50 years on, many still carry a torch for The Wicker Man

The wonder and weirdness of the radical 1973 film has a strange effect on everyone who experiences it, writes Stephen Applebaum

On 21 June – the date of this year’s summer solstice – a 4K restoration of ‘The Wicker Man: The Final Cut’ will be released in cinemas nationally, for one night only (Studiocanal)

The Wicker Man is the film that refused to die. Greenlit by Peter Snell, a young production head at British Lion, who had “gone rogue”, according to one of the director’s sons, Justin Hardy, the film was hastily re-edited and slipped into UK cinemas in 1973 as the lesser half of a double bill with another Snell commission, Don’t Look Now.

The latter is a “proper masterpiece”, says Justin. However, 50 years later, it is his father Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer’s “odd genre mash-up of a film”, set on the fictional Scottish island of Summerisle, that is being celebrated and revamped for the 21st century.

On 21 June – the date of this year’s summer solstice – a 4K restoration of The Wicker Man: The Final Cut will be released in cinemas nationally, for one night only. Three days later, Musics from Summerisle, at the Barbican, will feature Lesley Mackie, who appeared in the film and sang on the soundtrack, as well as on the soundtrack CD, in the first authorised performance of almost all of the late composer Paul Giovanni's evocative music from the film.