re murdering, sacrificing children. Which just did not happen in paganism, even going back thousands of years. Yes, sacrifices were made but rarely, rarely was it ever children. But at the same time, it is a film…

If you were involved with making a new production of it, would you, in order to keep the same basic story, recommend using a particular area’s culture or do you think it only works to tell that story by being the mismash that it is?

I think, yes, it only works because it’s so chaotic. It doesn’t take itself seriously and I think what also helps with the aspect of it not being slightly xenophobic and dodgy is that it is so comical. In places like Christopher Lee and the dancing around and even when you first see him as Lord Summerlisle, he’s just really over the top, the teuchter tartan getup and things like that. It’s so tongue in cheek and theatrical that you understand at all times that it’s not taking itself seriously.

I think the film only works because it’s so weird and all over the place and I think if we try to go back and change it now, it wouldn’t be the same film.

It never becomes camp.

No, that’s true. I think there’s areas that maybe retroactively now might be considered a little bit camp but yes, it doesn’t quite give into that – although somebody on, I think, The Verb, did describe it as Carry On Sacrifice or something like that.

I don’t agree. You look at something like the 1968 Devil Rides Out or go back to Dennis Wheatley’s books, they are camp.

Oh yes, yes.

Are there other examinations of paganism on film that you think would benefit from a similar sort of survey to what you’re doing with this?

That’s a good question. There are films that draw on folk horror but folk horror isn’t necessarily pagan. Folk horror exists in the traditionalist sense, and especially British folk horror, I think, draws on pre-Christian times, so there’s lots of pagan aspects, rituals, the forest and the animals. So I think the two are quite intertwined but only really in British folk horror.

I think there’s been an uptick in folk horror especially from Americans, so even if you look at bigger films like The Witch, even though it’s based around the American Puritan era, there were aspects of that in British practices that were brought over to America. But that is more specifically looking at witchcraft, and not all pagans are witches and not all witches are pagan.

The thing is, when they make things like horror they go on aspects of paganism that just simply aren’t there anymore or perhaps were never there to begin with. I think most people would be shocked to find that paganism is mostly just baking things! There’s lots of little ways to practise but it’s a lot of cooking and going to the forest to collect. It’s mostly spending time outside, making little things and doing a lot of cooking and making big meals for sabbat dinners and drying herbs and things like that. It’s very holistic and honouring the turn of the wheel; it’s an incredibly cyclical and mindful religion that has absolutely nothing to do with sacrifices.

With any religion there are people who practise it a different way who maybe are interested in more extreme things but those are not aspects of paganism. So I think when these films are made and they draw on horror, they insert these horror elements into a set of beliefs that just don’t have that. No one is out here sacrificing children.

Contemporary paganism once again has lots of different sects. Italian paganism is different to that in Iceland (illustrated, right), which has one of the oldest pagan communities in the world, and is very different to Celtic paganism, but in all of them, the core aspect is the cycle, and therefore it’s everything changing through death and life and rebirth and darkness and light. At the heart of paganism is a lot of dark shit but it’s not horror, it’s death, and that’s an intrinsic part of all of our lives that no one can escape, everyone must pass through and that’s fundamental. I think if people are afraid of death then yes, it becomes a horror element but if you’re not, it just becomes a cyclical part of nature.

For me and for many other people, especially pagans, I have never been afraid of death, not even since I was a small child. I have known death intimately my entire life, so I’ve had no fear of it and I think maybe that is what drives us all individually or [gives us] the interest in things like the paranormal, folk horror and things like that. But each of us interpret that completely differently based on our faith.

You’ve got your book coming out next year…

It’s an atlas of paranormal places. It is being published by Ivy Press who are part of the Quarto Publishing Group; it is a hardback and will cover paranormal places all over the world. It’s going to be broken down into sections so you’ve got witchcraft, strange nature, haunted places, creatures. It covers the world and there’s a cartographer that we’re working with so it’ll have full maps, as well as full page colour photographs. It gets released in September next year in the UK, America, New Zealand and Australia simultaneously.

 

The World of The Wicker Man evening is on BBC Radio 4 Extra on Saturday 2nd December from 1700-2200 (repeated over night at 0100-0600).

Image courtesy of BBC Radio 4 Extra; thanks to Stuart Ross for assistance in preparing this feature.