There can’t be many people who spend their 84th birthday doing publicity for a newly restored version of a cult horror film.
But that’s how veteran film director Robin Hardy, whose classic cult horror The Wicker Man opened the Manchester-based Grimmfest on Wednesday, spent his special day.
The newly restored HD version of the film was the centrepiece of the festival’s 2013 preview evening at Stockport Plaza.
The film tells the story of dour Calvanist police sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) who travels to the isolated community of Summerisle in search of a missing girl.
When he arrives he is horrified to find the mocking, uncooperative locals have, under the influence of the urbane Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), reverted to a pagan form of religion.
Famed for its iconic closing scene, the film has captured the imagination (and nightmares) of successive generations of horror fans.
The 1973 classic is regularly voted in the top-ten horror films of all time by movie lovers and the director is delighted to be able to show a version which is close to what he originally intended.
The original version of the film was cut by over 20 minutes by an unsympathetic film studio to fit in as a second feature in a double bill.
A great deal of the cut material has been lost forever but efforts have since been made to reinstate the deleted scenes that are still in existence.
To coincide with The Wicker Man’s 40th anniversary, Studiocanal is releasing a 92-minute version of the film, discovered in the Harvard Film Archive following a high-profile internet campaign to find missing footage.
Mr Hardy was able to explain how the film came to be cut when we met before the recent screening.
He said: “The film was designed as a 72-hour piece with the trip to the island to the burning at the end.
“In order to be able to fit the film in as a second feature as a result of all kind of political shenanigans at British Lion and EMI all those years ago they had to cut it because a double feature had to have a finite length.
“Don’t Look Now was approx. 105 minutes and that dictated how long The Wicker Man could be as a second feature. It ended up at 87 minutes or something like that.
“That meant taking out the first night and reducing it to a 36-hour length. No-one seemed to mind that it had won the Grand Prix at the Paris Film Festival and had received amazing reviews or that you didn’t see Christopher Lee, who was after all the star, until two-thirds of the way through the film.”
The film, which has been described as the ‘Citizen Kane of horror’, still has a huge cult following, something Mr Hardy is amazed by.
“It’s difficult to say why it has such an enduring cross-generational appeal but I think because it’s timeless in a sense,” he said.
“In a way that was intentional but of course we couldn’t possibly have foreseen that it would remain so popular or that the cult would have developed or anything like that.
“It’s very satisfying and surprising to have made something which still has the sort of appeal The Wicker Man has and the longevity of the film has been fantastic.”
The sequel The Wicker Tree was released in 2011 and the director and novelist is currently working on the final part of the trilogy, The Wrath of the Gods.
As for what drives him to keep going at an age when most people would be putting their feet up for a well-earned rest, Mr Hardy explained: “I’m a working person and supporting the whole work cycle of the three films which I’m in the middle of is really what I do. I’m also a novelist and that keeps me pretty busy.
“I don’t play golf or bridge so what else am I going to do?”
Image courtesy of Ageless Trailers via Flickr, with thanks.
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