Deadlights: Oh, the Humanity!

Perhaps the most elementally upsetting concept in horror film is one human doing terrible things to another. Demons, zombies, vampires, and other creatures of the night prey on the living by nature, but human on human violence is outside the logical structure of the food chain and can force us into contact with a variety of uncomfortable truths about the ways we interact with one another. In Robin Hardy's seminal 1973 folk horror flick The Wicker Man a group of pagans living on a private island off the coast of England lure in and entrap an English police officer, Sergeant Neil Howie, with the intent of sacrificing him to win back the favor of their gods and restore their once-bountiful harvest.

This is, as Howie himself screams at the islanders as they drag him to his death, complete nonsense. Nothing in the film suggests that the islanders' beliefs are any more linked to reality than Howie's staunch Catholic prudishness is based in some kind of objective truth, but nevertheless their fantasies have an edge sharp enough to kill. How much of our lives are spent surrounded by and participating in equally senseless systems of thought? How many of us live in misery because of what we were taught as children by people who in their own childhoods learned the same dogmatic tenets from their elders, and so on and so on. 

This idea that our irreconcilable beliefs could lead as far as ritual murder may seem far-fetched at first, and it's assuredly a lofty place to look for horror, but sit with the concept and it becomes less absurd with every passing moment. What is the function of state execution? Why do we go to war? The Wicker Man looks to the bloody riddle of human nature to inspire dread, presenting our own world to us in terms just different enough that it takes a while to recognize what's happening. The citizens of Summerisle aren't doing anything the nations of the Western world haven't. Kill these witches and the crops will grow again. Murder these rebels and crime will vanish out of fear of the law. It happens every day.

Hardy's film shows us what is in a way the ultimate terror, that sometimes basically good groups of people absorb as fact some insane precept which drives them into inevitable violent conflict with others. When Howie cries out to God to save him from Hell as flames climb the titular effigy at the film's climax he's as fully and flagrantly irrational as the pagans swaying in a song line around his funeral pyre, and no less sure of himself than they are. The universe in his mind and the universe in theirs cannot be brought together. That poisonous certainty, that built-in excuse to crush the Other and consume them as you would any other resource, is part of the fundament on which horror itself stands.