Episode 74: The Wicker Man

Just in time for your Summer Soltice: the Wicker Man! ☀️💀

In this episode, I discuss the eerie and weird world of The Wicker Man, a film that has become a cornerstone of the folk horror genre. What does this story really mean? Was the wicker man concept real, i.e., was such a ritual ever performed, or is it a construct of ancient propaganda?

Links:

https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/julius-caesar-inspired-the-wicker-man/

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog.

Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld is available! Click here to buy it on Amazon. 

Sara's book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld is available now! Click here to buy it on Amazon. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

The Wicker Man, horror film, Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, pagan traditions, human sacrifice, Summer Isle, May Day, gaslighting, isolation, Folk horror, Satanic Panic, Julius Caesar, occult elements, remote island.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about the 1973 classic horror film The Wicker Man. I had not seen this movie in years. We had some kind of nasty weather recently, it was the perfect night to lay on the couch like a slug and do nothing. And I was perusing around on Tubi, and I saw that they were offering this for free, and I thought, I'll give it another watch. I haven't seen it in years. I might as well go back and maybe pick up on some things that I've long since brain dumped. I'll give you my standard disclaimer here. You know how it is with Tubi. Things come and go. So just because it was available for free when I watched, it doesn't necessarily mean it will still be there by the time this episode drops. There typically is a gap between when I'm able to sit and record several episodes at once versus when they actually make it to the airwaves. It is what it is. I will also give another disclaimer that spoilers will abound, and this is the type of film that you may forget some of the finer points, some of the finer details of it, but you never forget the ending, and I do not want to spoil that for anyone. So if you have not seen this movie before, and you plan to download this episode or bookmark it and come back to it later. Don't allow me to spoil this for you. If you hang in here with me, I will assume that spoilers are fine with you and that you're locked loaded and ready to go. So pick out your beverage of choice for this evening, and we will saddle up and take this mighty strange ride. All right, so here we go. I'm not going to get too detailed in my plot summary. I will just simply say I had forgotten how odd this movie is. I could remember the basic beginning of it, Edward Woodward's character flying in and being this really straight laced, prim and proper type of police officer. And then, of course, I remembered the ending. I'm ashamed to say I had brain dumped. How bad Christopher Lee's hair piece or wig, whatever the hell that was. It was very bad. When he first appears on camera, busted out laughing. It was like, Oh, my God, that's terrible. All right, here we go. So toward the end of April, this man, Sergeant Neil Howie, who's played by Edward Woodward, shows up in a sea plane, and he's flown into this like remote island called Summer Isle, which is somewhere in relation to Scotland. I think it's supposed to be somewhere in the Hebrides. And he's trying to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison, and he had received some kind of letter, and it's not really clear, like who sent this letter? Apparently, it was sent anonymously to the police, and he winds up investigating this young girl on this remote island called Summer isle. We also learned pretty early on that how he considers himself to be this like conservative, upright, devout Christian. So whenever he gets to this island and he sees that there are a lot of very old school pagan traditions going on, it does not sit well with him, and he freaks out. Now, as soon as he lands on the water, he asks this group of old men to bring a dinghy to him so that he can get out of the seaplane and actually get on to dry land. And they're sort of like, no, no. You have to have permission from the Lord of summer Isle to land here, and it's clear that you don't so we're not going to help you. So you have this immediate sense of nobody else really wants him there. Everybody's being standoffish. Well, he gets up there finally, and he shows these dislike group of old men a photo of this girl, Rowan, and no, we don't know her. Haven't seen her before? Have you seen her? Nope, don't know her. So we immediately get this