Whether Grigsby’s residence in a small and remote Iowa town with an unusual mid-summer celebration influenced his avocation as a scholar of a film genre without honor, the so-called folk-horror movie, is a matter of conjecture. But, even the most skeptical of observers, must concede that the question has some small merit. Was there something about the summer festivities celebrated in Hanlontown, Iowa, Grigsby’s natal village, that developed in him a taste for the outre, the eccentric and the bizarre?
I first encountered Grigsby’s declarations on the genre of “folk-horror” when researching this note. Consulting a horror-film website on the subject of “folk-horror”, named Witcher Words (a reference to a popular 2019 Netflix television show), I noticed a series of annotations that far surpassed the norm with respect to cogency, wit, and, even, a kind of literary flair. To put it simply, among the dross of fan-boy postings on the site, those associated with the so-called “Wizard of Hanlontown”, the moniker under which he displayed his cogitations, were gems of lapidary irony and critical acumen. A couple of clicks on my laptop brought me face-to-face with Quentin Grigsby, an inhabitant of rural Iowa, and, apparently, an expert on folk horror.
Mr. Grigsby affirmed that the genre of “folk horror” was initiated by three movies produced in England under the auspices of Hammer Studios, now more than a half-century in the past. These films, central to Grigsby’s analysis were Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). Mr. Grigsby displayed encyclopedic knowledge of the genre citing as precedents for this trilogy, films such as Carl Dreyer’s eerie Vampyr (1932), chronicling a demented community occupying a grist-mill haunted by vampires and several anthropology documentaries, including Jean Rouch’s Le Maitres Fou (“The Mad Masters”, 1955), a cinematic essay on the strange rites of the Hauka cultists in Ghana. From these citations, it was clear to me that Quentin Grigsby was equipped with an encyclopedic knowledge of film and a flexible, adventurous imagination. I was gratified, therefore, when Mr. Grigsby responded to my email and commenced an electronic correspondence with me. I am indebted to him for many of the observations set forth in his note.
In our cyber-exchanges, we exchanged observations as to the much vexed question of the origins of folk horror. Of course, such inquiries encompass a field virtually unlimited unless a working definition for the genre is agreed-upon. To that end, I proposed that “folk horror” was defined as narratives in which an interloper encounters archaic and atavistic rites, usually of a grotesque or uncanny nature, persisting in some remote or isolated place. Generally, these stories involve the interloper, the “naive eye” of an outsider, discovering sacral practices that involve threats to the protagonist or others. In some cases, anachronistic rituals are efficacious in summoning demonic presences that influence the protagonist and affect the narrative. In other instances, the efficacy of these religious or superstitious practices is uncertain except that the sacraments themselves may involve mutilation, injury, or even death to the victims of these rites. In most examples, an outsider or stranger to the rituals enacted serves as the reader’s (or viewer’s) introduction to the dangers and horrors attendant upon the community’s practices. Two examples will suffice to delimit the genre: in Ari Aster’s 2019 Midsommar, a film avowedly influenced by The Wicker Man, a married couple vacations in Sweden’s far north, interacting with a cult that promotes various kinds of perverse sexual practices, elder suicide, (Thalaikoothal in Tamil or self-inflicted senicide) and human sacrifice. The movie proposes that the cult’s grotesque rites respond to a need in one of the characters who seems to joyously affirm her membership in the sect at the end of the picture. Another example is The Seventh Victim, a film produced by Val Lewton during World War Two involving a sect of devil worshipers residing in Greenwich Village. This movie, of course, spawned Rosemary’s Baby, a film with a similar premise (these devil worshipers have as their domicile the Dakota condominium on Manhattan’s upper West side), albeit with a gynecological/obstetrical aspect as well.
Literature, Mr. Grigsby, observed provides us with several precursors to this genre: my interlocutor asked if I had read Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan or Hawthorne. Of course, I had some passing familiarity with Hawthorne’s writing but nothing beyond vague surmise about Morton. “You should study him,” Grigsby admonished in an email: “Philip Roth says his face should be carved on Mount Rushmore.” Morton, it seems, was an Anglican libertine from Devon who established a colony near present-day Quincy, Massachusetts. The colony was permissive in its morality, established peaceful relations with the Indians in the area and, indeed, encouraged sexual liaisons with them. Morton had a 80 foot tall May Pole erected in the center of his town and crowned the erection with the horns of a stag. The colonists danced around the May Pole, celebrating rites sacred to Bacchus, Priapus, and Hymen. Needless to say the local Puritans were outraged and William Bradford called Thomas Morton “the lord of misrule.” John Endicott led a troop of Puritans who raided the colony, tore down its May Pole claiming it was the “calf of Horeb” and burnt the town’s granaries. In the end, the colony failed and Morton returned to Devon to write his history entitled New English Canaan published in 1637. All sorts of rumors circulated as to the wicked debauchery and strange rituals celebrated at Merry Mount. Two-hundred years later, memories of the ill-fated colony inspired Hawthorne at least twice: he published in Twice-Told Tales an essay on the colony called “The May-Pole at Merry Mount” and, then, later seems to have adverted to legends about the place in his famous story “Young Goodman Brown.” (I recalled that Young Goodman Brown, an optimistic and forward-looking youth living in a Puritan village wanders into the devil-haunted woods and encounters a sort of Black Sabbath in which all of the leading members of his town are participants together with Indians wearing masks and horns. The scene shocks him and exposes the hypocrisy of the pious people in the colony and his life is forever marred by the experience.) Of course, H.P. Lovecraft in many of his stories and short novels suggests the presence of pagan cults celebrating horrific rites in the tangled and whippoorwill-haunted forests of the Berkeley Hills of Massachusetts. In several of those stories, Lovecraft imagines a “cult of Dagon”, the sea monster, worshiped in nocturnal sacraments at blood-stained altars. This details seems a distant memory of Morton’s Merry Mount – when Endicott tore down the May Pole, he reported that he was destroying a temple consecrated to Dagon.
