‘The Wicker Man’: The Musical
by Tal Lavin
The Wicker Man (1973) is my favorite movie. Among its many contradictions and beauties, it proves that a musical—and the movie really is a musical at heart—can be completely terrifying.
The centrality of music in The Wicker Man is evident from the first scene: a seaplane swoops over the rugged landscape of the Hebrides, as a poignant arrangement of Robert Burns’s “Highland Widow’s Lament” pours out over the sunlit crags and the serge-grey water:
Oh, I am come to the low Countrie,
Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!
Without a penny in my purse,
To buy a meal to me.
The song, sung by Lesley Mackie, who plays Daisy in the film, instantly transfixes you with its lovely, strange steeliness. The unearthly music composed by Paul Giovanni and the group Magnet—a band put together from scratch and passion, like much else about the movie—weaves throughout its tight 90 minutes, building up the sense of a fleshed-out alternative reality, carved out from time, cut off by the sea. The soundtrack mixes snatches of nursery rhymes, British folk ballads, and original compositions with a calculated eeriness that makes the strange vision of Summerisle feel ancient. “Baa baa black sheep,” as a melody line out of context, or a brass-heavy rendition of “Willie O’Winsbury,” or the climactic, sabbat-like performance of “Sumer is icumen in” are the music of an old land and its lost denizens, haunted by their shades.
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