sense of foul play. The some somebody is lying. These people are highly isolated. This is just freaking weird. There are now. This is a nighttime broadcast, so I could be a lot more blunt, but you there? Are people on the island that are out having public sex and lots of public nudity. There's a really weird scene of a woman who's naked in the graveyard, crying on somebody's tomb. There are May Day celebrations, because, again, he's there toward the end of April, so the May Day is about to happen, and there are children going around the maypole. But it's not just like this, Oh, look. It's a little sort of homespun, rustic, little fair. And isn't that cute? The teacher in school is teaching a group of girls about how the maypole is a phallic symbol. It's like, oh, this is all about the penis. And he's he gets in his classroom. Is like, this is filth. This is degeneracy. There's also a woman who makes her daughter put a toad in her mouth, because she says that, like, if, if the toad gets in your mouth, and then the toad will take your sore throat, and then he'll have the sore throat and you won't there are some, you know, strange things going on in this island, and we get a clear juxtaposition between, like, okay, you've got Edward Woodward's character, Neil Howie straight laced upright by the book cop, and he's from the mainland. He's come out, and it's like one of the I don't want to get too far yet into the genre stereotypes, because that's something I want to talk about later in this episode. But we have him as the Stranger in a Strange Land. He's come from the mainland, where things are done a whole lot differently, and he's on this place called Summer Isle, and there's kids dancing around Maypole and being told it's a symbol of a penis. And then there's other pieces, adults, just random adults everywhere, fornicating and running through the grass in various states of nudity. And how he stays, while he's there, he stays at this place called the Green Man, in obvious nod to, you know, a pagan tradition there with the Green Man and the owner's daughter, who's played by Britt Eckland, tries to seduce him, and that's another bizarre scene that I had completely brain dumped. But he gets into his room, and she's dancing around naked and singing and like throwing her nude body up against the wall, moaning. And he's tempted, but he refuses to do anything. And the next morning, she's like, I really expected that she would try to gaslight him and be like, No, you must have dreamed that I wasn't moaning like a, you know, animal in heat trying to get you to come over here and service me. I don't know what you're talking about, but she doesn't. She's actually very forthcoming, if you'll pardon the pun, that now I was trying to get you to come over here and visit me, and you didn't do it. And he says, Well, I'm engaged to be married, and I just don't believe in premarital sex. So this is another moment where you're like, Well, okay, so you have somebody that is very, very, very old school about their predilections, and it's juxtaposed with these people that are frolicking naked and trying to have an affair through the wall. Another bizarre thing that happens at this hotel is that he sees this series of pictures on the wall about like the harvest queen, but the most recent one is missing. And of course, he suspects it's missing because Rowan was in the picture. He asks for a meal, and the meal he's given is pretty lackluster and gross, because everything is canned. And that's one of the questions that he asked to Brit ek character, is I see these pictures of all these fruits and vegetables, and you seem to have a like a highly agrarian society here. Why are you giving me canned produce and canned vegetables? It doesn't make any sense, and she appears shifty and uncomfortable by the question. And so she says, Oh, well, by now, everything's been exported. That's why I'm just giving you canned goods. But you can tell it's an obviously flimsy excuse. So here again, it's really obvious that something weird is going on. Nobody in the island seems to be very or on the island, I should say, seems to be very helpful in trying to figure out what happened to this girl, Rowan. That's really where the gaslighting does take place. Some of them say, There has never been any row in here. You're mistaken. Some of them say, Oh yes, Rowan was a little girl here, but she's dead now. So that lot of weird things going on and how he has to figure out who's telling the truth and who's lying. He meets with the leader this Lord summer Isle, who is played by Christopher Lee, again, with a really horrendous wig or hairpiece of some kind, he definitely looks like a goof.