Of course, Mr. Grigsby continued, this specific streak of the weird and uncanny could be traced through Arthur Machen, the Victorian writer famous for his tales of the “white people,” a race of malign fairies living among the caves and rocks of Wales and worshiped by the autochthonous folk in those isolated bluffs and valleys. Grigsby asked if I recalled Shirley Jackson’s once well-known short story, “The Lottery”. In that tale, the inhabitants of a village celebrate an annual ritual in which one of their townsfolk, selected by lottery, is stoned to death by the other members of the village. Mr. Grigsby said that the story was once a staple of High School literature text-books. “This was before those books became clogged with GLBT+ confessionals and race-baiting ethnic identity screeds, all concomitant to the ongoing White Genocide”, Mr. Grigsby wrote, a sentiment that I thought somewhat problematic. This note is not the place to unravel the entirety of Mr. Grigsby’s theories and conjectures as to the source of “folk horror”, the origins of the genre and its various transmutations. It suffices to say that he responded to each of my inquiries with forceful and well-researched replies and was not without certain idiosyncratic opinions some of which I found charming, although others were grim and repellant.
Needless to say, I was intrigued by my remarkable correspondent and suggested that we meet in person. Hanlontown, the hamlet where Quentin Grigsby lived, was only forty minutes by asphalt highway from my home and, after some negotiations as to time and date, I undertook to travel to see my informant on the subject of “folk horror.”
Hanlontown turned out to be less than an inhabited intersection, and, indeed, once descried, had something of the character of a ruined place, a ghost town far out on the prairies whispering with the wind. The village was not apparent from the State Highway, its prospect concealed behind a bombastic steel screen of enormous, fat-bellied grain bins. The bins formed a sort of metal wall to the north of the town and one entered the place through a slit in that steel escarpment, passing between the towering structures linked by millwork catwalks and augers as if through a gate. The village consisted of a single wide street angling toward a distant furrow filled with dense woods. Two banks stood apart from one another, once competitors for business, they were now competing only in their last dash toward total desuetude. The two crumbling heaps of brick facing each other stood next to a tavern with boarded plywood windows on its second level and a couple of Quonset huts once devoted to some kind of cottage industry but now abandoned. Some houses of wounded appearance were scattered about the main street, half-hidden by disconsolate trees, much abused, it seemed, by strong winds and lightning blasts. As soon as I entered onto Main Street, an elderly gent driving a silent golf cart appeared on my tail, escorting me into town. I drove slowly past the wreckage to the place where the lane central to the hamlet, corkscrewed down a steep hill to wooded hollow wherein, I supposed, a river flowed past the place. Indeed, a couple hundred yards away, I glimpsed some cyclopean blocks forming concrete steps down to the side of stream where a white pennant of water foamed over an ancient dam. By this time, another golf cart, also piloted by an old man with a white beard, had made an appearance and, now, the two conveyances flanked my SUV, following me at a respectful, but attentive distance. I turned around, passed the ruins of a creamery with a strange tin cupola shaped like an arrowhead, and, then, located Mr. Grigsby’s abode. He occupied the lower level of what had once been a small elementary school built a hundred years ago for generations of children now slumbering in some rural cemetery at the end of a gravel road. The sides of his domicile had sprouted several great, disfigured satellite dishes, two of them stenciled with the cryptic number “17". The satellite dishes were like immense fungi rooted in the crumbling brick of the abandoned school. As I approached the decaying structure, Quentin Grigsby appeared on a lathe porch appended to the building. He saluted the honor guard of golf carts that accompanied me – now, another two joined the previous couple. The old men saluted back to him with a military demeanor and, then, turned away to vanish into the undergrowth surrounding the dirt lanes comprising the rest of the town.
Mr. Grigsby was a nondescript fellow of uncertain age, burly with a beard that seemed to have slipped from his pinkish, moist face down below his chin to adorn his neck with tendrils of whisker. It was a late afternoon in May that was unseasonably warm and he was wearing a tee-shirt bearing an inscription in letters that were either Sanskrit or Hebrew. The tee-shirt wasn’t tucked into his Bermuda shorts that clung to his hips courtesy of hemp suspenders. He was wearing sandals that exposed his feet, deformed by great claws of toe-nail. His face wasn’t handsome and seemed to me a bit weather-beaten, but he had eyes of very pale grey that were intensely piercing, remote and, yet, also somehow engaged and engaging. He greeted me with a strangely high-pitched fluting voice, the tones of an eunuch I thought.
Mr. Grigsby suggested that I sit with him on the swing suspended from the timber porch. He offered me a beer which I declined. He was holding a tall glass full of ice and containing some fiery-looking decoction. It was very still in the village and the wind seemed to be holding its breath.
