Robin Hardy, 86, who set 'Wicker Man' cult alight . By William Grimes
New York Times . NEW YORK - Robin Hardy, director of the horror film
"The Wicker Man," which failed at the box office when released in 1973
but went on to attract a large cult following, died July 1. He was 86.
The University of Malta, where he had spoken recently, said on its
Facebook page that Victoria Webster, Mr. Hardy's wife, had informed the
school of his death. She did not specify where he died or the cause.
When Mr. Hardy, a television director, decided he wanted to make a
horror film, he found an enthusiastic collaborator in Anthony Shaffer,
who wrote the play "Sleuth" and the screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock
film "Frenzy. Mr. Hardy and Shaffer, partners in a production company,
were avid fans of the horror films made by Hammer Studios. Together
they set about making a film that would take the Hammer approach in a
new direction. Shaffer, using the novel "Ritual" by David Pinner as a
basis, came up with the story of a devout Christian policeman, Sergeant
Neil Howie, who travels to a Scottish island to investigate the
disappearance of a girl. In Mr. Hardy's hands, the island and its
inhabitants - led by the priestlike Lord Summerisle, played by
Christopher Lee, took on a mystifying aura, with bizarre events
unfolding. Howie beholds, with growing horror, a pagan society in which
sexual rituals are practiced openly and village schoolchildren are
encouraged to talk about phallic symbols and other topics not in the
usual curriculum. The sense of dread builds to a startling discovery
when Howie realizes he has been lured to his doom. In the film's final
scene, he is burned alive inside a giant man made of wicker, sacrificed
to appease the local gods and ensure a bountiful apple harvest. British
Lion, the company that produced the film, deemed it unsellable. Lee, in
his autobiography, asserted that the company's new head, Michael
Deeley, called it one of the 10 worst films he had ever seen. Deeley
protested that he had called it one of the 10 most unsalable films he
had ever seen. In any case, British Lion distributed it halfheartedly
and it failed miserably at the box office. "The Wicker Man" lived on,
cherished by horror-movie devotees who argued it belonged in the front
ranks of the genre. In 1977 the magazine Cinefantastique called it "the
'Citizen Kane' of horror movies. The Guardian, in 2010, put it in
fourth place on a list of the 24 greatest horror films in history,
after "Psycho," "Rosemary's Baby," and "Don't Look Now," and ahead of
"The Shining" and "The Exorcist. "It's stood the test of time because
it's about ideas," the film historian Jonny Murray, an organizer of the
first international "Wicker Man" conference at the University of
Glasgow, said in 2003. "It engages you on an intellectual level. It's
about paganism: the clash between superstition and modernity; authority
and sexuality. Mr. Hardy made only a handful of films: "The Fantasist"
(1986), about a serial killer who seduces his victims over the
telephone, and "The Wicker Tree" (2001), about two Texas evangelists
who bring their religious message to a remote Scottish island, with
disastrous results. At the time of his death, he was trying to raise
money for another "Wicker Man" film, "The Wrath of the Gods. With
Shaffer, Mr. Hardy wrote a novelization of "The Wicker Man," published
in 1978. The film was the subject of two documentaries released in
2001, "The 'Wicker Man' Enigma" and "Burnt Offering: The Cult of 'The
Wicker Man.' " The director Neil LaBute remade the film in 2006 with
Nicolas Cage as Sergeant Howie. In 2013, Mr. Hardy described the
filming of the final scene of "The Wicker Man" to The Guardian. "The
wicker man was enormous," he said. "The stunned look on Howie's face
when he first sees it wasn't acting. Up until then, Edward had only
seen drawings. He clambered in and we set it on fire, filming from the
inside.
