The Willing Fool: The Spectacle of The Wicker Man - Cult Horror Film Analysis & Review for Movie Buffs & Film Studies

A wonderful analysis of an endlessly rewarding film. Like all the best critical works, it offered me fresh and perceptive insights into a movie I thought I already knew very well. I was especially struck by the section drawing parallels between The Wicker Man and another favourite of mine, Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which seemed blindingly obvious after reading but had never occurred to me previously. The film has been written about at length before but never better than this - Alan Brown’s book is admirably rich on the film’s troubled production history but doesn’t try to offer much critical analysis, while the series of essays collected in Constructing the Wicker Man offer a variety of interesting ideological readings but feel a little thin on close reading of the text itself. For me, The Willing Fool is now the definitive study of one of the most important, complex and elusive of all British horror films - and that Robert J. E. Simpson’s book is truly worthy of it’s subject is about as great a compliment as I can think of. No fan of the film should be without a copy.