The Wicker Man (2006) is a catastrophically misjudged remake that somehow turned one of horror cinema's most precisely constructed films into a chaotic, unintentionally funny mess. Neil LaBute's version replaces Robin Hardy's 1973 folk horror original's pagan menace with a misandrist island commune off the coast of Oregon, and in doing so, eliminates the thing that made the source material so unsettling: a system of belief that functions perfectly on its own terms. What's left is Nicolas Cage in a bear suit, punching women, and screaming about bees.
To understand why the 2006 film fails so completely, you need to know what it was remaking. The Wicker Man (1973) is a film in which every character, every song, every ritual detail serves a coherent ideological architecture. Edward Woodward's Sergeant Howie is doomed not because the islanders are cartoonishly evil, but because he is exactly the sacrifice they need, and the film earns that revelation beat by beat. The horror is theological. It's about two competing worldviews colliding, and only one can win.
LaBute's film, written by the director himself, doesn't understand this. His Summerisle becomes Summersisle, governed by a matriarchal bee-keeping cult led by Ellen Burstyn's Sister Summersisle, a figure with neither the intellectual menace of Christopher Lee's Lord Summerisle nor any coherent philosophy of her own. The women of the island are not devotees of a pre-Christian nature religion; they're just hostile to men. That's it. The screenplay mistakes misanthropy for myth.
What the remake gets wrong from the first scene
LaBute opens on a highway accident. A truck strikes a car. A child burns. It's traumatic and random, establishing Cage's Edward Malus as a man haunted by survivor's guilt. The original opened with Howie arriving by seaplane, immediately immersed in a community with its own logic and rhythm. Hardy's film was curious from frame one. LaBute's is grieving, which might have worked in a different film, but here the trauma backstory just crowds out the space where dread should be.
Cage's Malus arrives on the island hunting for a missing girl who may or may not be his daughter. The mystery is paper-thin. The island's hostility to him is immediate and unvaried. There's no seduction, no sense of a world that has its own internal beauty before it reveals its teeth. The original film was frightening precisely because Summerisle looked good: the apple orchards, the free sexuality, the communal joy. You could almost understand why someone might choose it. LaBute's island is just grey and rude.
Nicolas Cage and the problem of sincerity
Cage is a genuinely interesting actor. His work in Mandy (2018) proved he can anchor a horror film. Here, he's given nothing to anchor. Malus has no spiritual conviction to contrast against the paganism around him (Howie's Christianity was load-bearing in the original), no procedural intelligence, and no wit. He stumbles from scene to scene, shouting increasingly unhinged questions at women who ignore him.
The famous sequence of him punching and kicking island women while wearing a bear costume exists in the film as though LaBute thought it was cathartic. It plays, instead, as deranged slapstick. The bees sequence, in which Cage screams "Not the bees! NOT THE BEES!" in a mask of CGI insects, has become one of the most-quoted horror clips online. That's not a compliment. It's a scene entirely without context, dread, or purpose.
Woodward's Howie screamed at the end of the 1973 film too. He screamed and prayed inside a burning effigy as the islanders sang around him. That scream carried fifty minutes of built dread behind it. Cage's scream carries only the absence of any prior tension.
The matriarchy problem
LaBute replaces the 1973 film's pre-Christian fertility cult with a community structured around female dominance and male subjugation. The men of the island are servants, drones, literally mute in some scenes. The intent, reportedly, was satirical. The execution is neither sharp enough to function as satire nor disturbing enough to function as horror.
The original film's paganism worked because Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer took it seriously. They researched Celtic and Norse mythology. They consulted on the songs. The religion on screen has internal consistency: seasons, sacrifice, reciprocity with the land. LaBute's matriarchy has no equivalent rigour. It exists as a provocation, and a provocation without intellectual content is just noise.
Compare this to how genre films handle belief systems at their most effective. Think of the communal logic in folk horror: the rituals serve a purpose within their own moral universe. A community that believes fully in what it's doing is far more frightening than one that exists simply to be antagonistic. The 2006 Wicker Man mistakes hostility for menace. Those are different things.
Ellen Burstyn, who deserved better
Burstyn brings something to Sister Summersisle. Her stillness in certain scenes gestures toward the imperious charisma Christopher Lee brought to Lord Summerisle, and there are three or four moments where you glimpse the film this could have been. But LaBute's script gives her nothing to say that a viewer couldn't anticipate. She reveals the film's "twist" without ceremony, without weight. Lee's equivalent speech in 1973 is delivered as a philosophical coup de grace. Burstyn's is a plot summary.
The supporting cast, which includes Kate Beahan and Leelee Sobieski, are similarly stranded. No one is given a character so much as a function.
What it tells us about folk horror adaptation
The Wicker Man (2006) is useful precisely because it fails so clearly. It demonstrates that folk horror isn't about location or ritual or even violence. It's about a coherent alternative worldview colliding with the protagonist's assumptions, and the protagonist being wrong in ways they can't recover from. Howie was wrong in 1973 not because he was stupid, but because his certainty about the superiority of his own belief system blinded him to the evidence in front of him. His death is a logical consequence of his character.
Malus in 2006 is wrong because the plot requires it. The film doesn't earn his death. It just delivers it.
Folk horror that works, whether it's the 1973 original or the atmospheric rural dread of a film like Midsommar (2019), always has that quality: the community's logic is internally consistent, and the outsider's failure to understand it costs them everything. The 2006 remake reduces a masterpiece of ideological horror to a revenge fantasy that doesn't know whose side it's on.
It's worth watching once, for the bear suit. Stop there.