A devout Christian policeman flies to a remote Scottish island to find a missing girl. The villagers insist she never existed. He finds crops decorated with genitalia, children taught pagan hymns in school, and a nude woman singing through his bedroom wall. He never once considers turning back.

THE WICKER MAN (1973) sends Sergeant Neil Howie, played by Edward Woodward, into Summerisle, ruled by Christopher Lee's Lord Summerisle, a laird who abandoned Christianity for the old gods. Howie's rigid faith makes him certain he is the one sane man in a village gone mad. His certainty may be his undoing.

Anthony Shaffer's screenplay, based on David Pinner's novel Ritual, treats folk religion with a seriousness horror rarely offers it. The island's May Day rites, the songs, the masks, the processions, are staged with an anthropologist's attention rather than pure spectacle. Britt Ekland's Willow, Diane Cilento's Miss Rose, and Ingrid Pitt's librarian all belong to a community that functions as a single, coherent organism.

Robin Hardy directed it on a modest budget in Scotland, and the result became the founding text of folk horror.