May The Goddess Guard Him. May He Find His Way To The Summerlands. May His Friends And Family Know Peace.

LA Weekly notes the sad death of Edward Woodward, star of cult TV shows The Equalizer (US) and Callan (UK), and, more crucially, the 1973 film version of The Wicker Man.

The film was remade in 2006 by Neil LaBute (starring Nicolas Cage) as a hysterically misogynistic flop, [Well, the movie was a hysterically (to coin a phrase) misogynistic flop, Cage was just a bad actor with a piss-poor script] but the original was a brilliant, moody little movie featuring Woodward as a repressed Scottish cop who gets called to investigate the death of a young girl in a remote island and ends up discovering a bizarre local pagan cult led by Christopher Lee in drag. Its soundtrack, written by Paul Giovanni and performed by Magnet, has had a huge influence on folk revival, freak-folk, and darkwave bands (and what other movie can you name that impressed both Pulp and Iron Maiden?).

As The Wild Hunt notes, a Wicker Man sequel is in the works.