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Episode 353: THE WICKER MAN (1973) with Dan Nagan

October 21, 2025·1 hr 47 min·9 clips

The hosts uncover the film's twist: the island's pagan rituals were fabricated by a rich grandfather to exploit workers.

1. Try Love podcast discusses Robin Hardy's 1973 folk horror film The Wicker Man, recorded as part of the Trilon Cinema's Nixon Land programming series. 2. Hosts are Jason Daphnis, Cody Narveson, and Harry Mackin; guest is Dan Nagan, appearing on his birthday, with Aaron Grossman absent from this episode. 3. The episode's central question is whether The Wicker Man is a horror film, a British satire, or a colonialist anxiety text — and the panel argues it is all three simultaneously. 4. Jason provides the plot summary: devout Christian Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) travels to the fictional Scottish island of Summer Isle to search for a missing girl and finds the community has abandoned Christianity for Celtic paganism. 5. Dan explains that many people from the panel's generation came to the original through the 2006 Nicholas Cage remake, which he rewatched before recording and found 'not as bad as I remembered' as a Cage performance, though very different from the original. 6. Harry calls Howie 'one of the least sympathetic protagonists I have ever seen in a film,' describing the film as being about 'how lame it is to be a virgin Christian when there are cool pagan fuck masters all around you.' 7. Harry argues the burning wicker man is 'for my money one of the most enduring horror images ever created in cinema' — despite the ending being entirely predictable from early in the film. 8. Dan traces the political context: the film came out in early 1973, when Britain was experiencing the same loss of faith in government and church that was playing out in America, making the Nixon Land programming context meaningful. 9. Harry reads the pagan folk horror as a specifically British colonialist anxiety: the fear that something older than Christianity exists on their own soil, that the empire's project of cultural erasure might itself rest on a transplanted religion. 10. The panel connects the film to Midsommar as a recent folk horror successor, both dealing with a protagonist who cannot assimilate into an ancient community and is ultimately consumed by it. 11. Dan identifies the most important late scene: Christopher Lee's Lord Summerisle visibly shakes when he realizes the sacrifice is hollow — his pagan revival was originally a practical tool for agricultural productivity, and he now knows the ritual won't work. 12. Cody notes that the film inverts standard horror morality: normally sex and sin mark the victims; here the virgin devout Christian is the one who dies while the 'sinners' thrive. 13. Jason observes that the first shot of Howie establishes him at church leading communion — church and state are his twin authorities — and the island systematically humiliates both. 14. Harry notes Christopher Lee's Lord Summerisle 'has never looked more comfortable' — his charisma comes from total surety in his worldview, making his single moment of doubt near the end all the more striking. 15. The panel discusses a scene where the barmaid's daughter dances and knocks on Howie's door — readable both as a temptation test and as her trying to save his life by removing his virginity before the sacrifice. 16. Cody mentions his first viewing was during the first spooky season of lockdown, and that the sold-out Trilon screening was physically hot enough to somewhat replicate the film's burning-man finale. 17. Dan mentions Kierla Janice as a scholar who has written extensively about Wicker Man and folk horror as a recommended resource for further reading. 18. The episode's tone is discursive and enthusiastic, with Dan as a birthday guest who had not previously had a strong connection to this film and is visibly reconsidering it in real time during the discussion. 19. Listeners interested in folk horror, British satire, and the political context of 1970s cinema will find the discussion substantive and multi-perspectived. 20. Listeners expecting a horror-focused plot analysis or those who have not seen the film and want to avoid knowing the ending may find the episode more thematically than narratively structured.

As heard by us

A shaggy Wicker Man conversation that finds bite in religion, sex, and self-justification.

Try Love opens with a John Waters style no smoking bit, then settles into a roundtable that keeps coming back to The Wicker Man with a loose, conversational rhythm that suits the movie.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a messy, funny Wicker Man conversation that still lands on religion and control.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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