The Wicker Man – Blood and Porridge

October 24, 2023October 24, 2023

Jim Mountfield takes to the trees

© Spiral Tower Press

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has been on a roll this month – which, appropriately enough, is October, the month of Halloween. Already in October 2023 he’s had short stories appear in the online publication Schlock! Webzine and in the collection Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023. Now he’s just had a third story, entitled The Shelterbelt, published in Issue 3 of the magazine Witch House.

As its title implies, The Shelterbelt concerns a plantation of trees grown next to a property to shield it against the elements. In the story, the property is a farm in a remote part of southern Scotland. I didn’t have to look far for inspiration for The Shelterbelt. In 1977, my parents sold our farm in Northern Ireland and purchased and moved to a new farm in southern Scotland, near the town of Peebles. But the steading we found ourselves living in was hardly ‘new’ – it was a dilapidated and bleak-looking place at the time, with scarcely a tree anywhere, which was unfortunate because the steading was in a north-south-running valley and in the pathway of any bad weather borne by the north wind. Several times during our first few winters there, we had to dig our way out from our front door, so heavily had snow been piled against it. How long ago that seems now in these globally-warmed times…

My Dad immediately decided to create a shelterbelt on the northern side of the steading. I still remember the day when he, my Mum and a good friend from Northern Ireland, Hugh Buchanon, planted the saplings. Maybe I remember it because I discovered then how seriously my Dad – who was normally relaxed and easy-going – took his work. He was very exacting. He was very particular about how far apart those saplings were placed – not too close, not too distant. After an hour of listening to him, my Mum and Hugh looked ready to plant him along with the trees.

Meanwhile, a literary influence for The Shelterbelt is the 1914 short story Ancient Lights by the author, broadcaster and occultist Algernon Blackwood. And I’d be lying if I said a certain 1973 movie, about an uptight, virginal, Free Presbyterian policeman investigating a possible case of human sacrifice on a remote Scottish island, didn’t provide a little inspiration too.

For more information about Witch House magazine, click here. And Issue 3, containing my story and a dozen others, can be downloaded here for free.

May 1, 2023May 13, 2023

Jim Mountfield gets something woolly for his 50th

© The Sirens Call Publications

Jim Mountfield, the pen-name under which I write horror fiction, has today had a new story published in the spring 2023 edition of the short-story and poetry ezine The Sirens Call. Entitled Wool, it’s set in rural Scotland in the near future and envisions a time when science has made agriculture – at least, agriculture where animals are reared for meat and wool – truly grotesque and nightmarish. The Sirens Call’s spring edition can be downloaded here.

According to my calculations, Wool is the 50^th story I’ve had published as Jim Mountfield. I came up with the name a dozen years ago, when I realised I had some good ideas for horror stories and wanted to put them down on paper, but was painfully aware that my real name ‘Ian Smith’ was hardly a memorable one for an author of scary fiction – or any sort of fiction, for that matter. While I was trying to think of a pseudonym, I noticed that I had playing in the background an album by the rock band Primal Scream. And Primal Scream’s bass player at the time was the affable Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, who’d earlier played for – and would later play for again – the legendary ‘Madchester’ band the Stone Roses. “Mountfield,” I thought, “what a cool surname!” Meanwhile, the ‘Jim’ part of ‘Jim Mountfield’ came easily, as ‘James’ is my middle name.

Looking back over the 50 stories that have appeared in print bearing Jim Mountfield’s name, I think the following ten are my favourites.

Laughing Dragon, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Flashes in the Dark in 2011, was a piece of flash fiction that featured a stained-glass window depicting a dragon and a man paranoid about the fact that his girlfriend was much younger than he was. Despite the story’s 1000-word length, I managed to fit in some brazenly scatological humour too. Laughing Dragon shouldn’t have worked, but I think it did, somehow.

© Midnight Street Press

The Next Bus appeared in issue 4 of the magazine Hellfire Crossroads in 2014. I had a lot of fun writing this story, which combines the misery of waiting for a bus that doesn’t seem to want to come with the terror of dealing with a knife-wielding psychopath at the bus-stop. I also really liked The Groove, which appeared in the subsequent issue of Hellfire Crossroads, because it wasn’t just about horror but about something else close to my heart, music. The story’s villainess was a scheming widow whose “CD collection consisted of just six titles: The Essential Mariah Carey, Phil Collins’ Hits, Robbie Williams’ Greatest Hits, Whitney Houston’s Ultimate Collection, Bryan Adams’ Best of Me and the musical soundtrack for Titanic.” Her evilness was such that she had her music-loving husband’s funeral defiled by the playing of Robbie Williams’ Angels (1997). Both issues of Hellfire Crossroads can be purchased here.

