Nitehawk celebrates May Day with a double-feature (our first!) screening of THE WICKER MAN!

Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man is a provocative British film challenging sexuality, religion, nature, and the value of life. Oozing with sexual references (phallic inferences on regeneration, growth, and fertilization abound), every gesture is a seductive act: sex in the graveyard, young women jumping over a fertility fire, the “innkeeper’s daughter”, boys dancing around the Maypole. And all of these devious acts lead up to the big May Day spring festival when the slightly kooky Scottish community turns full-on creep – it still shocks audiences today! (We’ll be screening the new director’s cut!)

But of course, it’s the 2006 American re-make by Neil LaBute that is actually the campiest of the two. Deemed “absurd” by its star Nicolas Cage, pitting the two against each other will be the most daring gesture of all!