Its geography is stark, rugged and eerily inviting, its characters are sickly happy and lying through their teeth and its narrative is immersive and questioning to the point where its finale is deeply affecting and horrifying. It’s a crying shame that viewers of The Wicker Man 1973 will never fully see the film as its director intended. Having been slashed to bits by the studio and then had its cuts supposedly destroyed, it seemed unlikely that fans or general filmgoers would be able to witness the full cut of Robin Hardy’s defining folk horror. A recent discovery of a more complete print, albeit with the excised segments of a somewhat battered quality, means that in its 40th anniversary year, the fullest version possible of the film can be seen for the first time since the 1970s.

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