Ae Fond Kiss, also the title of a Robert Burns song, was about a circus, an automaton designed by Henri Maillardet and some teenagers holidaying on the coast of south-western Scotland. I didn’t include the next words of the song – “And then we sever…” – in the title, as that would have given away the ending. The story appears in the summer 2018 print edition of The Horror Zine, which can be bought here.

© The Horror Zine

The same summer saw the publication of In Hog Heaven in Aphelion. This story feels special to me because it was the first time I tried setting a supernatural story in Northern Ireland, the place where I’d spent my childhood. In Hog Heaven can be read here. In July the following year, Aphelion published my story They Draw You In, about a teacher doing some groundwork for a school trip in a small, dingy, provincial art gallery that displays some unusual paintings by an artist who was known too for his Aleister Crowley-type proclivities. Again, They Draw You In was one of those stories where the disparate elements seemed to work together nicely. It’s accessible here.

The webzine Horrified was under threat of closure last year but, happily, it’s still on the go. In November 2020, my story First Footers appeared in its collection Christmas – Horror Stories from Horrified: Volume 1. Not quite set at Christmas, First Footers had a pair of lads in the Scottish Highlands attempting to revive the old Scottish tradition of first-footing on New Year’s Eve and having a series of increasingly bizarre experiences. Like a lot of the stories in my top ten, I valued this one because it contained a fair amount of humour. I can’t find a link to the collection now, unfortunately, but my story Where the Little Boy Drowned, published on Horrified’s fiction page in January 2021, can be read here. The story of a man trapped in a hellish physical predicament, with the possibility that a vengeful ghost is lurking close by, Where the Little Boy Drowned received some good feedback from its readers.

© Horrified Magazine

March 2022 saw the publication of Never Tell Tales Out of School in Schlock! Webzine. This one felt close to my heart because it revisited my memories of school in the 1970s, which was ‘rough and tumble’ to say the least. Its plot had a troubled author returning to his old school, which is now ultra-child-safety-conscious, ultra-inclusive and ultra-politically-correct, hoping that they’ll stock his new book in their library, and then being tormented by visions of bullying he suffered there 45 years earlier. This edition of Schock! Webzine is available here.

Also partly set in the 1970s was my story Guising, which was printed in the Halloween 2022 issue of The Sirens Call. An account of some kids participating in the Scottish variation of trick-or-treating, back in the days when they could just go up to and knock on strangers’ front doors unaccompanied by an adult, I enjoyed writing this because I could tell the story through the kids themselves – whose grasp of what is going on is somewhat less-than-complete. Like the current issue of The Sirens Call, the Halloween 2022 issue is downloadable here.

Finally, I’m delighted that Jim Mountfield should be celebrating the publication of his 50^th story on May 1^st, May Day, an auspicious date in the horror-genre calendar. The climax of the greatest horror movie of all time, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), took place on this day, which is important in pagan, pre-Christian cultures because it falls halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and marks the beginning of summer. Come to think of it, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Wicker Man’s release. There’s that number again, 50…

© British Lion Films

May 27, 2022May 27, 2022

A Lee-centennial

© British Lion Films

The British actor Sir Christopher Lee, who was born on this day exactly 100 years ago, was a man who embodied evil to generations of film-goers. He played Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Scaramanga, Comte de Rochefort, Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Blind Pew, Saruman, Count Dooku, the Jabberwocky, the Devil and, in the 2008 adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, Death himself. But up until his passing in 2015, I didn’t so much regard him as the embodiment of evil as one of the coolest people on the planet.

Lee did a lot during his 93 years and not just in terms of acting – though his movie resume was awesome, with some 275 titles to his name by the time he entered his tenth decade.

