Beware of May Day says this cult classic film that just turned 50

Welcome, May Day!

Maypoles! Madrigals! Flowers, festooning the hair, worn in garlands, gathered in picturesque baskets.

Best of all, human sacrifice! Screaming victims, burned alive in a gigantic wicker effigy of a man, as the crowds joyously sing and chant!

If that's not your picture of May Day then you haven't seen "The Wicker Man," the 1973 cult thriller that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

"It's a perennial favorite," said Nick Prueher, curator of Kim's Video, New York's fabled cult film destination, which has returned after a long hiatus to lower Manhattan (it's now part of the Alamo Drafthouse location on Liberty Street). You can rent the movie there for free. It's also available for purchase or streaming in multiple locations.

"I rewatched it in the last five years, and it still has that haunting quality," Prueher said. "It's a strange movie. It ends on a down note, and leaves you with a lot of questions. It starts slow and sort of envelopes you. It's a mood piece, for sure."

Queen of the May

Offbeat, oddball, creepy — "The Wicker Man" is all of that. But it's also weirdly seasonal. It's one of a handful of works (Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" is another) that looks at the pagan origins of our innocent spring customs.

Anthony Shaffer ("Sleuth"), who wrote the screenplay, did his research into bonfire-jumping and maypole dancing. His mythical Summerisle, off the coast of Scotland, where the old ways still live, and where a policeman (Edward Woodward) goes to investigate the disappearance of a little girl, is — among other things — an excuse for a May Day primer.

"Can anyone tell me what the Maypole represents?" a teacher (Diane Cilento) asks her grade-school class in the film. "Phallic symbol!" the kids chirrup happily.

Did the Druids actually burn people in wicker cages? Questionable. The main evidence comes from Julius Caesar: "Figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers [wicker] they fill with living men, which being set on fire, the men perish enveloped in the flames," he wrote in his "Commentaries on the Gallic War," 49 B.C. But it's not clear that he actually saw this.

Nevertheless, the idea has been immortalized in pop culture. Not just in "The Wicker Man" and its not-too-good remake (2006), but also in such events as the Burning Man Festival, in recorded tributes by Iron Maiden, Radiohead, Sneaker Pimps, Isobel Campbell, and in a Scottish band that called itself Summerisle.

In 2018, a Wicker Man roller coaster opened at Alton Towers, an English theme park.

"There's certainly a cult following for this film, not nearly as strong here as in the U.K.," Neil LaBute, director of the remake, told The Record in 2006.

Under the radar

How did a film about a cult become, itself, the ultimate cult film?

Such reputations start underground, of course. Often, after the movie itself is deliberately buried.

That's "The Wicker Man" — launched with high hopes by its director, Robin Hardy, and its star, Christopher Lee, who had pushed to get it made (he later called it the best film he ever did).

Its studio, British Lion, begged to differ.

One of the 10 worst movies he'd ever seen, said studio head Michael Deely. What was this weird mishmash of horror, sex, anthropology, and '70s folk rock on the soundtrack?

What was Christopher Lee, the star of "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" films, doing in a kilt?

The studio chopped it up, removing 20 minutes of footage, stuck it at the bottom half of a double bill, released it on Dec. 6, 1973, and waited for it to die.

It didn't.

But where's the rest of it?

People slowly discovered the strange movie, and — mutilated though it was — fell under its spell. In 1977, Cinefantastique magazine called it "the 'Citizen Kane' of horror films." In 2004, Total Film magazine ranked it the sixth greatest British film ever made.

"I think the origin story is always part of it," Prueher said. "The more it's buried, the more you want to see it."

The fact that it had been butchered by the studio made it, like Erich von Stroheim's "Greed" and Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," a cause celebre — and the hunt for the missing footage became an obsession with fans.

American director Roger Corman was rumored at one time to have the only complete print. Others said that the original negative was lost forever, buried — like a Jersey gangster — in the supports of the the M4 London-South Wales Motorway. Several "definitive" versions have been released on video and DVD, the most recent in 2013.

In any edition, "The Wicker Man" is worth seeing (note for parents — there is some rather graphic sex). You could even make it a part of your May Day celebration.

Just don't get carried away.

"Maybe if you're at home you could build a little toothpick man and do your own effigy," Prueher said. "On a smaller scale."

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: The Wicker Man: There's no day like May Day, says this cult classic