Wicker Man 1973 Quotes

Despite all the solo vocals, each using the others as a back-up group, the White Album still sounds haunted by memories of friendship—that “dreamlike state” they could still zoom into hearing each other sing. They translated Rishikesh into their own style of English pagan pastoral—so many talking animals, so many changes in the weather. One of my favorite British songwriters, Luke Haines from the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, once told me in an interview that his band was making “our Wicker Man album.” He was miffed I had no idea what he meant. “You can’t understand British bands without seeing The Wicker Man. Every British band makes its Wicker Man album.” So I rented the classic 1973 Hammer horror film, and had creepy dreams about rabbits for months, but he’s right, and the White Album is the Beatles’ Wicker Man album five years before The Wicker Man, a rustic retreat where nature seems dark and depraved in a primal English sing-cuckoo way. They also spruced up their acoustic guitar chops in India, learning folkie fingerpicking techniques from fellow pilgrim Donovan, giving the songs some kind of ancient mystic chill.

Sixty years after Frazer’s Golden Bough, the poet Robert Graves wrote The White Goddess, a book entirely made up of delightful nonsense about pagan rituals and asserting that the death-and-resurrection mummers plays were ‘the clearest survivals of the pre-Christian religion’. This in turn inspired Sylvia Plath, who found herself identifying with Grave’s goddess – a sister of Holda – who he put at the centre of it all. It inspired books like Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, the children’s story from 1973 about the dark, pagan magic that bleeds through into Christmas and midwinter. Plenty of our most beloved horror stories are based on these ideas too, from The Wicker Man to Midsommar and, arguably, the entire genre of folk horror.