A global search for the full-length version of Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult horror classic “The Wicker Man” has turned up a print of the cut he made with the American distributor Abraxas.
It was discovered by StudioCanal, which will restore and re-release a fresh edition of the film in the UK on September 27. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow on October 14 to celebrate the 40th anniversary, reports Screen Daily.
“We decided to check the Harvard archives in the US to see if they had anything,” the movie’s Facebook page reported. “We were very excited to hear that they did have a print, which they measured and informed us was 91½ minutes long! The print came into their collection in the ’90s from a private collector and had been in cold storage since 2004.”
The 83-year-old British director announced the news on a Facebook video yesterday. “This version will — optimistically — be known as the Final Cut,” he said with a faint smile.
It may be “final,” but it will almost certainly not be definitive. Hardy’s original cut (“the long version”) was 99 minutes long, though he has sometimes (and possibly erroneously) referred to the running time as 102 or 103 minutes. An 87-minute cut (“the short version”) was released in the UK as a B-feature on the same program as Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now.”
As a supernatural double bill, this has never been surpassed in English-language cinema — notwithstanding that “The Wicker Man”’s Celtic pagan rituals (and concomitant sexual exploitation) are entirely man-made. I wrote at length about the film here. It almost certainly influenced the nightmarish witch coven sequence of Ben Wheatley’s “Kill List” (2011), as Michael Reeves’s Civil War horror film “Witchfinder General” (1968, aka “The Conqueror Worm”) appears to have influenced Wheatley’s current “A Field in England.”
Since Hardy in his YouTube announcement is referring to the 95-minute Abraxas Cut (known as the “middle version” and sometimes described as 96 minutes long), “Wicker Man” diehards hoping to see the 99-minute cut will still feel short-changed. The middle version was issued to acclaim in the US in January 1979. The long version was available on VHS from Media Home Entertainment and later Magnum in the US in the 1980s and early ’90s, and can still occasionally be found on eBay.
The restoration holds promise, however, and a fresh generation of viewers is likely to be intrigued by the movie’s eeriness and perhaps more troubled than titillated by its intimations of depravity — and the way a Hebridean community’s conspiracy based on folkloric traditions elicits the paranoia of the mainland policeman (Edward Woodward) who has shown up to investigate a girl’s disappearance. Is the whole thing his fantasy — the return of the repressed?
No mention is made in current reports of the supposedly extant one-inch NTSC video copy of the long version that the UK producers had sent Roger Corman in 1973. Corman, who had expressed interest in distributing the film to the US drive-in market via his New World company, proposed 13 minutes worth of cuts to its owners, resulting in the short UK version; his print had disappeared by 2001.
The history of “The Wicker Man”’s three versions and how they differ can be read at Steve Phillips’s website, which features good stills reproductions. An urban rumor has it that 386 cans of Hardy’s raw location footage ended up as landfill in the building of the M3 motorway in southern England. The British film industry is not believed to be sponsoring an archaeological dig for them.