So the point is, a commune like the one in the movie wouldn't have had an unbroken tradition going back to the Olden Days with festivals every 90 years. Having it be a community of hippies who just reintroduced their approximation of the Old Faith (much like Lord Summerisle in Wicker Man) both makes more sense, and gives the villains here more agency as opposed to making them curious foreign cultures that must be accepted for what they are.
I'm trying to think if that would be true over here? Yeah, there could be a 100-200 year backwoods cult, it's possible. After all we had the bloody Pilgrims...and their witch burnings. We have some weird stuff, like the town that sort of disappeared. Also it could be true in the British Isles, which did practice the Wicker Man or a relatively less brutal version of it. They filled it with various crops and a cow and burned it.
Here's the 1970s film Dark Secrets of Harvest Home based on the Tom Tyrone best seller. (The book is better, and I saw it in the 1970s, I found it scary then, I don't now. It's sort of cheesy.)
Tyrone apparently based his story on an English religious sect that came over in the 1600s and practiced the pagan rituals. And I know from my own myth studies in Britain that they combined a lot of the Christian rituals with their own. Some really lend themselves to it. I don't think they did ritual sacrifice though -- the early Christians had a tendency to exaggerate and state this was the case. But I'm uncertain. We have some unreliable narrators when it comes to the historical record.
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Date: 2019-07-14 10:40 pm (UTC)I'm trying to think if that would be true over here? Yeah, there could be a 100-200 year backwoods cult, it's possible. After all we had the bloody Pilgrims...and their witch burnings. We have some weird stuff, like the town that sort of disappeared. Also it could be true in the British Isles, which did practice the Wicker Man or a relatively less brutal version of it. They filled it with various crops and a cow and burned it.
Here's the 1970s film Dark Secrets of Harvest Home based on the Tom Tyrone best seller. (The book is better, and I saw it in the 1970s, I found it scary then, I don't now. It's sort of cheesy.)
Tyrone apparently based his story on an English religious sect that came over in the 1600s and practiced the pagan rituals. And I know from my own myth studies in Britain that they combined a lot of the Christian rituals with their own. Some really lend themselves to it. I don't think they did ritual sacrifice though -- the early Christians had a tendency to exaggerate and state this was the case. But I'm uncertain. We have some unreliable narrators when it comes to the historical record.