He was, incidentally, an incredibly literary actor too, because his massive film and television CV contained adaptations of stories by Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl, Alexandre Dumas, Rider Haggard, Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Jules Verne. In real life, he was step-cousin of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming; and by the time Peter Jackson got around to filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2002-2004), he could boast that he was the only member of the movies’ cast and crew who’d actually met J.R.R. Tolkien. He was also good friends with Robert Bloch, author of Psycho (1959), the fabulous Ray Bradbury, and posh occult-thriller-writer Dennis Wheatley, whose potboiler The Devil Rides Out Lee would persuade Hammer Films to adapt to celluloid in 1968. And he was one of the last people alive who could claim to have met M.R. James, the greatest ghost story writer in English literature. As a lad Lee encountered James, who was then Provost of Eton College, when his family tried, unsuccessfully, to enrol him there. Lee obviously didn’t hold his failure to get into Eton against James because in 2000 he played the writer in the BBC miniseries Ghost Stories for Christmas.

Before getting into acting in the late 1940s, Lee did military service during World War II, which included attachments with the Special Operations Executive and the Long Range Desert Patrol , the forerunner to the SAS. He kept schtum about what he actually did with them. Decades later, though, he may have unintentionally dropped a hint about his secret wartime activities to Peter Jackson when, on set, he discreetly advised the Kiwi director about the sound a dying man would really make if he’d just had a knife planted in his back.

His first years as an actor did not see much success, due to his being too tall (six-foot-four) and too foreign-looking (he had Italian ancestry). During this period he at least learned how to swordfight, a skill he drew on when appearing in various low-budget swashbucklers. During the making of one such film, 1955’s The Dark Avenger, the famously sozzled Errol Flynn nearly hacked off Lee’s little finger; although later Lee got revenge when, during a TV shoot with the same actor, a slightly-misaimed sword-thrust knocked off Flynn’s toupee, much to the Hollywood star’s mortification and no doubt to everyone else’s amusement. Incidentally, I love the fact that Lee could boast of being the only actor in history who’d conducted sword fights with Errol Flynn and Yoda.

© 20^th Century Fox

And I’ve read somewhere that when he made the swashbuckler The Scarlet Blade for Hammer Films in 1963, Lee taught a young Oliver Reed the basics of sword-fighting. I’m sure fight-choreographer William Hobbs and the stunt crew who worked on The Three Musketeers a decade later quietly cursed Lee for this. (Lee starred alongside Reed in the film, playing the memorably eye-patched Comte de Rochefort.) From all accounts, the ever-enthusiastic Ollie threw himself into the Musketeers’ sword-fights like a whirling dervish, and eventually one stuntman had to ‘accidentally’ stab him in the hand and put him out of action before he killed someone.

In 1956 and 1957 Lee got two gigs for Hammer films that’d change his fortunes and make him a star – playing the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein and then, on the strength of that, Bram Stoker’s famous vampire count in Dracula. Apparently, Hammer wanted originally to hire the hulking comedic actor Bernard Bresslaw to play Frankenstein’s monster. I suppose there’s a parallel universe out there somewhere where Bresslaw actually got the job; so that the man we know as Little Heap in Carry On Cowboy (1965), Bernie Lugg in Carry On Camping (1969) and Peter Potter in Carry On Girls (1973) went on in that universe to play Count Dooku in the Star Wars movies and Saruman the White in the Lord of the Rings ones.

Playing Baron Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein and Van Helsing in Dracula was the legendary Peter Cushing and he and Lee would hit it off immediately, become best mates and make another 18 films together, in which for much of the time they did bad things to each other. As a mad-scientist-cum-asylum-keeper in The Creeping Flesh (1972), Lee brought a monster to life and then, after the monster had attacked Cushing and driven him insane with terror, he coolly incarcerated Cushing in his asylum. Whereas in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) Cushing chased him, as Dracula, through a prickly hawthorn bush – hawthorns are apparently harmful to vampires and the experience, Lee recalled in his autobiography Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977), left him ‘shedding genuine Lee blood like a garden sprinkler’ – before impaling him on a sharp, uprooted fence-post. Meanwhile, the 1972 British-Spanish movie Horror Express featured a decomposing ape-man fossil that’d come back to life, was possessed by an alien force and had the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs. It was such an evil motherf***er that Lee and Cushing had to join forces, for once, to defeat it.

© Granada Films

Lee was famously uncomfortable about being branded a horror-movie star and about being associated with Dracula, an association that might thwart his ambitions for a serious acting career. He did, though, play the character another six times for Hammer, and an eighth time in the Spanish production El Conde Dracula. Tweeting a tribute to him when he passed away, Stephen King said, “He was the King of the Vampires.” So sorry, Sir Christopher, but when the man who wrote Salem’s Lot (1975) says you’re the King of the Vampires, you’re the King of the Vampires.

