A Mystery to the Key
Today, The Wicker Man (1973) is recognized as a unique achievement of British genre cinema of the 1970s, but its history reads like a series of contradictions and anomalies, making the survival and the subsequent success of this faulty masterpiece about a “Christian copper” who gets caught in the sacrificial trap of modern-day pagans from Summerisle perhaps even more surprising. In the text, we highlight a perspective that allows us to read the film (and the character of Sgt. Howie) primarily as an expression of the Christian reaction to a decade that took away its moral monopoly in society.
The integral (Slovenian) version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!