We argued about movies for a while. I told Mr. Grigsby that the Finnish film, The White Reindeer, a picture that I had watched recently on a bootleg disc, didn’t seem to me to be “folk horror” notwithstanding the notation to that effect in Wikipedia. Mr. Grigsby agreed and said that Wikipedia, as a whole, was indifferently sourced and unreliable. He said that he regarded the 1952 picture involving a sexually unsatisfied wife transformed by Sami rituals into a ravening monster as a species of vampire film, on account, he said “of the blood-sucking, of course, but also the strong sexual undertones.” I told him that I thought this was right.
To my surprise, Mr. Grigsby said that he was an admirer of Neil Labute’s 2008 version of The Wicker Man, a picture that I thought execrable. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said with surprise. But Grigsby mounted an effective defense of picture noting that Ellen Burstyn was excellent in the film and that Nicolas Gage was always impressive in horror films, mentioning, of course, his recent work in The Color out of Space, an adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella. Further, he said that no one was so egregiously miscast in Labute’s version as Britt Ekland as Willow in the 1972 version.
“What was she doing in the picture?” Quentin Grigsby asked.
“I think she’s very effective,” I said.
Mr. Grigsby sneered. “She’s in the picture because she happened to be in England and partying with the right people.”
Britt Eklund married Peter Sellers in 1964. Sellers had a series of debilitating heart attacks and became, at least, partially disabled. The two divorced in 1968 and Ms. Eklund was, then, romantically linked with the rock star, Rod Stewart – in fact, he wrote a song about her. The Wicker Man’s director, Robin Hardy, knew both Sellers and Stewart and was close to Joan Collins as well, the person who introduced the Swedish star to the rock and roller.
“That may be true,” I said. “But she’s good in the part.”
“We must agree to disagree,” Mr. Grigsby said with false magnanimity.
Something was scratching at the screen door that led into Mr. Grigsby’s ruinous den. He rose to open the door. A yellow mongrel puppy emerged from within the shadows of the house. The dog whimpered piteously.
“I must care for the beast,” Mr. Grigsby said. He excused himself, picked up the little dog, and tethered it to a chain in yard. The puppy whimpered some more, while, paradoxically, wagging his yellow tail.
“There, there,” Mr. Grigsby said. “Be a good little beast.”
I asked Mr. Grigsby about a toilet. Grigsby bowed slightly and said that he was inconvenienced at the moment: “my water system is a little funky,” he said. He encouraged me to take recourse with the shrubbery and foliage screening his back yard. “It’s one of the privileges of living in a place of this sort,” he told me.
Following his directions, I went around the side of the dilapidated school house and eased myself against an old oak towering over the building. The lower branches of the tree were oddly adorned with the tinsel, tin-foil it seemed knotted around twigs and branches and glistening as the sun shot its rays through the oak’s green leaves.
I returned to the porch noting that the sills to Mr. Grigsby’s windows behind the dusty glass panes were all matted with the fine filigree work of patient, busy spiders.
“It’s an old, old town,” Mr. Grigsby expostulated, when I took my place beside him on the porch swing. “Originally, the village was built around the river, an eighth mile or so down there.” He pointed to the green groove in the prairie overflowing with a leaf and bower in tropical abundance. “There was a mill on the stream, but it was archaic even when first built, not a modern roller mill but an old millstone grinding mechanism. The railroad came through here in 1973, on a diagonal. Hanlontown was lucky – around here villages are either on the railroad or the river. But we have both amenities – the river in the valley and the railroad slicing through the edge of town.”
“Is there a train station?”
“Unfortunately not. The train passes by, but there’s no side-track, for instance, to the grain bins.”
Robin Hardy, the director of The Wicker Man in it’s 1972 original form, finally made a sequel, released in 2011, The Wicker Tree. The film is based on Hardy’s novel Cowboys for Christ and has a similar premise to its precursor made 39 years earlier. I thought that film had been misunderstood and wrongly reviled. Mr. Grigsby, however, seemed determined to be oppositional, expressing contrarian views on every subject that we discussed. “The film is awful,” he said. We debated that point for a half-hour while the beast whimpered on his tether.
Mr. Grigsby announced that he had made reservations for us to eat in a nearby town, a place called Fertile where there was a celebrated restaurant, the Mir Café. The afternoon had become quite warm and, it was as if, the grain bins towering over the village focused the sun’s declining rays, casting a bright beam of light onto the ruined town as if from a colossal magnifying glass.
“Sumer is icumen in,” Mr. Grigsby sang in a brittle high tenor.
The Middle- English song is featured at the climax of The Wicker Man.
He told me that his pickup was a bit wonky and that it would be best if I drove the three-and-a-half miles to Fertile.
“We have quite a summer solstice festival here in this little garden spot of Iowa,” Mr. Grigsby said. “You must come down for that festival.”
He told me that the party was held on the weekend most proximate to the summer solstice, this year the 17th of June. I said that I would try to attend. “You have my summons,” Mr. Grigsby said, smiling. He unchained the beast and put it inside his screen door.
As we walked to my SUV, Mr. Grigsby passed gas loudly. “Excuse me,” he said. “Bad digestion.” Then, he cited the Middle English song: Bulloc sturteth / Bucke uerteth / Murie sing cucu – that is, “Bullock cavorts / Billy-goat farts / The cuckoo sings merrily”.