As Dracula, he got to bite Barbara Shelley, Barbara Ewing, Linda Hayden, Anouska Hempel, Marcia Hunt, Caroline Munro and Valerie Van Ost. Last-minute interventions by Peter Cushing in Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) prevented him from biting Stephanie Beacham and Joanna Lumley, which must have been frustrating. Meanwhile, the 1965 movie Dracula, Prince of Darkness was the first really scary horror movie I ever saw, on TV, back when I was eight or nine years old. I’d watched old horror films made by Universal Studios in the 1940s, like House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), in which everything was discreetly black-and-white and bloodless, so I wasn’t prepared for an early scene in Dracula, Prince of Darkness where Lee / the count is revived during a ceremony that involves a luckless traveller (Charles Tingwell) being suspended upside-down over a coffin and having his throat cut. The sight and sound of the blood splattering noisily onto the supposedly dead vampire’s ashes traumatised me.

© Warner Pathé / Hammer Films

Thanks to Hammer’s success in the horror genre, the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s saw a boom in British, usually gothic, horror filmmaking. And during that boom, Lee did many memorable, often evil, things. He drove his car into Michael Gough and squidged off Gough’s hand in Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (1965). He forced Vincent Price to immerse himself in a vat of acid in Scream and Scream Again (1969). He turned up as a snobbish senior-civil-servant type and tormented Donald Pleasance in Deathline (1972).

Lee was probably Britain’s most linguistic actor, speaking German, French, Italian and Spanish and also knowing a bit of Swedish, Russian and Greek. Thus, he also found it easy to find employment making horror movies on mainland Europe, where the gothic tradition was raunchier, more lurid and looser in its plot logic than its counterpart in Britain. He worked with the Italian maestro Mario Bava in 1963’s The Whip and the Body and on several occasions with the fascinatingly prolific, but erratic, Spanish director Jess Franco. Despite Franco’s cheeky habit of shooting scenes with Lee and then inserting them into a totally different and usually pornographic movie – something Lee would only discover later, when he strolled past a blue-movie theatre in Soho and noticed that he was starring in something like Eugenie and the Story of her Journey into Perversion (1970) – Lee held the Spaniard in esteem and championed his work at a time it wasn’t fashionable to do so. Since his death in 2013, Franco’s reputation has improved and art-house director Peter Strickland’s movie The Duke of Burgundy (2014) is a tribute, in part, to him.

Franco directed the later entries in a series of movies about Fu Manchu that Lee made in the 1960s, in which he played Sax Rohmer’s supervillain in un-PC Oriental makeup and spent his time barking orders at Chinese minions, who were usually played by Burt Kwouk. As well as retaining some of the racism that was prominent in Rohmer’s books, the series generally wasn’t up to much in terms of quality. However, the film’s endings have always haunted me. Invariably, Fu Manchu’s secret headquarters would blow up and then Lee’s voice would boom imperiously through the smoke, “The world will hear of me again!”

© Eon Productions

In the early 1970s, Lee finally got opportunities to make the sort of films he wanted to make, including Richard Lester’s two Musketeers movies (1974 and 1975); the ninth official Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun (1975), in which he taunted Roger Moore, “You work for peanuts – a hearty well-done from Her Majesty the Queen and a pittance of a pension. Apart from that, we are the same. To us, Mr Bond. We are the best… Oh come, come, Mr Bond. You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”; and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), regarded by many as the best attempt at bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing super-sleuth to the screen.

In that latter film, Lee played Holmes’s snooty brother Mycroft. Lee also played Sherlock Holmes himself several times, including in a couple of early-1990s TV movies with Dr Watson played by the impeccable Patrick Macnee, whom decades earlier had been Lee’s schoolmate at Summer Fields School in Oxford. And he played Henry Baskerville in the 1959 Hammer adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which had Peter Cushing in the role of Holmes. But for some strange reason, nobody ever thought of casting Lee as Professor Moriarty.

In 1973, he also played Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, a film that needs no introduction from me. Actually, next year is the film’s fiftieth anniversary. I trust the Scottish Tourist Board will celebrate this fact on May 1^st, 2023, by lighting lots of wicker men, with lots of sanctimonious, virginal, Free Presbyterian policemen inside them, along the coasts of Scotland.

