'An unkind film': letters reveal rift between Wicker Man creatives

A screenplay by Anthony Shaffer and a cast headed by Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward should have been the stuff of dreams for a director.

- Dalya Alberge

Although The Wicker Man is today revered as a cult horror classic, the extent of the misery that it brought its makers has been revealed by previously unpublished letters and script drafts.

The 1973 film is about a puritan police officer, played by Woodward, who arrives on a remote Scottish island in search of a missing girl, only to encounter sinister pagans who deny she ever existed. Britt Ekland was cast as an innkeeper's sexually liberated daughter, who seduces the God-fearing officer, with Lee as Lord Summerisle, a pagan aristocrat.

But the creative atmosphere was frayed and fractious, the documents show. In a letter to Shaffer, director Robin Hardy wrote: "How dare you treat me like this?"

Shaffer had made his name with masterpieces such as Sleuth but his typed draft of The Wicker Man reveals Hardy's brutal editing.

Extensive crossings-out include Summerisle's lines in the final scene, which would have begun: "The child was but the tip of the iceberg - the part that showed. Do not reproach yourself, there was no way you could have known."