BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Ritual
Published by Weird Walk (in collaboration with StudioCanal & TSPTR)
2023, rrp £5.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ If you’re a Wicker Man fan, you’ll love Ritual!
From the offices of Weird Walk, our favourite ‘journal of wanderings and wonderings’, comes a special edition zine focussing on Summerisle. As you may recall, this is a fictional island off the west coast of Scotland, as seen in The Wicker Man film. Interestingly, there is an archipelago named the Summer Isles on Loch Broom, Ross & Cromarty…
Whilst Summerisle is at an almost diametrically opposed corner of the UK to Hastings, I think in spirit it is intertwined with our odd wee town. Imagine Netherwood, now demolished, but once a guesthouse that hosted Aleister Crowley, as Lord Summerisle’s residence. Imagine the Old Town as a stand-in for the Hebridean village (in fact, mostly filmed around Dumfries and Galloway). Imagine The Stag as a stand-in for The Green Man. And, imagine a giant wicker man burning on the East Hill in the stead of our Armada beacon…
Easy, see? That the pub is named The Green Man is especially resonant for us here. The pagan and pseudo-pagan annual festivities here nicely parallel the rituals in the film, albeit, aside from ‘naked Richard’, with less nudity!
This excellent little zine is already a bestseller at Bookbuster, and not only with our wiccan customers. The 1973 movie has a very wide fan-base, and the advent of Ritual on the 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man has caught peoples’ imagination.
The zine begins with a great interview with Rob Young, author of the also locally popular Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, and hauntologically inclined exhumation of 70s TV culture, Magic Box. This is followed by a fictionalised history of the famed apples of Summerisle, and an ‘Eye-Spy’ inspired ‘Folk Customs’ glossary (under the monicker ‘I See’, accompanied by the film’s famous pagan sun/eye logo. Later in the zine, a further intriguing ‘I See’ relates ‘5 Things in the Novel that aren’t in the Film’! Possibly most sorely missed is the character Beech, who opens a whole new subplot, and should possibly have been the focus of a sequel, rather than the poorer ‘companion piece’, 2011’s The Wicker Tree…
The centrespread reprints a 1980s article ‘Summerisle Stone Circle: Decoded’, after which we are gifted an interesting essay on the glorious movie soundtrack and its composers, Paul Giovanni and Magnet.
Another Hastings bestseller is Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism. Its author is involved with The Witchcraft Shop in Glastonbury, and has been shortlisted three times for the Philip K Dick award, and once for the Arthur C Clarke award! She contributes an ace interview discussing contemporary paganism and The Wicker Man. This includes references to the Romans and the Druids in relation to the inspiration behind the finale – an eighteenth-century illustration, The Wicker Colossus of the Druids, and to James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as a source for some of the folk customs the makers of the film, Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer used (Hardy also wrote the 1978 novelisation).
The zine is rounded off with a crossword!
Perhaps, when our bonfire night arrives, we should all go down to the beach at Rock-A-Nore and chant ‘Sumer is icumen in’!
Ritual is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN39 1RE
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply