Kill James Bond! - S4E7.5: Wicker Man

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

This is a preview of a bonus episode! check it out on our beautiful Patreon. Our wonderful patreon. This week, we're talking about agricultural horror with the wonderful Michael from Worm from Home!  The Wicker Man is a 1973 British folk horror starring Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, and Christopher Lee. You may be familiar with it from an american remake starring Nick Cage, but we're talking about the real McCoy today babey. Check out Worm from Home Here! And please do donate to Maher's fundraiser here: https://chuffed.org/project/121901-help-mahers-family-with-medical-costs ---- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. As you well know I've been working with a few gazan families to raise money for their daily living costs in the genocide. As a ceasefire has been announced, we hope soon plenty of Aid can get in and help alleviate the dire famine they're being subjected to. But until then, they still have to afford to eat, so we ask for you to keep helping them out, just a little longer. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-and-my-family-to-find-a-safe-place https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-maher-and-my-family-to-leave-gaza-to-belgium https://www.gofundme.com/f/htdcj-evacuating-my-family-from-gaza https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- This is an unlocked bonus episode, find the rest here, on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

I, as you can see, am a police officer. Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly, joined as always by my friends Abigail, Thorne and Devon. How you doing? Hello! And we have a guest. It's Michael Wave from Worm from Home. How's it going, Michael? Hi, November. It's going really well. Really happy to be here. Talk about some farming

films, and how farming is really scary. Absolutely. Yeah. Farming is terrifying. A simple, harmless, agronomical film. Exactly. That's a word, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we're watching The Wicker Man, which is...

1973. Yes. Not The Nicholas Cage Version. The good Wicker Man. Yeah. Theo G. We'll get to The Nicholas Cage version in due time. Believe you me, we'll get there.

But no, this is the good one, the Edward Woodward one. Really satisfying name to say, I'm gonna be doing this. ELLIE Edward Woodward? ALICE Yep. ALICE It's like you enjoyed saying Edward and just kept saying it. Very indulgent. LIAM Edward Woodward. You gotta stop me, I'll just keep going, Edward Woodward Woodward Woodward Woodward.

ALICE How much wood would an Edward Woodward Woodward Woodward Woodward Woodward. How much wood would an Edward Woodward wood, if a wood would could wood would? Alright. And these are the questions that, you know, like the modern Cistl and Yvette are asking. This is a good one to be starting off two recordings with. Yeah, it's a good energy. Cards on the table, this film fucking rules. Yeah I love this movie so much.

It's so good. It's just, as a piece of filmmaking, it's... yeah. If you watch it, if you've been watching a lot of bad recent films, you really think wow, we used to make movies. Yeah. We used to make horror movies, specifically. Right? This is a fucking cinema.

This is a horror film that is kind of existentially terrifying in a way that it doesn't have a lot of gore, it doesn't have a lot of blood spattered everywhere. And deliberately so. On the part of the directors and the producers, they were like, let's do something different from Hammer Horror, let's get away from the gore, let's really freak people out in new ways by thinking about how the English upper classes are really scary. Yeah, they are. It's based on a novel, right? Yes. I don't have it in front of me. The ritual, it's called.

Yes. Which, yeah. So like, basically, you might be more familiar with the plot than with the actual movie. I think this was the position I was in before I'd seen it, where I knew basically what the plot was about. I knew the ending, because it kind of entered into pop culture from the 70s. Which is... the Wicca Man, there's a Wicca Man. I'll spoil it now, there's a guy who goes in the Wicca Man, he doesn't like it very much. RILEY Yeah. GARETH No, he has a bad time in a Wicca Man. ALICE He does. But how we get there...

RILEY You don't want to be in that. ALICE...is the kind of, like, process of a horror movie that's about belief and about sacrifice and about religion in a way that I think a lot of more modern horror films have tried to capture. I'm thinking a lot of Heretic, for instance. They just haven't really been able to grapple with it in the same way. ALICE I think it was a really interesting film to watch now, in the context of the rise of

Christo-fascism in the US, and watch this space UK. It's really, really kind of fascinating, and as, just kind of cards on the table, as somebody who has like no religious belief in myself and also like doesn't really get it, I found this movie to be particularly horrifying, because I'm just like, you people are all fucking mental. In a way that's probably quite insensitive and I probably didn't get it for that reason. But yeah, me and the ghost of Christopher Hitchens had an interesting time watching this film.

You know, I will hop on about this so apologies in advance, but yeah, also, you know, very much a film about land and land relations and farming and, you know, how ideologies build relationships with the land and the violence that is needed to maintain those relationships quite explicitly. But we'll get to that. Get to that. Absolutely. They always need land. It's the one thing they aren't making any more of, Superman. As another preface, reclaimed land, of course. Another thing I like is...

Yeah, I'll fucking Dutch that. They did enough of that. Yeah, eventually it's all gonna be Holland. Growth industry. That remake in Dockerland, I hear, is back. And it's Dutch. Creeping polderism comes through us all. This movie had famously a very torrid time after release with the British film industry.

