You Love to See It: The Wicker Man

There’s something profoundly moving in the way Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) kneels at his bedside to say his evening prayers in Robin Hardy’s cult classic horror movie The Wicker Man. In his cotton pajamas, hair combed flat, Howie looks like nothing so much as a serious, frowning schoolboy — a not inaccurate representation of his prudish, moralistic, and oddly vulnerable way of moving through the world. Later, as he suffocates and burns within the smoldering edifice of the titular wicker man, he declaims another prayer at his killers in a voice first thunderous, then pleading. Again, it is a child’s prayer, no matter that the voice is a grown man’s. It is the Lord, he claims, who has decimated Summerisle’s crops. It is the Lord who will punish the villagers for their crime. It is the Lord who can offer him, Howie, succor in extremis.

Listen to the way Howie’s voice trembles when he says “Do not deliver me into the enemy's hands… or put me out of mind forever.” A child’s fear of a parent’s neglect, or perhaps a parent’s anger. The irony of the Sergeant’s appeal to the villagers on the basis of science and reason is sharp enough to cut, but beneath it is a tremendous empathy for the human forces which instill and maintain belief. Howie’s faith in the face of a full demonstration of religion’s cruel stupidity is heartbreaking. He has, in the end, no other comfort. Nothing else in which to take solace or believe. Howie believes in God because, although his culture and upbringing have convinced him affection is immoral and must be tightly controlled, he wants to believe that he’s loved.

Howie’s final prayer is beautiful not just because it’s childlike, or because Woodward invests it with such a depth of misery and terror that it feels frighteningly intimate, but because it is wholly genuine and unselfconscious. His only answer to a total loss of control is to pretend it isn’t happening, and his inability to sustain that fiction seamlessly for himself is crushing, a complex and deeply human conflict playing out in desperate real time on Howie’s sweating face. The way he clutches at the woven wicker of his prison as he sinks to its floor, as though by holding onto something real he can convince himself that resurrection really does await him, that his savior Christ will receive him with warm and loving arms.