It's almost like you're so focused on how bad. Hair piece is that it's like, oh, God, how could anyone take this person seriously? And he goes into this weird story about how his grandfather was a Victorian agronomist, and he came to this island and turned everything around. So it's, in a way, it's like a reverse missionary, or a missionary from a different religion, because we tend to think about missionaries being of the Christian faith. But this this grandfather was an old school pagan, and he wanted to bring old school paganism back to this summer aisle. And he's developed. This grandfather has developed, like, I don't know, some weird variety of fruits and vegetables that would grow in Scotland's climate. Like even, even in the climate of this little weird Scottish Island, things that would not normally grow there will suddenly grow there. And he has this belief that one of the main reasons why that is is because he has this loyalty to the old fashioned, old school gods and goddesses, and they're bringing prosperity. They're bringing miracles, things that would not normally grow are growing. I suppose that we could make the analogy of if someone planted a coconut tree in Alaska and it actually started growing coconuts. If you brought tropical fruits to Siberia, the coldest part of Siberia, and everything was doing just fine, you would think nature is completely amiss in this situation, and because it's working, because the island is becoming prosperous, and they have all these fruits and vegetables, and everything seems to be going very well for them. They embrace the old fashioned paganism that this grandfather has brought to the island, and anybody that's still loyal to Christianity just leaves how he finds out that there's a grave that supposedly belongs to Rowan, he gets permission from this Lord summer Isle to exhume the body. And one of the, I don't know, weird, creepy things about their conversation is that how he is telling summer Isle, this girl may have been murdered here, and you're awfully laissez faire about it, like, how can you not care that one of your own citizens was murdered, especially a kid that's just seems particularly bad, and summer Island is laughing like, I'm not bothered by it, because it's not true. There was no little girl murdered here. This is something that you have completely wrong. So he exhumes the grave, and there's in the coffin, you're expecting that he will find either nothing at all or the corpse of a little girl, and they will continue to gaslight him. Instead, he finds the corpse of a rabbit, and he also is able to find, like this missing photograph that had been inside the Green Man Inn. And Rowan was standing there, but the boxes were empty. And so it's clear to him now that the crops must have failed. Like there, here are all these other pictures of these little girls who were, like, the harvest queen or the May Queen, whatever, and she's surrounded by box after box after box of produce. Rowan is not so now he's really convinced that Rowan is is dead somewhere, and this is a terrible, terrible thing, and he's got to figure out who killed her and bring this perpetrator to justice. Well now, by now in the movie, it is May Day, and he's trying to get back to the mainland because he thinks this job is going to be more than what I can do by myself. I need to come back here with several other officers. He also begins to suspect that Rowan is not dead. He wonders if she is being held captive somewhere because she's going to be a human sacrifice for the May Day. So he gets back to his seaplane, and it's all bungled up. There's there's obviously been foul play with it. He cannot leave. And he also, because the radio is damaged, he also can't call out to get anybody else to come back from the mainland, so he really is marooned there now. So he goes back and he like loses another weird scene. The whole movie is weird. There's another weird scene where the innkeeper and his daughter are are talking rather loudly about how they want to subdue Edward Woodward's character, Howie, and they light. I don't know if it's supposed to be a real hand that they've set on fire, or if it's a wax candle that's been made in the shape of a hand. Yeah, but they take this hand or hand candle into his hotel room and light it on fire, and supposedly this is going to lull him into a big, dramatic sleep, and he's just going to be like Rip Van Winkle and sleep for days so they can have their big May Day celebration, and he'll never even know what they did. Well, of course, that's gonna whet his appetite. He's gonna have to know what they did. It's like a moth to the flame, super duper. No pun intended, especially with where we're going. So he, like, pretends to be asleep, and they leave the room. And, in fact, Britt Eklund character, the daughter, leaves the inn completely because she's got to go be part of the revelry that's going to happen. The innkeeper, owner guy is going to play punch the fool, and he has this elaborate costume Edward Woodward's character, beats him up, knocks him out, and while he's unconscious, he ties him up, and he takes the costume. And the costume, of course, comes with like this big, ugly, grotesque mask. And he thinks I will just go in place of the innkeeper while he's knocked out and tied up here and unavailable for revealing what's happening. I will go to the parade. I will figure out in the May Day festivities, where is Rowan? And he thinks that wherever she is, she's been tied up, she's been held captive, he will find her, release her, and somehow they will get back to the mainland. Obviously, as a viewer, you sort of have forgotten this problem as you're watching the film like well, how the hell are they going to get out if he does find her, and it's the two of them against everybody else on this island, and he has no working plane and no working radio. How the hell are they actually going to get back to the mainland? Nevertheless, that's his goal. Is to save her somehow, and he's playing the role, and he's trying his best he can to just blend in and do whatever he thinks the innkeeper would do, playing the role of punch towards the end of their ceremonies, Rowan emerges from a cave, and of course, he thinks this is my chance they're going to kill her, and this is my chance to save her. And she goes along with this. And I'm very scared. I don't know what's going on with these people. They're all crazy. And she tells Howie, I know how to get out of here. I know how they put me in this cave. I know how to get out so we can go somewhere and be safe. He takes her word for it and follows her instead. All she really does is take him around this cavern, and when they come out on the other side, the main villagers are all waiting for them, and Rowan runs off, like to be with Christopher Lee and some of these other people, and is basically like, Oh, I did a good job, didn't I? Yay, go. Me. I led this guy right to you. That's really when he Howie begins to realize that he's been had he got, got and he has been had. And summer Isle explains to Howie Edward Woodward's character, that Rowan was never meant to be the human sacrifice. Yes, they're going to do a human sacrifice that day. How he's been right about that suspicion all along. It's just not ever going it was never intended that Rowan would be that person, the person that they're going to murder is Howie, and he gives the speech about animal sacrifices, will do certain things. And if you murder a child that will do certain things. But if you really want to make the gods and goddesses happy, then you have to get an extra special adult human sacrifice. And he's standing there like, what does that even mean? An extra special adult sacrifice? Well, the person has to show up of his own free will. He has to be powerful, like a king, which we can say you are, because you represent the king in law, someone that's virginal, and then somebody who is actually also a fool, which you are, because you fell right into our trap.

