To balance up the sins of that awful Nic Cage rehash, I thought this was as good a time as any to revisit the peerless 1973 original of The Wicker Man.
Dour, puritanical, West Highland Police sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) receives an anonymous letter, telling him about the case of a missing girl - Rowan Morrison.
She was supposed to have disappeared on the secluded Summerisle, a remote Hebridean island famed for its popular and unusually abundant fruit produce.
However, when he arrives there, the islanders claim never to have heard of the girl. Even the woman Howie believes is her mother, post mistress May Morrison (Irene Sunter), denies that she's her daughter.
Realising that this investigation isn't going to be an open-and-shut case, Howie takes a room at the island's Green Man Inn, where he meets the landlord's lovely daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland, dubbed by Annie Ross).
Struggling to come to terms with the girl's disappearance evolving into a question of semantics, humourless Howie of the 'fun police' grows increasingly frustrated with the islanders' pagan ways of public nudity, dogging, fertility rituals, singing (there's so many songs in The Wicker Man it could be classed as a musical), dancing etc.
Finding a grave for the missing girl, Howie gains permission from the island's head honcho, the charismatic Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), to exhume her body... only to find that Rowan's coffin doesn't contain her body.
As May Day draws near, Howie begins to suspect that Rowan isn't really dead, but being held hostage to be used in a pagan sacrifice to ensure that the island's crops don't fail as they did the year before.
Of course, we all know that the machinations of the islanders are far more sinister than that, leading to the classic - and well-known - climax (that doesn't involve bees).
It was my late father who introduced me to The Wicker Man and therefore it has always held a special significance for me.
I watched the director's cut, which had been shown on Film 4, so it had all the bits that had been cut out of the original release (just in lower quality, which is a shame because it makes those scenes draw attention to themselves for the wrong reasons).
Surely, there must be technology now that could restore these low-quality scenes to the standard of the rest of the film? That would be worth sacrificing a few virgins for, right?
It's been too long since I've seen The Wicker Man, despite it being one of my favourite movies (not just in this genre, but of all-time), and I was reminded just how many moments were lifted from it for the more recent remake... and yet that still managed to get so much wrong.
Not a scary horror per se, The Wicker Man is disorientating and unnerving, and its very lack of overt supernatural elements gives it a terrifying verisimilitude that makes you wonder if perhaps such events could still occur in modern times.
And it's always worth being reminded of this: