When The Wicker Man first arrived in theaters in 1973, the British horror film struggled commercially and was largely overlooked at the box office.
But over the decades, the movie, especially its deeply unsettling soundtrack, would become enormously influential.
The soundtrack to The Wicker Man was recently ranked among the best movie soundtracks of all time by Rolling Stone, which praised the film's haunting blend of folk music and psychological unease.
Directed by Robin Hardy and starring Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward, and Britt Ekland, the film follows a police sergeant investigating the disappearance of a young girl on the isolated Scottish island of Summerisle, where pagan rituals and strange traditions quickly create an atmosphere of mounting dread.
Much of that atmosphere came directly from the soundtrack composed by Paul Giovanni and performed with the group Magnet. Rather than relying on traditional horror scoring, the music used British folk ballads, nursery rhymes, tavern songs and acoustic instrumentation to create something simultaneously pastoral and deeply unsettling.
In an interview with The Guardian, Hardy recalled instructing Giovanni, "that the film should have no electronic sounds in it at all. It should be as if we were using a town band on the island, and therefore it should have Scottish folk origins. We talked about Robbie Burns a good deal - the songs Corn Rigs and Gently Johnny are both from his poems."
Rolling Stone noted that the soundtrack's eerie blend of "concertina, fife, lyre, jaw harp, fiddle, and ocarina" helped redefine how folk music could function within horror storytelling.
"I think one of the things is that the songs are used as dialogue but they don't set out as they would in a musical," Hardy told BFI. "It's just that the dialogue lapses into song and vice versa. The lyrics in the songs are very important because they say what we are trying to say in that particular part of the story."
Rolling Stone also argued that later "freak folk" artists such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom owe part of their aesthetic lineage to The Wicker Man's uniquely sinister folk sound.
What made the soundtrack especially effective was the way its cheerful melodies often contrasted with the increasingly disturbing events onscreen. Songs that initially sounded playful or traditional gradually took on a more ominous quality as the story unfolded.
Over time, the soundtrack became almost as celebrated as the film itself, influencing generations of horror filmmakers and musicians interested in blending folk traditions with darker themes.
Although The Wicker Man initially failed commercially, it later developed one of the strongest cult followings in horror cinema history and is now widely considered one of the greatest folk horror films ever made.
Its soundtrack remains central to that legacy, a chilling musical landscape that permanently changed the sound of cinematic horror.
Related: 1975 Timeless Classic, Written in 20 Minutes, Became a Soft Rock Anthem
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