We were in Fertile ten minutes later. The village was a mile from the State Highway, a group of twelve buildings draped around the river. A millpond impounded a sullen-looking oculus of water that captured in its still reserve the yellow and gold twilight overhead. An old mill with red wooden walls and a high steep gable covered in grey, worn shingles stood guard over the dam where a shimmer of water was falling like lace over the tilted slabs of a concrete apron acting as weir to the stream.. A cement overpass slipped over the river downstream from the dam and, at Mr. Grigsby’s urging, we crossed the stream, veined here with streaks of pale white foam, and parked on a little island, accessed by another short concrete span, the green dome of the islet across from the Mir Café. Beyond the stream, some people were sitting at picnic tables overlooking the river and several citron Tiki torches had been lit to repel the night-flying mosquitos. A string of Christmas tree lights blinked at us from an arbor above the water. We made our way on foot up a path that led to a suspension bridge over the river, a seventy-foot span that quaked under our feet as we made our way to the opposing bank where the people were dining. Music sounded in the air and it seemed a most pleasant, Arcadian sort of place, bucolic in the best way. The entrance to the café was on the main street paralleling the rather crooked course of the river. The proprietor beamed at Mr. Grigsby and greeted him: “I’m so glad to see you Q.” A woman with dark hair and very black eyes emerged from the kitchen and said: “Thanks for coming, Q.” Mr. Grigsby bowed slightly and a young woman, evidently the daughter of the host, ushered us through the dining room onto the terrace next to the river, bidding us sit at a small round table close to the hanging bridge that we had just crossed. Without him ordering, the host brought us a pitcher of beer of the kind favored by Mr. Grigsby together with two frosty mugs. On the menu, I noticed that the 17th item was named after my colleague and interlocutor – it was a hearty lamb dish named “Q’s Stew.” The waitress arrived a moment later, asked Mr. Grigsby if he wanted his regular order (he did) and asked me my pleasure. I wasn’t particularly hungry and so I ordered a Currywurst platter with home-fries and a cup of terrapin soup.
When the food arrived, the owner of the café came to our table and, drawing up a chair, sat between us.
“How are things going on the celebration?” the host asked.
“Very good, thank you,” Mr. Grigsby said.
The celebration was evidently called “Sundown Days”. On the evening of the festival, the sun played a trick of light on the town, setting at such a location against the horizon as to illumine with its dying rays the railroad track traversing the edge of the village. In that fading radiance, the rails of the train track were gilded gold and shone with a well-nigh supernatural radiance, at least that was what I gathered from the conversation in which I was only indirectly involved.
“I just hope the sun doesn’t disappoint,” the host said.
“The sun can never disappoint,” Mr. Grigsby said with a broad solar and Mithraic grin.
Mr. Grigsby excused himself to seek the amenities inside the café.
“Is he talking politics?” the café owner asked. He was Levantine and spoke with a slight accent. The sweat of his brow, expressed during his work in the kitchen, made his face seem slightly moist. It seemed to me that he was wearing eye-shadow although this was, perhaps, an illusion fostered by the lighting.
“No, we’re discussing movies,” I said.
“Good,” the man said. “You don’t want to get him on the subject of politics.”
“He’s an erudite fellow,” I replied.
“Yes, he knows everything about everything.”
A minor crisis in the kitchen required that our host depart. Grigsby returned.
The food was very good and, at a nearby table, people were drinking from several iced bottles of champagne. The sky was scarlet with sunset that shimmered in the millpond above the pale banner of falling water stretched across the dam.
Grigsby said that “folk horror” involved the customs of the pagans. “You know that ‘pagan’ or ‘paynim’ as it used to be written just means someone who lives in the country, The word is related to pais or “country” in the sense of a rural place. ‘Paisano’ – that is, someone who is a ‘countryman.’”
Mr. Grigsby seemed slightly inebriated. This didn’t deter him from speaking; to the contrary, he uttered his declarations with more emphatic force.
“Pagans were rural people who may have been practicing Christians but didn’t want to relinquish belief in the spirits living in their springs and bodies of water and concealed in their ancient groves,” he explained.
Once, Grigsby said, he had been in this little village before the Mir Café opened when no one remained except a couple of elderly widows, a hermit, and some hoot owls. He recalled sitting on the opposite bank of the river, watching the water slide over the dam in the twilight. A couple of men emerged from the old mill, then, bolted and shuttered so that it would not suffer the depredations of vandals. The men must have stumbled into a place within the structure where flour had been stored because they were stark white, pale as the moon. The men from the mill stood across the stream and looked in his direction with their bright flour-white eyes and there was not a trace of color or shadow on them. They were like bleached cardboard cut-outs. The figures didn’t speak and, in fact, didn’t even seem to recognize Quentin Grigsby’s presence and, then, silently, turned and vanished once more into mill.
We were alone in the café when Mr. Grigsby told me this story. The owner poured some Benedictine into several snifters and we sipped the syrup-sweet stuff. Then, I drove Mr. Grigsby back into Hanlontown, noticing for the first time, the double rail at the edge of town running toward the dark rim of the world where the scarred moon was rising.
After dropping him off, I drove back to the freeway. A few miles north on the Interstate, a casino open 24 hours a day splashed colored light in the air. A searchlight nudged the stars as it swept back and forth, the giant beam moving like windshield wipers in the rain. The trucks and cars on the freeway seemed to occupy a different world than the silent main street of the hamlet where Mr. Grigsby lived.