Later in the 1970s, no longer so typecast in horror movies and with the British film industry on its deathbed, Lee decamped to Hollywood. He ended up appearing in some big-budget puddings like dire 1977 disaster movie Airport 77 and Steven Spielberg’s supposed comedy 1941 (1979), but at least he was able to rub shoulders with icons such as Muhammad Ali and John Belushi. And he didn’t, strictly speaking, stop appearing in horror movies. He was in the likes of House of the Long Shadows (1982), The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985), The Funny Man (1994) and Talos the Mummy (1998). Amusingly, Lee usually explained this by arguing that these weren’t really horror films. The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf wasn’t a horror film? Aye, right.

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

Though he never relented in his workload, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Lee experienced a late-term career renaissance – no doubt because many of the nerdish kids who’d sneaked into cinemas or stayed up late in front of the TV to watch his old horror movies had now grown up, become major players in the film industry and were only too happy to cast him in their movies: Joe Dante, John Landis, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton. Hence his roles in two of the biggest franchises in cinematic history, the Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings / Hobbit ones, plus five movies directed by Burton.

When he was in his eighties, Lee must have wondered if there were any territories left for him to conquer – and he realised that yes, there was one. Heavy metal! He had a fine baritone singing voice but only occasionally in his film career, for example, in The Wicker Man and The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), did he get a chance to show it off. In the mid-noughties, however, he started recording with symphonic / power-metal bands Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar and soon after he was releasing his own metal albums such as Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, which had contributions by guitarist Hedras Ramos and Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner. He also released two collections of Christmas songs, done heavy-metal style. The festive season will never seem the same after you’ve heard Lee thundering his way through The Little Drummer Boy with electric guitars caterwauling in the background.

© Charlemagne Productions Ltd

Obviously, the heavy metal community, which sees itself as a crowd of badasses, was flattered when the cinema’s supreme badass – Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, etc. – elected to join them and they welcomed Lee with open arms. They even gave him, as the genre’s oldest practitioner, the Spirit of Metal Award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods ceremony in 2010.

So: singing heavy metal, speaking eight languages, being perhaps the 20^th century’s greatest screen villain and, probably, bayoneting Nazis to death. Was there anything this man couldn’t do? Well, it seems the only thing he couldn’t quite manage was to live forever. Mind you, for someone who spent his cinema career dying – even when he penned his autobiography in his mid-fifties, he reckoned he’d been killed onscreen more than any other actor in history – but kept coming back, it feels a bit odd to be writing about Christopher Lee in the past tense.

Actually, if anybody wants to congregate in a Carpathian castle after dark and perform a blood-soaked ritual to resurrect the great man, I’m up for it.

From the Independent

October 5, 2021

Jim Mountfield’s folky fortieth

© Horrified Magazine

My horror-writing alter-ego Jim Mountfield has just had a short story published in the new anthology Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror.

‘Horrified’ refers to Horrified Magazine, a webzine devoted to British films, television and literature in the horror genre. The magazine’s current literary editor William J. Brown, its former literary editor John Clewarth and its editor-in-chief Jae Prowse have put this collection together. Meanwhile ‘Folk Horror’ refers – quoting its entry in Wikipedia – to “a subgenre of horror… which uses elements of folklore to invoke fear in its audience. Typical elements include a rural setting and themes of isolation, religion, the power of nature, and the potential darkness of rural landscapes.” Or as Jae Prowse puts it more poetically in his introduction to the collection, it’s macabre storytelling with evocations “of briar and bramble, of the quiet eeriness of rurality, of secrets buried in the earth, and of the fiend in the furrows.”

According to my calculations, my story in Folk Horror is the 40^th one I’ve had published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield. Entitled Bottled Up, it’s set in East Anglia, a place where I lived in 1998, again in 2002, and then again in 2008-2009, and a place that ranks as perhaps my favourite part of England. While a lot of examples of folk horror have strange rural communities welcoming hapless outsiders into their ranks, for nefarious reasons – see Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) or Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) – Bottled Up is about an ancient sect that’s just fearful of outsiders and exists to keep them at bay, something that might resonate in the 2021 Britain of Brexit and Covid-19.

Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror is now available at the Horrified Magazine shop and can be ordered here. Incidentally, the magazine’s previous collection, Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 1): Christmas is still available, contains another Jim Mountfield story called First Footers, and might be a timely purchase as Christmas 2021 approaches.

