There is, perhaps, no genre more formulaic and more equally prone to subversion than horror. Genre classics like Scream, cult hits like The Cabin in the Woods, even Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die riff infinitely off the format of horror cinema, often inserting their own “movie nerd,” one who summons the endless back catalog of drive-in fodder that they can adapt to the events transpiring in their own narrative. For most of cinematic history, horror was simple: it was a terrifying escapade between a monster and a hero. A hero not in the Herculean sense, but heroic in the sense that this character often embodies the best of social virtues at the time. They are, in the eyes of a contemporary audience, paragons of virtue and “good, moral citizens.” Friday the 13th’s Alice Hardy survived because she was a virgin, adhering to American society’s conservative attitudes towards sexuality. Halloween’s Laurie Strode protects the children she is charged with babysitting rather than abandoning them, advocating for a personal responsibility in accordance with societal viewpoints. Antagonists, on the other hand, capitalize on the fears of the audience. The killer of Friday the 13th reflects a fear of “being caught” that accompanies the early sexual escapades of youth, while Michael Myers reflects the fear of every parent leaving their children with the babysitter: what if something happens? These heroes and monsters fulfill an almost stock character-esque sensibility in the genre that is manipulated to this day.
While Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man might at first appear to fit these genre tropes, on closer examination it acts as one of the earliest and most intense examples of subversion in horror. Protagonist Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is a police officer sent to investigate the purported disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison (Geraldine Cowper), on the island of Summerisle following a lead from an anonymous letter. Howie is stuffy, uptight, evangelical, self-righteous and puritanical to the extreme. To summarize, he’s the perfect package of British conservatism, especially in a society on the verge of the satanic panic. From the standpoint of a contemporary conservative audience, he would be the perfect hero: a good, moral, upstanding citizen. The longer he spends on the island, however, the more his moral superiority becomes an obstacle in dealing with the islanders and their pagan traditions, highlighting the contradiction of the heroic label: a heroism undermined by reactionary attitudes.
As a result of his staunch Christianity and self-righteousness, he repeatedly abuses his power as an officer to learn more about Rowan, often with open and flagrant disrespect for the people of Summerisle. To the people of Summerisle, the dead do not die, rather, they cease to exist. Their spirit rejoins nature, and the villagers’ dialogue about that person changes entirely. Howie, however, cannot abide by this non-Christian attitude. He terrorizes a group of schoolchildren and their teacher, forcing himself into the teacher’s desk to retrieve the school’s attendance book that confirms Rowan’s existence. When the schoolteacher attempts to explain that his actions are upsetting to the children and violate their religious rhetoric about death, he is repulsed and horrified. The “horror” of The Wicker Man does not originate from the “inhumanity” or the cruelty of the islanders, but a more interior source rooted in Howie’s own xenophobia and intolerance.
A perfect example of this can be seen during Howie’s first night on the island, perhaps the most surreal sequence of the film. As he boards one of the rooms above Summerisle’s tavern, he is awoken by the innkeeper’s daughter, naked, singing, and pounding on the walls. Though he cannot see her, it appears to the audience that Howie is aware of what she’s doing — and is horrified by the notion. Howie spirals into a panic, driven near the brink of desperation by the strange ritual. He is not in any danger, yet Howie is terrified in much the same way a Lovecraftian protagonist would react to the unveiling of some Eldritch beast; a madness driven by inability to understand. In this case, Howie’s Eldritch monster is not a gelatinous, indescribable Cthulhu but a naked woman.
Howie is later revealed to be a virgin, and before this scene he is shown praying by his bedside. He is the perfect Christian; a prayerful, devout man who has held by the rule of chastity before marriage well into his adult life. Knowing this, it becomes easy to see why he reacts this way, especially as he casts his eyes out the window to discover the orgy happening on the field outside the inn. He is chaste, and believes as a good Christian that chastity is holy purity, and the alternative is damnable and savage. In the wake of such a public display of sexuality, Howie believes himself surrounded by devils, thrust out of the civilized Eden and into the Wilderness of Summerisle. Unlike scenes of murder or the summoning of a demon in other horror films, this is not a universally terrifying experience, rather, it is a horror specifically tailored to Howie’s experience as a Christian. The Wicker Man preys on Neil Howie in a way that subverts audience expectations. The hero of horror cinema is never an intentional hero. They do not parade their virtue, rather, they do what they believe to be right — and the audience is expected to understand and adopt that opinion out of fear and admiration. The Wicker Man does the opposite: the hero names his ideology and positions himself as a moral, upstanding citizen surrounded by heathens. As a result, the audience is not impressed by the hero’s endurance of the horrors that surround him but invited to view him as just one man with one kind of belief.
