1973 Movie Song, Not Actually Sung by Its Swedish Star, Became a Cross-Generational Hit

The Wicker Man is widely regarded as a landmark of British folk horror—and its soundtrack is every bit as unsettling. At the top of the canon of deeply unsettling acid folk, the film’s music draws heavily on British folk traditions, with American composer Paul Giovanni writing the songs and the specially assembled group Magnet performing much of the music.

“I thought it would be fun and entertaining and probably truthful if we used folk songs,” director Robin Hardy told Sight and Sound. “Nearly all of Robert Burns’ great poems have been put to music, so we used those, and then there were ones that were cooked up and sounded more Victorian, like The Landlord’s Daughter.”

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But no song from the film has had quite the afterlife of “Willow’s Song.” A masterpiece of hauntology, the song is at once beautiful, erotic, and menacing.

In the film, Swedish actress Britt Ekland performs the song, but once the smoke and mirrors of movie magic are dispelled, it turns out the blonde beauty inseparable from the iconic movie-music moment didn’t provide the vocals heard in the finished film. Someone else sang the song. In fact, it actually took several women to produce the film’s defining sequence.

Released in December 1973, The Wicker Man follows Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), a devout Christian policeman who travels to a remote Scottish island to investigate a missing girl and uncovers a secret pagan community instead. As Willow MacGregor, the free-spirited daughter of the island’s leader, Lord Summerisle, Ekland spends much of the reel trying to seduce the sergeant.

A final test for Sergeant Howie before the May Day celebration, the temptation sequence involves a nude Willow singing and dancing in the room next door to the sergeant’s suite at the local inn. As she taps, wriggles, and rhythmically bangs on the shared wall, her trance-like movements and a haunting ballad build an unbearable acoustic pressure in Howie’s room. But in reality, it’s not Ekland singing. And it’s not her dancing either.

Because Ekland was pregnant at the time of filming, a body double was used for portions of the nude dancing sequence. And the vocals coming from Ekland are actually those of two other actresses. The speaking voice of Annie Ross was dubbed over Ekland’s to hide her Swedish accent, and the singing voice of Rachel Verney was used in “Willow’s Song.”

“I’m old enough to be able to look away and look at it as a movie and not look at me, because that’s not me,” Ekland said in a Q&A following a screening of the film in 2023.

Dubbing over Ekland is an especially curious detail given that she was also a singer. Years later, she released the singles “Do It to Me (Once More With Feeling)” and “Private Party,” and she contributed the spoken French passage to her then-boyfriend Rod Stewart’s 1976 hit “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright).”

But despite the trickery, the sequence has since been regarded as one of the most hypnotic and sensory-heavy sequences in folk horror history, with the film’s soundtrack receiving similar praise.

“Robin Hardy’s ’70s pagan horror, revolving around the creepy community living on a remote island, could only be soundtracked by weirdy-beardy folk music really,” NME wrote in its list of creepiest horror movie soundtracks, adding that “Willow’s Song …  has taken on a life of its own.”

The outlet is right. The song’s reputation has only grown with time. It appears at No. 10 on a Letterboxd list of 113 greatest music pieces in horror, while artists including The Mock Turtles, Sneaker Pimps, and former Belle & Sebastian member Isobel Campbell have all put their own spin on it.

More than five decades later, “Willow’s Song” remains one of folk horror’s most haunting musical signatures—a song forever associated with a woman whose voice, as it turns out, was never actually heard.

Related: 1982 Ballad, Immortalized in a Jake Gyllenhaal Cult Classic, Became a Cross-Generational Hit