Don't Keep The Wicker Man Waiting Symposium - Speakers

Keynote: Andrew Michael Hurley (author of The Loney and Starve Acre).

2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the most influential folk horror film of all time, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Long regarded as a cult curiosity, Hardy’s iconic film changed the template for British horror, and fifty years later is finally achieving the scholarly attention it deserves. This symposium, timed to coincide with the Dukes Theatre’s annual Dark Dukes festival, aims to assess the film’s legacy, from the rise of folk horror in the 1970s to the so-called folk horror revival in the 2010s and beyond. It will examine The Wicker Man within its broader intellectual, social and historical contexts, asking why this particular film made such a mark on the cinematic landscape and how it continues to inspire filmmakers, writers, artists and musicians.

Draft Programme

Creative Practices

• Maxine Gee - A Part, A Whole: A Creative Practices Screenwriting Exploration of Female Character Types in Folk Horror
• Sophie Parkes-Nield - ‘The Wicker Man effect’: Writing Everyday folklore
• Liam Bell - Embracing and resisting the influence of The Wicker Man on the writing of The Sleepless

Before The Wicker Man

• Stephen Curtis - Folk Horror Renaissance? Representing the Early Modern in Folk Horror Cinema
• Hannah O’Flanagan - Magic on the moors: the proto-folk horror of Marjorie Bowen’s ‘Kecksies’
• Robert Edgar and Adam James Smith – Keeping the Wicker Man Waiting: 300 Years of Folk Horror

History of The Wicker Man

• James Chapman - The Film Finances Archive and The Wicker Man 
• David Cottis – The Wicker Man & Anthony Shaffer
• Andrew Smith - The Golden Bough from a Greco-Roman perspective in relation to the Wicker Man

Eco Folk Horror

• Tom Duxbury - Bring back your apples: Can folk horror help fight the ecological crisis?
• Beth Cortese - The Green Future of Folk Horror
• Pam Walker - What if the old ways were right: To what extent is paganism exploited for shock effect in folk horror films?

Folk Horror’s Objects 

• Hannah Singleton - Folk Horror’s Material Culture: an analysis of Summerisle’s objects, craft, and ritual
• Liz Oakley-Brown - Sex, Sensibility and Summerisle’s Snails
• Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk - (Un)grounding the Stones: exploring the role of stone circles and walls in The Wicker Man, Children of the Stones and the work of Nigel Kneale

The Spaces of Folk Horror

• Andy Thatcher - Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent: exploring common land’s complex history through a folk horror methodology.
• Jimmy Packham - On strangers’ shores: folk horror and the seaside
• Alvaro Lopez - Folk Horror, Global Anxieties, and Aster’s Fantasized Europe in Midsommar

 Folk Horror, performance and media

• Andrew Ainscough - Riding the Wicker Man at Alton Towers: Constructing the Theatrics of Folk Horror.
• Jodie Passey - The Wicker Man: musical or "film with music"?
• Richard Sheppard - Place for 'A Place to Die': an audio/visual essay

Gender and Sexuality in Folk Horror

• Chloe Campbell - Wicker Men and Wicca Women: Folk Horror, The Wicker Man (1973) and Twenty-First Century Witches
• Clare Patterson – ‘I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure!’: Queer(ing) folk horror 
• Rebecca Gibson - 'Film, Femininity and Folk Horror in Censor (2021)'

Welcome from 9am-9.30am

To note: this is an in-person-only event. 

Symposium entry includes entry to an evening screening of The Wicker Man at 8.30pm. There will be a conference dinner at 6.30pm at the plant-based restaurant the Herbarium which is a short walk from The Dukes.