Quentin Grigsby and I spoke several times about The Wicker Man and provided me with details as to the production. The film was largely shot on the southwest coast of England in December 1972. Weather was clear but cold. The director, Robin Hardy, had several semi-trucks loaded with potted trees and flowers hauled to the locations so that images could simulate Spring – the movie’s story, after all, involves May Poles and takes place in that month. Fans were set off-stage to blow on the actors so that their breath, condensing in the air, would not be seen. In some cases, small heaters were placed below the players and aimed to direct warm air on their faces. Plane shots of the rugged coast were shot in northern Scotland and over the Hebrides.
Britt Ekland spoke with a heavy Swedish accent and her lines had to be dubbed. She told Hardy that she had “an ass like a ski slope”, a strange description that the director couldn’t quite visualize and that seemed inconsistent with what he had seen of her derriere. In any event, the actress refused to be filmed from behind. Therefore, an exotic dancer from Manchester had to be imported to serve as “body double” for Ekland in the scenes in which Willow dances. Difficulties arose in shooting those scenes and the dancer from Manchester had to remain on location for about five days. This was distressing to her boss, the manager of the Manchester burlesque joint, and Hardy had to pay him compensation for the loss of “his best dancer” for the week she worked on the movie. Hardy didn’t think that Ekland could act, but said she was unpretentious and generous. (Three weeks into the film’s production, Ekland discovered that she was pregnant.) Hardy was more impressed with Ingrid Pitt (the Librarian), an East German actress, who had fled the DDR by swimming across the Elbe in a “hail of bullets.” Pitt was a Hammer alumnus – she had worked with Christopher Lee on several of his Dracula pictures. Diane Cilento plays Miss Rose, the schoolteacher. She was married to Sean Connery when the picture was made. However, she was romantically involved with Tony Schaffer and, after a decade long affair, married him in 1983. Edward Woodward who plays Officer Neil Howie would have been familiar to British audiences. He was the star of a long-running Tv show featuring a tough guy cop – the program was called Callan and, reputedly, the show was noteworthy for requiring the actor to show righteous rage in every episode. Later Woodward appeared in several Bruce Beresford films, including most notably, Breaker Morant (1980). As late as 2007, he performed in Edgar Wright’s cult film Hot Fuzz. The figure of “Mr. Punch”, the role of the fool impersonated by the hapless copper, is a British adaptation of Punchinello, the character from commedia dell’arte. Mr. Punch, in his British incarnation, was violent, unreliable, prone to beheading people – he was also imagined to be deformed and a hunchback; this is obvious from the mask and the costume that Officer Howie dons for the procession to the standing stones.
Mr. Grigsby and I debated why it was that Robin Hardy was a “one-shot wonder,” an artist who created only one indelible work of art – the rest of the things that he made are flawed and forgettable. Indeed, Hardy was so closely connected with The Wicker Man that most of his career in film is a melancholy chronicles of attempts at re-making or re-imagining the story. (I argued that Hardy’s one success is based on Tony Schaffer’s ingenious screenplay, really a macabre version of the Agatha Christie mystery novels that both men admired – and that Schaffer adapted for the screen. Tony Schaffer’s greatest success was with the extremely clever detective play and film, Sleuth. Mr. Grigsby’s theories as to Hardy’s difficulties in recapturing the success of The Wicker Man in his later work were more conspiratorial in nature – Quentin thought that Hardy’s film revealed something about a secret society that led that cabal to thwart his future efforts; in Grigsby’s mind, the making of the film involved actual initiation into a secret society similar to the libertine club in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In fact, Grigsby believes that the orgies in Eyes Wide Shut are depictions of group sex rituals in which the same coven shown in The Wicker Man indulged – after all, at the time that Eyes Wide Shut was made, Kubrick was living in England and, indeed, known to associate with Hardy.) Hardy was the son of a British Civil Servant who had served in India. As a young man, he was educated in Paris where he studied art. His art degree doesn’t have seem to have had much value and, so, Hardy migrated into public relations and advertising. It was while working in advertising that he met Tony Schaffer, the screenwriter. Schaffer is the identical twin brother of Peter Schaffer, the famous British playwright who composed Amadeus, Equus, and The Royal Hunt of the Sun among other plays. Anthony Schaffer had aspirations to work in theater like his much-feted brother. He formed a partnership with Robin Hardy and they worked to produce plays. Schaffer had read a novel named Ritual that develops some of the themes in The Wicker Man and, so, the two men devised a scenario involving the existence of a pagan cult on a remote island in the United Kingdom. Both Hardy and Schaffer were fans of the horror films made by Hammer Studios and, so, they recruited Christopher Lee for the role of Lord Sommerisle. (Lee had appeared in seven Hammer films as Dracula and said that he was tired in lying in coffins; he thought the role of Lord Sommerisle would give him an opportunity to play against type and establish credibility as a serious actor).
