I asked David if he was involved in the process of making the film The Wicker Man? “Not at all, because in those days, they just bought the rights and then they got on and made it. It’s based on King Edred and because he’s 1000 years old, he has seen the whole of history, so it has a lot of potential as a novel.” Edred was performed at the London Horror Festival last year and it has a lot of humour in it. I am writing a novel based on my latest play Edred, The Vampyre. My agent Jonathan Clowes then said, ‘Why don’t you turn it into a novel?’ And now we are in lockdown, I’m doing a similar thing. “Yes, it was initially the treatment for a screenplay that Michael Winner had on his list to do. ![]() Ritual was originally written as a screenplay. In terms of the ritual side, my acting background also helped because in acting, there are a lot of rituals as well.” In fact, I had only visited it a couple of times, but I liked the isolation of Cornwall, and in those days, it was very isolated. I asked David if he knew Cornwall would be a good location, “Yes, but I only knew Cornwall a bit. Ritual is set in Cornwall, and so it differs in its location from The Wicker Man. Even though it’s all predicated on death of animals!” Often in history, people have used killing and murder in a ritualistic way, in the belief, ironically, that sacrificing others will bring the people a good life. I think the woods gave me an important part of the idea for my novel – because what happens in nature, when people hang on to ideas like ‘by sacrificing a horse you will get a great harvest’. You see, I was brought up in a poor environment in Peterborough and my brothers and I used to spend a lot of time in the woods. “Ritual deals with a lot of pagan imagery and sacrificial practices. It was a time when I also wrote a comedy about a lesbian vampire called Fanghorn, which Glenda Jackson played in the West End.” And as I was playing a policeman in The Mousetrap, it gave me the idea of writing about a policeman. The ideas came, in a way, as a mixture from Dennis Wheatley and also from Robert Graves, who wrote The White Goddess (about pagan mythology). ![]() ”I wrote a lot of it on the Tube train and I handwrote it. I actually wrote it while I was playing the lead in The Mousetrap in the West End.” (David was previously an actor). It was an unusual book for the time? “Before me, there was really only Dennis Wheatley doing this. I first asked David about the genesis of Ritual. I spoke to David about Ritual and his Millennium-set-follow-up novel, The Wicca Woman and his upcoming projects. It was also famously the book that inspired the film The Wicker Man. Pagan symbols, sacrificial rituals and a twist of an ending – this, it seems, is where the folk horror archetypes were created. In the novel, an outsider (policeman David Hanlin) enters an isolated village to investigate a murder in a close-knit-community and he finds nothing is what it seems. In 1967, when David Pinner’s novel Ritual was published, it created the template for what would become Folk Horror. ❉ The ‘Ritual’ author on the book that was the genesis of Folk Horror, and its sequel novel.
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