There's like three different cuts of it that may or may not still exist, that have been like dumped down holes or cemented into motorway foundations, because various studios didn't like it or didn't think they could sell it, and so the one that I saw was what's described as the final cut and as a restoration. And I do really like a translator's preface, that this started with a big card explaining all the restoration work. Explaining that they had put in like 500 hours of work to fix this original 35mm negative that was completely fucked.

STACEY This is gonna be one of those episodes of Forkast, where we've all watched slightly different versions of the film. ALICE Okay. I think that's good. STACEY So the version that I started had none of that, it just opened with Zardoz's Wicca cousin? On my notes, say, 70s movies love opening with a big fucked up head. ALICE That's true.

That is true. STACEY Yeah. GARETH My one, I watched on the BFI film player, I paid for it. This is not sponsored content, it was on there. And mine opened with a little note that says, the producers would like to thank Lord Summer Isle and the people of his island off the west coast of Scotland for this privileged insight into their religious practices and for their generous cooperation in the making of this film.

Oh, in universe. Oh, a mockumentary detail. Wow. That this film. And it opens with that. Wow. That's cute. This is Wicker Man. Yeah, exactly. I'm fascinated. I want three different versions, at least, of this movie. Yeah, I watched the same one as you, November, so yeah, we've got the restoration and, you

know, the 500 hours of work they put in, really, really worth it. It looks incredible. Absolutely. It's, yeah, gorgeous. Yeah, I love labor that declares itself, it reminds me of those New Deal, like, this is a printing office place. So, as you say, Abi, we begin with the head from Zardos, it's a green man, it's a foliate head. And then we see our protagonist, Edward Woodward Woodward. I'm gonna be doing this the whole time.

ALICE & LIAM Sargeant Howie. ALICE & LIAM Sargeant Howie. Who is shown in church, right, singing Psalm 23, reading from 1st Corinthians, this is my body which is broken for you. ALICE Mmhmm. Eating flesh, eating the blood, all that kind of stuff? Yep. Absolutely. You see him taking communion, which is a blood sacrifice, right?

We're gonna get into this. We got some very pastoral themes in the hymn as well, like, we're already thinking about where has this bread come from, where has this wine come from, does it come from the land, where does it grow, yeah, more of a rewatch observation, I guess, but it is there from the beginning. ALICE Yeah. I think it's interesting as well that we introduce him in the life of the church as well, in a kind of community church setting. There are a couple of scenes that I think are now lost forever, with him being a cop, like, on the mainland in Scotland, where he's portrayed to be, like, kind of unusually Puritan, even amongst mainland

society, but here it's just, he goes to church, he sings the hymns, he does the reading, and is then yoinked immediately into a little seaplane. FLYNN- Yeah, this whole opening credit sequence in the seaplane flying over the Scottish islands is really beautiful. It's a nice reminder that, well, we really do have remote, rural, isolated places in the UK, which we don't often think about, but they're out there. And this whole credit sequence is very long, and it really conveys, we are going a long way away from the place we just were, which was a church. ALICE We're going to the Hebrides.

JUSTIN Yeah. SONIA Sorry, one thing I really like about this one, which I think starts in the credit sequence, is it is only about 90 minutes long, but it really lingers on so many of its sequences. I feel like in a more modern film, and in the bad remake, there's a lot more just kind of chaff thrown in in shorter scenes, but you get this really, really, really long credit sequence that is, as you say, Abi, like telling you something about the story and distance, but also just showing you a lot of beauty, which is really nice.

Let's spend a few minutes looking at these beautiful shots, because we can, but it's so well paced that, you know, it doesn't end up being three hours long even though it does kind of take its time quite a lot, and I think that's really nice. ALICE It feels like David Attenborough's gonna be out there in the landscape somewhere. These people are fucking nutters. ALICE As we go over the landscape, right, there's

this kind of element of alienation, because we have these kind of very barren, very windswept landscapes, and then as we fly over there's a vineyard, and then there's a town with palm trees planted, and it still looks kind of, like, Baltically cold, right, and you're just looking at these palm trees in the wind, and that's an element of profound alienation, and it's a great little horror movie thing to show you something slightly off on the way in, to be like, not everything's right here. ALICE The other thing that's slightly off is, and

my note here says, this MF pure spits we're streeting. ALICE A little. So imagine how he does look kind of like an aged up Wes Streeting. Not even aged up, he looks like Wes Streeting. And he's just like pure. That's the next prime minister you're talking about, pal. Oh my god, I'm gonna fucking kill myself. Now hold on, mainlander. If you want to hear the rest of this episode of Kill James Bond,

you are gonna have to come to our island, patreon.com slash Kill James Bond, or one word, and tie those like five pounds minimum. Yeah, and then we'll probably let you listen to the rest of it really. That's how the business model works.