Much of the horror beats reflected in the film follow this pattern: if one thinks of the people of Summerisle as a people of their own distinct religion and culture, the “fear factor” becomes distant rather than immediate. Howie is horrified, and we are invited to watch the story through his eyes, for if we watched it from any other viewpoint we would laugh. This distinction of The Wicker Man as a personal rather than universal horror is actually presented within the film itself by Howie’s adoption of the role of Punch in the May Day celebrations after stealing the costume from the innkeeper. The Punch costume hides Howie’s identity and by stealing it he is able to infiltrate the May Day parade, where he hopes he can rescue Rowan before she is sacrificed to appease the gods of Summerisle and bring good harvest. Rowan is safe, of course, and it is his own obsession with the people’s supposed barbarism that drives him to his own demise.
The character of Punch itself is one worth examining further. While sharing the same name and appearance as the famous English puppet, The Wicker Man’s Punch actually dates back to the Pulcinella character of Italian commedia dell’arte. Pulcinella is a character defined by duality, either playing dumb despite an acute awareness of his outward situation, or assuming himself extremely intelligent in spite of his obliviousness and ignorance. The Wicker Man refers to Punch as “the privileged simpleton and king for a day,” reflective of the original character’s nature seeking to appease the powerful and exert his will over those who he believes to be below him. This is clearly analogous to Howie’s character, especially in these appeals to higher authority. Perhaps the clearest example of Howie fulfilling the role of Punch comes during Howie’s visit to the island’s only church, now a ruin with nothing left but some half-remnant walls and a stone altar, covered in crates of rotted fruit. In the ruined church, a woman breastfeeds her infant child. Howie lashes out, scaring the mother and destroying the crates that litter the altar, now simply a stone object without a purpose. Taking fragments of wood from the crates, he jams them together to create a cross, which he lies across the altar seemingly to spite the mother behind him. Punch asserts his power over those he views as below him, while appealing to who he believes to be the ultimate authority: the Christian God.
Ultimately, interpreting Howie as Punch or Pulcinella allows his downfall to be read as twofold, both a result of his own ignorance disguised as righteousness, and his appeal to an authority that is not present on Summerisle. The enforcement of his own Christian values on the islanders who he views as beneath him only highlight his role in their plan, and his own appeal to his higher authority is ultimately what leads him to his incendiary fate. As Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) indicates, the “true” god is dead on Summerisle. Punch’s appeals to him mean nothing, another indication of his own intelligence revealing itself as woeful ignorance. Another important aspect of the Punch character is the adherence to costume and an understanding of the function of commedia dell’arte, where Punch originates. As with all characters in commedia dell’arte, Punch is a stock character whose personality is meant to be easily recognized and understood through his costume, a colorful harlequin outfit with skinny legs, a bulbous gut, and a sharp nose. Costume is synonymous with character, which is why the parallel between Pulcinella and Howie becomes clear when he dons the costume. However, it is the costume Howie wears before donning the Punch costume that paints the greater picture of The Wicker Man’s subversive messaging. Howie is a police officer, and spends nearly the film’s entire runtime wearing his uniform, which itself acts as a costume. Once he dons the visage of Punch and arrives at the Wicker Man to confront Lord Summerisle, it is revealed that since his arrival he has been playing Punch, and all of his actions have led to where he stands now. Thus, the audience is invited to apply this revelation to Howie’s entire time on the island.
Now, the costume of Punch becomes synonymous with that of a police officer, a different iteration of the same stock character. As a result, The Wicker Man finally shows its hand, revealing that the costume of Howie as a police officer and Howie as Punch are one and the same. With the synthesis of the two complete, the larger picture of the film’s messaging becomes clear: a warning sign to those who uphold the oppressive state of policing and imperial Christianity, led into the role of privileged simpleton by ideologies that delude them into false authority, and weaponize them against their own people and communities. ACAP: All Cops Are Punch.
Expanding this message to a larger, more modern scope, it is easy to see exactly who The Wicker Man seeks to satirize through its glorification of Howie, the modern Pulcinella. The exact people who would find solace in Howie’s “virtuous” fear of the islanders rather than laugh are the exact people who risk becoming, or have already become, Pulcinella themselves. What’s the real, concrete difference between Neil Howie and someone like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, or Charlie Kirk? They respond with the same terror and fervor Howie does to the same stimuli. Lil Nas X, using his “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” music video for a song about his sexuality to explore the Christian homophobic rhetoric often leveled at him and other LGBT+ people rouses cries of “Satanism!” and “Heathenry!” much like Howie’s reaction to the sex-positive education children on Summerisle receive. The satire of conservative ideology that The Wicker Man engages in points to a growing, concerning trend in conservative rhetoric: reduced to nothing but a culture war, anyone who hails themselves a savior of the “old-fashioned” way of life can rise to great power, regardless of their morals or ethics.
The comparisons between Howie, Pulcinella, and modern conservative rhetoric are clear: representative of justice and virtue in name alone, these forces seek to repress every experience that is not their own. They want power, and above that, control, even at the cost of infringing on the freedoms they hold so dear to enforce their will on others. Much like Neil Howie, modern conservatism can only delude itself so long before it must unmask itself and emerge from its stolen costume: ideological fascism, lashing out at whatever it claims not to understand in order to exert power over those it deems below itself.
