The Wicker Man
On Sunday, April 29, 1973, Sergeant Neil Howie with the West Highland Constabulary flies solo to Summerisle off the coast of Scotland. He is there to follow up on a letter addressed specifically to him from an anonymous source on Summerisle reporting that a twelve year old girl who lives on the island, Rowan Morrison, the daughter of May Morrison, has long been missing. The correspondence includes a photograph of Rowan. Upon his arrival on Summerisle, Howie finds that the locals are a seemingly simple minded lot who provide little information beyond the fact that they know of no Rowan Morrison and do not know the girl in the photo. Mrs. Morrison admits to having a daughter, seven year old Myrtle, but no Rowan. As Howie speaks to more and more people, he begins to believe that Rowan does or did live on the island, but that the locals are hiding their knowledge of her. He also begins to see that the locals all have pagan beliefs, their "religion" which centers on procreation as the source of life. That procreation does not necessarily need to be within marriage, and openly flaunts the act of sex, both in private and in public. These beliefs do not sit well against Howie's strict Christian morals, he who regularly attends church, prays, and accepts communion. Everything that happens on the island seems to be dictated by Lord Summerisle, whose ancestors bought the island generations ago. Howie begins to believe that Rowan was murdered, she a sacrifice by the islanders to their higher power to ensure a bountiful apple crop - the main crop of the island - which did not materialize last season. With May Day approaching, Howie not only tries to find out if Rowan was indeed murdered/sacrificed, which includes trying to locate her body, but if there will be another sacrifice on this important day within the cycle of life.
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IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/
Video encoded in two-pass 13.0 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available.
Subtitles converted to VobSub and repositioned.
Note : Here's a worthy upgrade of a previous encode of mine, courtesy of a pretty new StudioCanal 4k remaster. This is of course one of the great classics, the defining film of the folk horror subgenre, and generally a tour de force by everyone involved. Edward Woodward is by turns insufferably arrogant and pitiable, Christopher Lee does his smarmy evil authority figure thing, Britt Ekland puts on show the naked consequences of unbridled pagan sexuality (and lo, they're good), Ingrid Pitt is around, but sadly doesn't get naked, and the twist at the end will probably get you if you haven't seen it before. Best of all, it's definitely not the bees in this one. An essential for any serious horror collection. The soundtrack is also full of bangers, and, if you listen to the lyrics, is just amazingly horny.
Police sergeant Neil Howie travels by seaplane to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate the seeming disappearance of a young girl, Rowan, after receiving an anonymous letter. Howie, who's a devout Christian, is shocked to find the inhabitants of the island practicing a kind of Celtic paganism, which involves quite a lot of public fornication and nakedness, as well as being way too horny for an uptight copper from the mainland. The islanders are reticent to tell him much, and at first even deny the girl's existence, but as he investigates further, and meets the island's owner, Lord Summerisle, whose grandfather founded the island's apple groves and converted the locals to paganism to enhance their ties to the land and the harvest, he first is told Rowan is dead, then finds her grave empty except for a hare. Discovering that the harvest had failed the previous year, when Rowan was May Queen, Howie starts suspecting something horrible is about to happen on May Day, which is imminent, but things are more complicated.
This remaster is very good, with the exception of a small proportion of material (including the prologue) which looks like it's taken from an inferior projection print or internegative, but most of it is as good as it gets. Stereo track is also quite good, and I've added a commentary track from another release of the Final Cut, which doesn't sync up perfectly, but these guys never stop talking, so it's not that noticeable.
Screenshots
Mediainfo Code:
- The Wicker Man 1973 FC RM4k SC 1080p BluRay x265 hevc 10bit AAC 2.0 commentary-HeVK
| Name | Size | Date | |||
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| 3.5 GB | 08/01/26 | 6170 | 14035 | ||
| 8.9 GB | 07/31/26 | 1426 | 3344 | ||
| 2.7 GB | 03/11/22 | 1281 | 471 | ||
| 5.9 GB | 08/07/26 | 976 | 506 | ||
| 2.5 GB | 12/31/25 | 825 | 26 | ||
| 47.4 GB | 08/13/22 | 785 | 570 | ||
| 2.7 GB | 01/23/26 | 755 | 96 | ||
| 2.4 GB | 03/30/24 | 690 | 444 | ||
| 674 MB | 07/17/26 | 641 | 111 | ||
| 88 GB | 02/01/25 | 637 | 845 | ||
| 6.9 GB | 04/23/25 | 580 | 750 | ||
| 10.1 GB | 12/21/25 | 554 | 35 | ||
| 4.3 GB | 08/04/26 | 448 | 272 | ||
| 34.4 GB | 11/19/22 | 414 | 217 | ||
Wonder Man - Season 1 in Television | 2.4 GB | 01/30/26 | 414 | 99 |