The Wicker Man is an astoundingly successful horror film. Using no gore whatsoever and no traditional shock tactics (nothing jumps out of the dark and yells "boo!"), it succeeded in transforming from a campy, amusingly weird film about a fish out of water into a shocking and unexpectedly moving horror film about faith. How it did it is unclear to me. Well into the film, when our intrepidly British hero has succeeded in tramping around the island telling everyone that they're mad pagans and threatening them with serious legal and Biblical repercussions, I was still mildly amused and weirded out by the proceedings. I can't pinpoint the exact moment when it turned dead serious; perhaps the horror of it was that it put off the distressing revelation until the bitter end. Watching the film is like being the butt of a practical joke gone horribly wrong.

I felt initially skeptical of what looked like a cheesy 1970s sort of nudie musical. Sergeant Howie (The Equalizer's Edward Woodward), a straight-laced and no-nonsense British investigator, arrives at Summerisle off the coast of Scotland to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He meets stone-faced resistance from the locals, all of whom deny that the missing girl in question actually exists, and all of whom alternately menace him and ignore him. One scene has him barging into the local bar and asking questions; the colorful locals, in the long tradition of movies about exotic places, burst into a spontaneous ribald song about the innkeeper's daughter Willow (played by Bond girl Britt Ekland, who should have had more ribald songs sung in her honor. Interestingly, her lines were dubbed by another actress because of her strong Swedish accent).

Howie is shocked and horrified by the townspeople's loose attitudes toward nudity and sex; one bizzare scene has him trying to sleep as Willow writhes in the nude (with a body double for certain shots) on the other side of the wall singing a provocative song (this was excised from the US theatrical release and the video version, and it really has to be seen to be believed). It's a nudie music video. This occurs just after Howie wanders out of the pub to find couples having sex in the fields. He finds evidence that the islanders are covering up the girl's disappearance; more upsetting to him, he discovers that they are pagans who celebrate May Day with more than parades. He confronts the leader of the island, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee, with a bad haircut), who tells him the island's bizzare history and warns him to get out of town before sundown. Things don't exactly work out that way. The increasingly crazy and horrifying finale, I will leave to you to discover.

Part of what makes the film so effective is the fact that most of the action takes place in the cold light of day. Most horror films confine their horrors to the night, where our instinctive fear of the dark and our imaginations can fill in the blanks. This one is matter-of-fact about everything: watch the second scene involving Howie's plane and the behavior of the villagers. They're not doing anything inherently scary; they're just watching him, and it's one of the creepiest scenes I have seen in a long time.

The rituals depicted in the film are apparently based on Iron Age tribal rituals; these give the film an almost documentary-like feel, as Howie stands in for a narrator on a tour of what Spring festivities might have looked like thousands of years ago. The script is literate and often surprisingly funny, many of the best lines coming from Christopher Lee, who brings a wry and understated menace to his part. Although the film starts off slowly, it deserves your patience.