The Wicker Man was made on a low-budget. The film’s production company, British Lion, was struggling and the movie was supposed to demonstrate the firm’s credibility in the industry. But the picture was scarcely released, given no publicity, and played to decidedly mixed reviews – it was deemed ingenious but “too horrible” and “barbarous” to be entertaining. In the United States, the movie was released in double-bill format, cut to 80 minutes, and shown with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Critics reviewed Don’t Look Now, an important film in the British “New Wave”, but, mostly, ignored The Wicker Man. Nonetheless, the film developed a following and Hardy, with Schaffer, went to work on a sequel The Lair of the Loathsome Worm. Financing fell through and the picture was never produced.
Hardy migrated to the United States where he served as a consultant to historical theme parks. He worked in Hollywood and produced some TV commercials. He made another movie in the eighties, The Fantasist which no one seems to have seen. He also co-wrote an erotic thriller Forbidden Sun (1989) said to be about sexual repression in a Cretan girl’s school – the plot has something to do with labyrinths and the Minotaur. (Even Mr. Grigsby hadn’t seen this picture, although he told me had a “lead” on a bootleg DVD said to be circulating in Macedonia.) In between these projects, Hardy wrote a musical about Winston Churchill (Winnie) that opened (only to close a week later) in London. Finally, Hardy raised enough money to make The Wicker Tree (2013), his sequel to the earlier movie. He was working on crowd-funded sequel to the sequel, The Wrath of the Gods, a film that employed the mythos developed in the two earlier “wicker” pictures. But he died in 2016 before shooting any footage on that film.
Grigsby owns all three versions of The Wicker Man known to exist – these are the 80 minute American version, a 100 minute cut on scarcely visible VHS, and the 94 minute director’s “final cut” and approved version that was released on Blu-Ray in 2013. Footage restored to the 80 minute version is identifiable because colors are more muted and the image’s focus is less assured. (Two sequences restored to the 94 minutes Blu-Ray are the initial sequence involving Officer Howie taking Communion and the scene in which Lord Sommerisle first appears delivering a nubile boy to the sexually voracious Willow – changes in mores have rendered that episode a bit dubious since it seems to involve sex with a minor.) The negative for The Wicker Man has been lost. Grigsby told me that the cans of negative film were supposedly buried for safekeeping under a scarecrow in a vacant field on the outskirts of the London suburbs. When Hardy went back to the site to unearth the original negative from its grave, a huge landfill covered the terrain and the M4 Orbital ran right through the center of dump. As far as Hardy could ascertain, the freeway had been built over the site where the negative had been buried for safe-keeping. It’s a picturesque story, Mr. Grigsby told me, but there’s not the faintest possibility that it’s true –why would someone bury a fragile and perishable film negative in the ground? Grigsby told me that his inquiries on the subject didn’t even uncover a source for these rumors. “Internet rubbish,” Quentin Grigsby told me, “rumors based on gossip based on hearsay.” But I have located the source of this legend – the U.K. director, Alex Cox introducing the film on his show Videodrome said that the negative had “ended up in the pylons on the M4.” It’s not clear to me why Cox thought this was true. (Grigsby was similarly scathing about the allegation that Rod Stewart, then Britt Ekland’s boyfriend, tried to buy all existing prints of The Wicker Man so that he could destroy them – this effort said to be a futile attempt to retrieve the nude images of his lover from public commerce.)
Some critics refer to The Wicker Man as a “horror musical.” Paul Giovanni wrote the score. Fans of the film have memorized many lines and, of course, can sing the tunes featured in the movie. To avoid hiring union musicians, too expensive it was thought on the film’s low budget, Hardy recruited performers from a local conservatory. (He didn’t know that under British labor law, the students were also de facto union members, and so he ended up paying scale for them in any event.) Some of the tunes in the film became popular in the U.K. when the soundtrack recording was released. The opening melody, “Corn rigs”, is setting of Robert Burns’ Scottish dialect poem of the same name. In this context, “corn” refers to oats; “rigs” are ridges about three-feet high plowed in Scottish upland fields for drainage purposes. The poem recounts a sexual liaison among the “corn” and barley rigs – in effect, it’s about having sex in a drainage ditch. The film contains seven folk songs, all of them much revised by Anthony Schaffer. Most of the songs are full of extravagant double entendre. In “Willow’s Song,” the character sings: “I saw a maid milk a bull / Every stroke a bucketful.” In addition to “Summer is icumen in” and “Willow’s Song”, the film features the priapic “Gentle Johnny” (“I put her hand all on her thigh / And she said: ‘Do you want to try?’ / I put her hand all on her belly / And she said ‘Do you want to fuck me?’ “), “The Maypole Song”, “The Landlord’s Daughter”, and “The Tinker’s Song”. The musicians who perform on the soundtrack also appear in the film.