August 9, 2020August 10, 2020

An appointment with Willow’s Song

This is a revision of an entry that first appeared on this blog on – appropriately – May 1^st, 2014. Be warned that it’s packed with spoilers about The Wicker Man (1973).

The Scottish-American singer and actress Annie Ross died last month at the age of 89. Even if she hadn’t been a celebrated jazz chanteuse, she could boast of leading a varied life. She worked as a child actress in the USA, became a jazz artist in Europe as an adult, became a familiar face on British TV in the late 1970s, and finally re-established herself in the USA and got citizenship there in 2001. She was both the sister of the well-known Scottish comedian and actor Jimmy Logan (whose performance as Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer I was lucky enough to see at Aberdeen’s His Majesty’s Theatre in the mid-1980s) and the one-time lover of a rather different type of comedian, Lenny Bruce. And she acted in films as wildly assorted as Peter Collinson’s Straight On Till Morning (1972), Richard Lester’s Superman III (1983), Danny DeVito’s Throw Momma from the Train (1987), Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993) and, yes, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case 2 (1990) and Basket Case 3: The Progeny (1991).

She was also tasked with the unusual job of making Britt Ekland sound Scottish in my all-time favourite horror movie, 1973’s The Wicker Man. Yes, whenever Ekland opens her mouth in the role of Willow Macgregor, the landlord’s daughter at the portentously titled Green Man Hotel on the remote Scottish island of Summer Isle, it’s not actually her Swedish-inflected tones you hear but those of Annie Ross instead.

Curiously, despite Ross’s famous singing talent, she didn’t get to voice Ekland during the scene that required her character to break into song. At that point, supposedly, Ekland was dubbed by another singer, Rachel Verney. (I’ve heard claims that Annie Ross did perform the song as well, but the weight of evidence seems to be against that.)

Anyway, this gives me a chance to talk about the song sung in that scene, Willow’s Song, sometimes known too as How Do. The luscious Willow Macgregor sings it one night when she’s trying to lure the Green Man’s current guest, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) into her room for some hanky-panky. Howie, a policeman sent to Summer Isle to investigate the disappearance of a local schoolgirl, is a devout Free Presbyterian and is already unimpressed at finding that everyone on the island is a practising pagan. His strict Christian principles prevent him from answering Willow’s call. Just about.

14 years ago, I was working in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, whose small enclave of expatriates, mostly diplomats and aid workers, held a weekly cinema evening. Noticing that the next such evening fell on October 31^st, i.e. Halloween, I dusted down my DVD of The Wicker Man and persuaded Pyongyang’s little cinema society that this would be a good time to watch a classic horror movie. For most of its running time, the audience seemed pleasantly bemused by the film. They enjoyed a good chuckle at how the pagan islanders led the stick-up-his-arse Howie on a merry dance around Summer Isle, taunting him with their innuendo-laden folk songs and their unconventional sense of public decency (e.g. organising mass couplings in the local graveyard, dancing naked through flames in the centre of stone circles). But the people sitting closest to me kept leaning over and whispering, “Isn’t this supposed to be a horror film?”

Then the film’s final ten minutes arrived. Howie discovers what the islanders have planned for him at the climax of their May Day celebrations – it involves ‘an appointment with the wicker man’ – and the room fell silent. The silence continued for several minutes after the film ended, broken only by the voice of a Scotswoman who worked at the British Embassy. She kept wailing to everyone around her, “Scotland isn’t really like that! Scotland isn’t really like that!”

Later, a Dutch lady whose husband headed the Red Cross and Crescent’s operations in Pyongyang came over to me with big smile on her face. “I really liked that,” she said. “But you know, most of the film felt like a musical to me.”

And indeed, one reason why The Wicker Man is so special to me is its music. Willow’s Song is the centrepiece of its soundtrack but the film is choc-a-bloc with gorgeous and haunting folk tunes. Meanwhile, the lack of music is a reason why the 2006 American remake directed by Neil Labute and starring Nicholas Cage sucks, although, to be honest, there are many reasons why it sucks.

The man responsible for the original Wicker Man’s music was New Yorker Paul Giovanni, who assembled a number of songs, some self-composed, some traditional folk songs, and performed them with the folk-rock band Magnet. Clearly a renaissance man, Giovanni was also a playwright and actor during his career. Tragically, in 1990, he died from pneumonia, a complication caused by an HIV/AIDS infection.

