![]() ![]() Events come to a head at a pagan festival (but in Ritual it's Midsummer rather than May Day).He would probably claim it is rooted directly in his and Shaffer's research into Frazer's Golden Bough and the story of the Rex Nemorensis, but I think I now see what tipped them off to look into stories of sacred trees in the first place). There is a sacred oak tree, reached through a forest, with ritual offerings hung on it (this isn't in the film of The Wicker Man, but it is prominent in the novelisation by Robin Hardy.There is a sweet-shop which sells strange figurines as a well as sweets.One young local woman who plays a prominent role in the pagan activities attempts to seduce the policeman by writhing naked against the walls of an adjoining bedroom during the night.This involves quite a lot of rampant sexuality (but in Ritual this is concentrated in certain characters at certain times, and is also characterised as distinctly brutal and animalistic, all of which makes quite a contrast with the joyous celebration of fertility that suffuses the entire community in Wicker).The locals are pretty weird, and practise paganism (but in Ritual they still have a local priest as well, who turns an indulgent blind eye to it all, whereas in Wicker Christianity has been completely supplanted).He is there to investigate the fate of a young girl (in Ritual she's straightforwardly dead, although it takes a while to find out whether this was murder or an accident in Wicker, a much greater degree of ambiguity about her fate is sustained for 4/5 of the film, and drives much of the plot).A lone policeman arrives in a remote rural community (in Ritual, a Cornish village in Wicker a Scottish island).Here are a few of their major points of connection, along with their associated differences: The truth is that although The Wicker Man is clearly a different story from Ritual, the thematic concerns of the two, their overall structures and many of their motifs remain very, very similar indeed. Shaffer always adamantly denied that the resulting script for The Wicker Man had anything to do with Ritual, but Pinner has remained distinctly disgruntled about what he sees as extensive unacknowledged borrowing. Instead, he began researching and writing his own story, and got Robin Hardy involved in developing it and turning it into a film in early 1972. In 1971, Christopher Lee, Peter Snell and Anthony Shaffer bought the rights to Ritual for a collective total of £15,000, with the intention of turning it into a film, but when Shaffer started work on the process in earnest, he realised that a direct adaptation wasn't really going to work as a drama, and gave the other two their money back. ![]() The logistics of this relationship are set out in chapter 3 of Allan Brown (2000), Inside The Wicker Man, but for those who don't happen to have a copy to hand they go roughly as follows. Strange_complexI read this would-otherwise-be-forgotten 1960s novel for the same reason that everyone who reads it now does so - because of its relationship to the film, The Wicker Man (1973). ![]()
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