The wicker man effigy is based on a sentence in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. Caesar writes: “(the Gauls) have figures of vast size, the limbs of which are formed from osiers which they fill with living men which being set afire, the men perish in the enveloping flames.” During one of our conversations by email, Grigsby observed that his part of Iowa was laboring under a terrible drought and that there was a danger that crops would fail. He messaged me that “if this drought could be ended by the means that you see in the film, I’m pretty sure that people would build a Wicker Man in downtown Des Moines, probably at the Pappajohn Sculpture Park, and sell corn dogs and cotton candy before the human sacrifice. In fact, the spectacle would probably have financial support by John Deere and Monsanto.” I asked him what he thought about “climate change.” “Interesting question,” he replied. “We will live to see human sacrifices to combat climate change. Perhaps, they are already underway.” Mr. Grigsby was apparently in a misanthropic and sour mood. He wrote: “The problem is rooted in the human need to make sense of death. Both the Christians and pagans in The Wicker Man believe that there is no such thing as death. The Christians think the righteous are whisked away to judgement and, then, heaven – they live eternally in an unearthly realm. The pagans believe that the dead simply pass into the earth and are resurrected in fruits, crops, and flowers. Death is converted to life in this earthly realm. This is why the corpse of a rabbit is found in the grave raised (ostensibly) over the body of the missing girl. The hare is a symbol for resurrection through reproduction. But both the Christians and pagans are mistaken. They don’t understand that the earth itself is perishing – the death of men and women is nothing compared to the irreversible holocaust that will arise when the earth dies.” I asked: “Is it as bad as all that?” “Worse,” Mr. Grigsby said. From these messages, I concluded that the general drought throughout Iowa had thrown my correspondent into a black funk. Nonetheless, he reminded me about Hanlontown’s festival. “You must come down for ‘Sundown Days’,” he told me. “You can pitch a tent and spend the night. I’m sure you’ll be in no state to drive home after the festivities.” I replied that I planned to attend.
Quentin Grigsby send me several links to articles in which Britt Ekland claimed that several of the sacrificial animals confined in the Wicker Man at the film’s climax, in fact, died during the fiery destruction of the colossal effigy. She told a journalist that she thought a rabbit and pigeon (or, perhaps, a chicken) had been burned alive. Robin Hardy was incensed at the allegations and told journalists that she was mistaken and that all of the animals in the effigy osiers had been retrieved well before the colossus was consumed by flame. The exchange occurred in 2013, that is, fifty years after the movie was released.
A couple weeks ago, I drove down to Hanlontown to experience “Sundown Days.”
A pale blue banner was stretched over the road where it ran between the belligerent-looking grain bins towering over the village. The banner represented a curve of railroad tracks running into the semi-circle of the setting sun.
Main Street, a hundred feet beyond the huge columns of the metal bins, was blocked with some saw-horses and orange detour cones. Vehicles were parked in the shadow of the bins, pulled up on the grass. At intervals on the street, heaps of kindling had been stacked in teepee-shaped piles. The road was full of people wandering between the abandoned brick buildings, little groups of men and women gathering together and, then, splitting apart. At the end of gravel driveways, I could see more people, milling around by beer kegs planted at the edge of the tangled brush lapped up against the sides of the old farmhouses. Lawns wild with golden-rod and purple thistle showed flashes of red and white and blue, flags dangling from splintered crumbling porches or set up on poles in shrubbery. A whole hog, roasted to the color of wet leather, was rotating in a sheet-metal tube that looked something like an old cannon. The air smelled of rendered fat, beer, smoke from grills twisting through the air in the corridors forming and, then, closing once more in crowd. At the end of the broad street, where the lane ended in the gravel tracks dropping down to the river a couple football fields distant, a flat-bed trailer was parked. A band was playing a cover of “Little Red Corvette” from atop the trailer. Next to the stone columns and strong-box walls of one of the abandoned banks, a couple of vendors were selling cotton candy, fry-bread, and soda pop from several small wooden booths mounted on wheels chocked in the gravel.
Mr. Grigsby was standing in the midst of a knot of men, wearing a cap tilted over his eyes that said Sundown Days. His bare legs were very pale. Someone was laughing loudly, but Mr. Grigsby looked very grave and solemn. Everyone was holding 16 ounce plastic cups foaming with beer. A row of six turquoise colored porta-potties were arrayed in a phalanx against the curved steel bastion of the grain bins, some people slipping in and out, as I stood beside Quentin. The food smelled good and so I bought a plate of pulled pork served with some soggy french fries and a small plastic saucer of sugary vinegar mixed with ketchup. Mr. Grigsby had opened a couple of folding lawn chairs in front of his home and we sat in the shade of his trees listening to the rock band down the street. Some motorcycles rolled through the crowd and, then, accelerated with a roar zooming out toward the edge of town. The chain-saw roar of the cycle engines echoed off the metal storage bins. A steady stream of people came to exchange pleasantries with Mr. Grigsby and he called them all by name, sometimes, shaking hands with the older men.
The sun dipped low and the rock band vacated the stage on the flat bed trailer. The crowd marched down a side street to an open field next to the railroad tracks skirting the edge of the village. Some of the people carried their lawn chairs and set them up along the alleys opening onto the railroad crossings. The tracks ran toward the place on the horizon where the sun was about to set. The right-of-way was level and the sleeper ties made a dark ladder, soaked with creosote, climbing up toward the red orb of the sun. A drum and bugle corps not marching in step sauntered over the rails to the other side of the tracks. The men in the corps were mostly from Osage and they were sponsored by a couple of American Legion posts, wearing ill-fitting uniforms and scarlet cummerbunds (the musicians were middle-aged and overweight with wobbly beer bellies) and little caps with plastic visors that made them look airplane pilots from a half-century earlier. The train tracks were flat and straight and ran between pinkish-yellow windrows of fist-sized rock.