As well as showcasing the film’s most famous song, the sequence in which Willow Macgregor sings has some notoriety because it shows her performing a nude dance as well. (Having withstood Willow’s saucy enticements, Howie discovers later that the episode was arranged by the crafty pagan islanders to determine whether or not he’s a virgin and hence suitable sacrificial material.) This is probably Britt Ekland’s greatest cinematic moment. Mind you, her only other well-known major role is in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), so there isn’t much competition.

Come to think of it, though, Ekland was pregnant during the shooting of The Wicker Man, so it isn’t her naked body that we see cavorting during the scene. The filmmakers hired a stripper to act as her ‘body double’ and, in at least one interview with her I’ve read, Ekland has remarked cattily about the size of the double’s bum. So with Rachel Verney (or possibly Annie Ross) doing her singing, and a stripper doing her dancing, Britt’s greatest cinematic moment doesn’t actually have much Britt in it.

It was ignored at the time of its release but, over the years, the prestige of The Wicker Man has grown. And as I’ve said, much of its mystique is due to its music. Willow’s Song in particular has received much attention and a number of artists have had a go at covering it. The most famous version is probably that by cinematically inspired electronica band the Sneaker Pimps. It appears on their acclaimed 1996 album Becoming X, for which they recruited female singer Kelli Dayton (now Kelli Ali) to do vocals. Afterwards, the band ungentlemanly gave Dayton the shove, claiming ‘her voice was no longer considered suitable for their new music’. And has anyone heard anything of the Sneaker Pimps since then? No. Thought not. Incidentally, if you have the right edition of Becoming X you’ll find as a bonus track a version of Gently Johnny, the second-best song that Paul Giovanni / Magnet recorded for The Wicker Man. The scenes with Gently Johnny were chopped out of the film’s original print but years later were restored to the Director’s Cut of it.

The Sneaker Pimps’ version is still recognisably the movie’s Willow’s Song, although it has a lush, synthesised sheen. Filmmaker Eli Roth liked their take on it so much that he incorporated it into the soundtrack of his notorious 2006 ‘torture porn’ epic Hostel – the Wicker Man reference signifying that Something Bad is going to happen to Roth’s own hapless protagonists. I don’t find Hostel as objectionable as other people do, but nonetheless I feel that the delicate, pleading tone of Willow’s Song is incongruous in a movie that’s basically about dumb American backpackers getting tortured to death. Interestingly, both The Wicker Man and Hostel go against the philosophy of conventional, conservative horror movies, like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1980), which holds that only characters who hang onto their virginity escape being victims, while promiscuous characters die horribly. In The Wicker Man, it’s the only adult virgin on the island who goes up in smoke at the end, while in Hostel, it’s the randiest backpacker who survives the carnage.

From genius.com

Before the Sneaker Pimps’ version, in 1991, indie band the Mock Turtles did a take on Willow’s Song – I haven’t been able to find an online recording of it to link to – while a dozen years later soulful British rock band the Doves attempted it too. Both versions are distinctive thanks to the fact that a man, not a woman, does the singing. The song was also covered in 2006 by Scottish folk singer Isobel Campbell (best known for her collaborations with Mark Lanegan), who unsurprisingly took a more traditional, folky approach to it, and in 2007 by indie-dance-hip-hop group the Go! Team.

Definitely worth mentioning is a version of Willow’s Song by the eerie, theremin-loving combo Spacedog, who decided to go for it and deconstructed it. They mixed in a sample from another classic British horror film, the ‘power of the will’ monologue delivered by actor Charles Gray while he played the villain in 1968’s The Devil Rides Out, and the results are impressively phantasmagorical.

Willow’s Song has a Wikipedia entry that lists a dozen other versions, which isn’t bad for a song that accompanies a scene in which a woman tries to seduce an older, unprepossessing man but is rebuffed, and in a film that baffled its studio, got chopped to pieces before its release and was, initially, financially unsuccessful and critically shunned. Perhaps it’s the strange juxtaposition of elements that makes the song memorable. Its sound is gorgeously ethereal and delicate but, when you listen to the lyrics, you realise it’s pretty bawdy too. Willow promises Howie “a stroke as gentle as a feather,” and later boasts, “How a maid can milk a bull! And every stroke a bucketful.”

Come to think of it, the contrasts in the song are similar to the contrasts in The Wicker Man itself, a film packed with humour, music and cheerful lewdness but ending with a horrific act of cruelty – contrasts that have ensured the movie lives on in Britain’s cinematic consciousness.