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| Sorry, Alton Towers. The Wicker Man just isn’t a rollercoaster ride | Sorry, Alton Towers. The Wicker Man just isn’t a rollercoaster ride |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| I don’t know what The Wicker Man did to hurt people, but enough is probably enough. What began as one of the greatest British movies of all time is about to become, of all things, a rollercoaster. Alton Towers has just unveiled a new Wicker Man attraction, featuring an eponymous 58ft effigy that bursts into flame as you plunge in and out of it at high speed. | I don’t know what The Wicker Man did to hurt people, but enough is probably enough. What began as one of the greatest British movies of all time is about to become, of all things, a rollercoaster. Alton Towers has just unveiled a new Wicker Man attraction, featuring an eponymous 58ft effigy that bursts into flame as you plunge in and out of it at high speed. |
| A chilling, folky, doom-laden meditation on the consequences of unchecked religion now shares a form of entertainment with Professor Burp’s Bubbleworks. The indignity. It’s a move akin to making a Rosemary’s Baby board game, or a Don’t Look Now inflatable bouncy castle set. | A chilling, folky, doom-laden meditation on the consequences of unchecked religion now shares a form of entertainment with Professor Burp’s Bubbleworks. The indignity. It’s a move akin to making a Rosemary’s Baby board game, or a Don’t Look Now inflatable bouncy castle set. |
| It doesn’t make a terrific amount of sense, all said. The Wicker Man – in which Edward Woodward visits a remote island to track down a missing child – is a film that lives and dies on its ability to build a slow sense of mounting dread. When Woodward’s Sergeant Neil Howie arrives on Summerisle, the audience is struck by a muted and unexplained disquiet. It takes an hour and a half for that disquiet to come into full, roaring focus; by the time the island’s horrifying masterplan has been revealed, we’ve come too far to ever find our way back again. It is bleak and brilliant and unusually literate, and it absolutely does not lend itself to a 90-second children’s ride that ends with a polite reminder that photos of your experience are available at the exit for 20 quid. | It doesn’t make a terrific amount of sense, all said. The Wicker Man – in which Edward Woodward visits a remote island to track down a missing child – is a film that lives and dies on its ability to build a slow sense of mounting dread. When Woodward’s Sergeant Neil Howie arrives on Summerisle, the audience is struck by a muted and unexplained disquiet. It takes an hour and a half for that disquiet to come into full, roaring focus; by the time the island’s horrifying masterplan has been revealed, we’ve come too far to ever find our way back again. It is bleak and brilliant and unusually literate, and it absolutely does not lend itself to a 90-second children’s ride that ends with a polite reminder that photos of your experience are available at the exit for 20 quid. |
| I’ve ridden the Saw coaster myself, and it is exactly like the films. It starts, you go ‘argh', then ‘yuck'. It’s perfect | I’ve ridden the Saw coaster myself, and it is exactly like the films. It starts, you go ‘argh', then ‘yuck'. It’s perfect |
| Of course, The Wicker Man isn’t the first horror film to become a rollercoaster. For the last nine years, Thorpe Park has been running a ride based on the Saw franchise; a series which, in part, delighted in drowning people in vats of liquidised pig intestine. But that rollercoaster makes perfect sense, because it’s based on a film that teenage boys like. The Saw films are all immediate and visceral. They’re a non-stop joyride of scream and squelch that pander to our basest instincts. They are a dare, a game of chicken. They are probably the closest that films can get to rollercoasters. I’ve ridden the Saw coaster myself, and it is exactly like the films. It starts, you go “argh”, then you go “yuck”, then it ends and you never think about it again. It’s perfect. | Of course, The Wicker Man isn’t the first horror film to become a rollercoaster. For the last nine years, Thorpe Park has been running a ride based on the Saw franchise; a series which, in part, delighted in drowning people in vats of liquidised pig intestine. But that rollercoaster makes perfect sense, because it’s based on a film that teenage boys like. The Saw films are all immediate and visceral. They’re a non-stop joyride of scream and squelch that pander to our basest instincts. They are a dare, a game of chicken. They are probably the closest that films can get to rollercoasters. I’ve ridden the Saw coaster myself, and it is exactly like the films. It starts, you go “argh”, then you go “yuck”, then it ends and you never think about it again. It’s perfect. |
| All of which puts it on the exact opposite end of the horror spectrum to The Wicker Man. Show the average teenage boy The Wicker Man and, aside from the moment where you see Britt Ekland’s (double’s) bum, it wouldn’t be able to hold their interest at all. It’s too slow-moving and thoughtful to be adopted into such a mainstream attraction. You’d have better luck making a rollercoaster based on Eyes Without a Face or Under the Skin or Amour. | |
| I might be getting this wrong, of course. I might have misread the press release and not realised that The Wicker Man ride is actually based on the 2006 Neil LaBute film, where Nicolas Cage punches a woman in a bear suit and then gets murdered by bees. But even then, that doesn’t deserve to become a rollercoaster either. It deserves to become an attraction where a stranger puts a metal dustbin over your head and beats you unconscious with a cricket bat. Whichever way you slice it, The Wicker Man is simply not rollercoaster material. | I might be getting this wrong, of course. I might have misread the press release and not realised that The Wicker Man ride is actually based on the 2006 Neil LaBute film, where Nicolas Cage punches a woman in a bear suit and then gets murdered by bees. But even then, that doesn’t deserve to become a rollercoaster either. It deserves to become an attraction where a stranger puts a metal dustbin over your head and beats you unconscious with a cricket bat. Whichever way you slice it, The Wicker Man is simply not rollercoaster material. |
| Unless all of this is a ruse. I’ve been giving it some thought and I’ve come to the conclusion that, while a rollercoaster absolutely does not suit The Wicker Man, a rollercoaster queue does. Think about it, you spend hours and hours laid bare before the elements in a weird and forced situation, often surrounded by evangelical people you neither like nor trust as your back starts to ache and your guts start to churn, to the point that you end up questioning your desire to even join it in the first place. | Unless all of this is a ruse. I’ve been giving it some thought and I’ve come to the conclusion that, while a rollercoaster absolutely does not suit The Wicker Man, a rollercoaster queue does. Think about it, you spend hours and hours laid bare before the elements in a weird and forced situation, often surrounded by evangelical people you neither like nor trust as your back starts to ache and your guts start to churn, to the point that you end up questioning your desire to even join it in the first place. |
| Perhaps the most faithful thing that Alton Towers could do to The Wicker Man ride is just make it a tedious, endless queue to nowhere that ends with a video of one of your pets burning to death. Now that’s a rollercoaster I could get behind. | Perhaps the most faithful thing that Alton Towers could do to The Wicker Man ride is just make it a tedious, endless queue to nowhere that ends with a video of one of your pets burning to death. Now that’s a rollercoaster I could get behind. |
| • Stuart Heritage writes about film, TV and music for the Guardian | • Stuart Heritage writes about film, TV and music for the Guardian |