The drum-and-bugle corps played “The Star Spangled Banner”. Most of the men looked pretty drunk and one of them actually sat down on the iron rail as he blew into his cornet. The crowd cheered and clapped hands and, behind the crowd gathered to watch the sun set, some kids lit strings of firecrackers and, over the village, a rocket burst, drizzling hissing red and blue sparks onto the roof tops. The sun flattened against the horizon, squeezing out lateral rays of red light. The bugle corps tried to play Sousa’s “Stars and Stripe Forever”, but the ensemble had no trombones and no piccolos either, and, so, the melody broke apart, those losing their place blowing their horns tentatively so that it seemed as if the music were coming from very close and, yet, also miles away, a strange effect as if some of the band were playing nearby and others from atop remote hilltops far out in the country. The band director signaled that the musicians should cease playing and, so, there was silence for a moment, some catcalls and hoots, and, then, the drum and bugle corps tried again with the march, but this effort went even more badly awry so that fragments of the melody scattered in all directions and, at last, only the drums were beating out a tattoo in the gathering darkness.
Then, the sun suddenly reached out and lit the rails running by the village with golden light and the metal blazed all along its length, two radiant arrows fired out along the tracks and glistening against the twilight. Everyone cheered and the drum and bugle corps played “The Star Spangled Banner” again and men removed their hats and clapped them over their breasts and some of the women sang along.
The spectacle lasted for only a couple of minutes. Then, the sun slid sideways, ducking under the horizon, and, looking up, I saw the moon coasting over a shelter-belt on the opposite horizon. Most of the people from other small towns stumbled to their cars and drove away. Mr. Grigsby and I went back to Main Street. Bonfires were burning now at intervals of a couple hundred feet up and down the road between the buildings. Dim lightbulbs glowed in the shacks selling food. Hanlontown smelled of ash and pork fat and cordite from the fire crackers, now and then, rattling the middle of vacant lots. The yellow puppy scuttled under Mr. Grigsby’s lawn chair, frightened by the detonations. A group of fat men were sitting on the flat bed trailer, playing accordions and saxophone, polka music in the dark, while a dozen kids pogoed up and down in shadows under the improvised band stand.
“Calm down, Beast,” Mr. Grigsby told the whimpering puppy.
“What is his name?” I asked.
“No name,” Grigsby said.
A procession of golf carts silently rolled up to where we were sitting. The canopies over two of the golf carts were decorated with deer antlers, pronged horns casting weird shadows on the gravel edges of the road. The man driving the third golf cart was wearing a crown of antlers on his head. Mr. Grigsby unchained the trembling puppy and handed it to the man wearing the antler headdress. The golf carts, then, made a loop in the middle of the street, the caravan passing between the bonfires blazing in the night. A crowd of people gathered between two of the fires, muttering together, most everyone now staggering drunk. Then, the mob set off behind the golf carts to the edge of town, standing in a dense congregation along the railroad tracks. The moon was in the middle of the sky and stars twinkled.
The three carts bounced along the edge of the rail until they were about a hundred yards beyond the card-controlled coop fuel pumps on the edge of town. One of the men under an antlered canopy stopped the cart, got out, and walked along the rail, now and then, stooping to deposit something on the pitchy sleepers.
“What is he doing?”
“It’s cut-up hot dog,” Mr. Grigsby told me.
“But why?”
“You’ll see,” Mr. Grigsby said. The man wearing the rack of horns on his head stopped the cart. He carried the yellow puppy onto the tracks. People shuffled back and forth nervously, brandishing flaring torches. The man put the beast between the rails.
The little dog limped forward, following the trail of cut-up hot dogs planted on the tracks.
A dull murmur rose from the crowd. The people were nothing more than shadows casting shadows in the flicker of the torches. Faces were invisible, although now and then, I noticed a liquid glint of eye or the flash of bone in someone’s mouth.
As the dog approached, tail wagging a little, I saw people stoop and pick up the fist-sized cobbles heaped along the right-of-way. Mr. Grigsby nodded to me and I bent over and took a stone in my hand. The rock felt smooth and heavy and was still warm with the heat of the day.
The puppy was now about fifteen feet from the crowd, still ambling between the rails, tail raised like a question mark over his yellow back.
“This isn’t so intense,” someone said.
“Not near as intense as some years,” a woman cackled.
I dropped the rock and turned my back, hurrying away from the conclave gathered around the railroad tracks.
The puppy yelped and I could hear stones ricocheting off the tracks.
Later, Mr. Grigsby said that little places far out in the country had their own ways of doing things and that these ways were valid in their own right and should be respected.
I told him that I was going home. “Not without a night cap,” he said.
Someone brought out bottle of peppermint schnaps. The polka band had acquired a tuba and the big horn glistened in the flicker of the bonfires.
Much later someone said that we should go down to the river. A young woman had pulled the banner between the grain bins down and had wrapped the pennant around her body. Her legs and shoulders were bare. Some of the young men ran through the dying embers of the bonfires, kicking up sparks that flared up in the sky.
It seemed like a long way to the water, over a hill and, then, wriggling through barbed wire, and, then, down a steep slope where people lost their footing and stumbled and fell, toppling down into the water. The river was cold and the water in its depths stirred as if with monstrous intent and the current carried people, all of whom were singing and whooping and hollering, apart from one another, dragging some downstream. The moon painted the rippling water with silvery light and I could see naked bodies floating in the river.
Somehow, dawn glowed in the reeds. The trees were musical with birds praising the rising sun. I clambered out of the ooze, found my clothing spiked on a thorn bush, and, after dressing, made my melancholy way to my car parked at the edge of Hanlontown.
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