Fifty years ago, The Wicker Man delivered one of horror’s most effective lessons. Danger thrives in the dark . Picture a lone alleyway at night or an attic with a burnt-out bulb.
Horror has long relied on our fear of that which we can’t see, of what might be lurking in the shadows, which is what makes the absence of light such a natural incitement for dread. However, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man , set almost entirely during the daytime on the cheery, sun-dappled fictional Scottish island of Summerisle, concluded with the frightening revelation that evil could be no more easily be detected under the harsh glare of the sun. In the process, The Wicker Man helped popularize a new subgenre of horror.
Released a year earlier, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1973) weaponized not just the innocuous nature of daylight but the everyday, ordinary sight of a town's bird population, staging terrifying sunlit sequences, such as one in which a murder of crows did just that. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), released just a few months after The Wicker Man , contrasted the blazing sun against an overlooked insular community wreaking terror on the hapless outsiders who'd stumbled onto their land. Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz (2007) is a more comedic riff on the premise of Hardy's film — an English cop being transplanted to an idyllic village only to uncover a sinister secret society — and echoes of The Wicker Man similarly reverberate in Gareth Evans’ The Apostle (2018.