How he freaks out because he realizes, like, I I'm in a spider's web here. I thought I was doing something noble to save this kid, but I am totally screwed. And so he tells everybody, as they're closing in on him, this is not going to bring your crops back. The crops never should have been growing here anyway, because they're not meant to be Scottish crops. None of this is making any sense. And He also warned summer isle that whenever his human sacrifice fails to appease the gods, using air quotes here, appease the gods, and the crops fail anyway. For another year, the people of this island will only be satisfied by having the next human sacrifice the summer Isle himself. But summer Isle is not convinced by this, and he's like No. Know they're going to be appeased by your sacrifice. Don't worry about it there. Nobody's going to be murdering me because all of our prosperity is going to come back and it'll last for a long time, because the gods are going to be really happy with you as their sacrifice. So even though he's trying to get away and he's screaming like this is murder, no matter how you try to put it, no matter how many excuses you try to make for it, it's cold blooded murder. You need to wake up. You need to use some logic. This is not going to make your crops grow back. Murdering me is only murder. Somebody eventually will come here looking for me. You can't do this. He's trying to reason with them, and they're not listening. They don't care. And finally, you see, like the piece, there is a song at the end of all of this, this giant Wicker Man statue. And so horrifyingly, there are all these different compartments where they've put in various animals, which I, as an animal lover, hated. I was like, Oh God, how terrible. And they force Edward Woodward's character, Howie, into it. They tie everything off so he can't get out. And then they surround it and set it on fire, and they're just singing as the animals are screaming, and Edward Woodward's character is screaming and praying and all of this. He's inside, like trying to recite one of the Psalms and having his prayer and final, like, I don't know, asking God for absolution or something like that. They're all singing. They're like, singing this happy little folk song and going round and round. And they're just as happy as they can be. And that's how the film ends. There's no further explanation that that is the ending of the film. And that's why, if you've ever seen it, even just the one time. I couldn't remember a great deal of it, but I never forgot the ending, because the first time that you see it, you're like, Oh God, I see why this is a horror movie. Because this is just gross in some respects. I would, I would compare it, in a way, in its own way, to the exorcist. And here's why I say that. If someone showed me the exorcist and said, This is proof, this is quote, unquote proof of demonic possession, I would not be convinced. It's a movie and it's grotesque. It's highly disturbing to watch a young girl who's like 11 or 12 years old, defiling herself and screaming out profanity, and there's pea green vomit going everywhere, and then when you find out that Linda Blair actually did break her pelvis, and some of her screams in the film were quite real that it's just that's like, well, that's child abuse really, when you think about it, this is terrible, but would it convince me of demonic possession? No, it wouldn't. Now, if you show me Jack Nicholson's portrayal of Jack Torrance in the shining and said, This is evidence of demonic possession. I would believe you, because he really becomes so evil, so cruel and just the way that he looks, his facial expressions, his eyes, everything he is so deranged in that movie, he plays the character incredibly well. I can't believe anybody else would have done better. I know that Stephen King was disappointed with how the movie was in comparison to how the novel was. But for my money, holy shit, Jack Nicholson, as Jack Torrance would convince me of demonic possession. So The Wicker Man, for me, is a bit like the exorcist. In that regard, I watch it, and I'm not like, Oh God, I might have to sleep with the lights on tonight and say a prayer before bed. I don't feel that way. I feel like this is disturbing. I find this disturbing, and that's what I would say about the exorcist. I find this disturbing. So now I think it's worth asking what was the point? Is this true? Is it based on anything real? There were times for me when I thought about the 1980s Satanic Panic. You may remember a while back I did that early episode in this podcast about the documentary Satan wants you, which in turn, is about the old book. Michelle remembers back in the 80s, everything was the devil. The Devil was at the Christian devil, specifically the Christian devil was everywhere, lurking around every bush, inside your house, inside your music, under your bed, in the closet, in the attic, if you heard a mouse scratching on the baseboard, it was actually the devil. So there was part of it for me that was a bit like that, like, Oh, here's this isolated island, and they're doing paganism, old school paganism. Awesome. Just kind of like, yeah, okay, but, but before we get into some of the nuances of horror genre, which I think are really interesting, we can go to Den of geek.com of course, I'll drop a link. Please check this article out for yourself, but they talk about Julius Caesar's account of The Wicker Man, so we can start to get an idea of well, is this based on anything real, or did some novelist or screenplay writer just come up with the idea of a Wicker Man because it sounded really horrific, and in the film it is. So I'll read a little bit from Den of Geek for you now, Julius Caesar, the man who was pivotal in transitioning Rome from a republic to an empire, yet who did not live to see the name enshrined as a synonym with Emperor, led a full life, even before he crossed the Rubicon and triggered a world shattering Civil War prior to that fateful day in 49 BCE, Caesar was a transcendent general of legions and A consul of Rome. Now they quote a bit from some of Caesar's writings where he quote evaluated the druids need for secrecy. Now this is Caesar's writing. They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses. Accordingly, some remain in the course of training 20 years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing, though in almost all other matters, in their public and private transactions, they use Greek script that practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons, because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of people nor those who learn to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory by relying on writing. Since it generally occurs to most men that in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly and their employment of the memory. So there's this idea, according to Caesar, that they're not writing anything down. Are there? Are there reasons for that? Now I'm going to read a little bit more from what Caesar has written. All the Gauls are extremely devoted to superstitious rituals. I mean, like the Romans weren't just saying, just a minute, okay, sorry. And on that account, they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases, and they who are engaged in battles and dangers either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them and employ the druids as the performers of those sacrifices, because they think that unless the life of a man be offered for the life of a man, the mind of the immortal gods cannot be rendered propitious, and they have sacrifices of that kind ordained for national purposes. Others have figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of wicker. They fill with living men, which being set on fire. The men perish enveloped in the flames. They consider that the sacrifice of peoples guilty of theft or in robbery or any other offense is more acceptable to the immortal gods, but when a supply of such people is wanting, they have the right to even sacrifice the innocent. So here's where the idea from ancient history comes from. Is there some skepticism about this? Yes, and did the Den of Geek article does get into that. There are some historians, of course, that say Caesar ma'am and making this up to make them sound bad. He may have seen one isolated incident. Decide on that for yourself, but that kind of story from antiquity, from Julius Caesar, is what gives us the idea, the very concept of a Wicker Man. Now, in terms of genre, horror movie genre, you know, I touched on this earlier, we have the idea straight away, of Edward Woodward's character, Howie as being a stranger in a strange land. He's from the mainland. They do things in a more conservative Christian way, where he's from, he's accustomed to going to church and no premarital sex, and he's engaged to some woman, and they haven't done anything yet because he's very straight laced. And then he gets to summer Isle, and there's naked dancing and people screwing outside, and children are taught that the maypole is a symbol of a penis, and kids are swallowing toads because they think it'll get rid of a sore throat. And it's like, what is this? So that's one part of it. Another part of it too is that Edward Woodward's character, Howie, is isolated. He comes in by sea plane, and he leaves the sea plane unattended so anybody could go out there and sabotage it, which is exactly what happens, and he has no way to get home. I'm thinking now, even just as I hadn't planned to talk about this, but even just as I'm saying this out loud for this podcast, I'm thinking now of like Harker in Dracula, like Harker and and how he gets, um, he gets to the. Castle, and it's like, well, you're trapped here. Now I've got you. I'm going to keep you here for a long period of time, and I'm going to tell you that our business is going to take a while. This isn't just a little overnight thing. You need to be here with me for a while, and we're in this remote area, and you don't know anybody, and you don't speak the language around here, so I have you in my clutches, and I can do whatever I want with you. We have these kind of horror movie scenarios already happening, the Stranger in a Strange Land. You don't fit in around here, and we do things differently. And being trapped, having no way to call for help, being really isolated, and having to live on your wits, more broadly speaking, well actually, before I get to them, more broadly speaking, then you have the occult elements of all this old school paganism, not Neo pagans, Not Wiccans, but old school pagans. They do human sacrifice. Old school pagans, we have a lot of fearfulness about that, that there could be some enclave, some pocket of society somewhere, that still does, that they still follow the old ways. So we have these horror movie scenarios already happening now, I will say, more broadly, we also have the idea of the Folk horror sub genre of horror movie. There are plenty of people online that will in in more recent years, point to a film like mid summer, which I think came out in 2019, be a great one for me to do an episode on. I'm surprised I haven't already, but it's of that same vein, like this man has gone off to this island where they do things differently. These people are superstitious. They have these old school dark, creepy rituals that they still do. We see this certainly in mid summer. We see it maybe also to some degree, in the film The Witch, which I think came out in 2015 that would be another great one for me to do an episode on at some point. But the idea is that you've gone into this remote area out in the country, we don't do things like the city folk. Things are different around here. There's an old school or a rural type of paganism or or maybe even devil worship, and you're just trapped out here. So in some respects, that makes it it makes it even scarier, because we think about the possibility of that truly happening. Could Could you take a wrong turn and suddenly be somewhere, or like to stick with Howie Edward Woodward's character, maybe you're just doing something for your job. He legitimately thinks that he is looking for a missing child. He thinks, after he gets out there, that the child has been murdered by a bunch of creepy old school pagan people. And he really thinks that he is doing something to help society. If we look at the film midsummer, the girl is depressed. She's lost her whole family, her relationship with her boyfriend is hanging on only by a thread, and he basically takes her on this peculiar vacation because he feels sorry for her, and he thinks that she might have a minty bee if he dumps her. So she's not even really supposed to be part of this gathering. He only takes her because he feels sorry for her, and then these people are doing all kinds of weird old school things that the others, who are not from around there, find disturbing. So there you go. Could Could you take a vacation and suddenly end up in the wrong place? I'm also thinking of the remake of House of Wax. Now, I love the old House of Wax with Vincent Price, which is itself a remake. Off the top of my head, I can't remember. The film is an old film. It seemed like it had Lionel at will and Faye ray in it, if I'm not mistaken. And it's good too. But House of Wax from the 50s is quite good. I think the House of Wax remake that they made sometime in the aughts is weird. It's like slasher, schlocky type horror, but it has its moments, and it's a bit like that too. These kids take the wrong turn. They end up in this weird little community where weird stuff is going on. There's another movie I'm also thinking of now, called x that's a bit like that, where these creepy people go off to try to. Like they rent a little house on a farm, and they're going to make an X rated film, and then all of these weird, creepy things start happening to them on this weird, creepy farm. Same kind of idea you we're not from around here. You don't know what really goes on. So what do you think? Are there these weird pockets, these weird communities, there's there these weird enclaves, or is that just a human fear? Is it just a deep seated human fear that you might take the wrong turn and wind up in some kind of land That Time Forgot, someplace where they still do things very old school, and you might wind up in The Wicker Man, or you might wind up witnessing like the types of things that happen in mid summer or in House of Wax. Do we just tell ourselves that? Because it makes an awesome story. Is The Wicker Man another form of Satanic Panic. You better be careful out there in the countryside. On these remote islands, they still kill people out there. They're old school pagans. For that matter, I remember when I was a high school kid, there was this remote area. I never went out there. Some of the other teenage kids did, but I never did. Supposedly, there were people out there that did satanic rituals that killed animals, and there were pentagrams everywhere. I don't know if that was true, because I never went out there, but it's the same, the same genre of fear, right? Don't go out there because there are people doing devil worship on that place. It's really scary. So what do you think? Are such things real, or are they just archetypes? Are they things common to the human experience that exist because, well, they don't necessarily exist in reality. Do they only exist in our fears, or do they exist in reality? I leave the question to you, stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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