Extraordinarily literate and thoroughly compelling, The Wicker Man has often been called the Citizen Kane of horror movies. Writer Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy built their contemporary (1973) English murder mystery/thriller upon gothic Druid underpinnings and wisely gave songwriter-composer Paul Giovanni (whose first and only film score this is) the freedom to create music of a piece. The score remains one of the most unusual in the entire genre: a collection of original, well-researched folk songs and instrumental underscore that evoke a rare, eerily discomfiting sense of displaced time and place--"70s folk-pop informed by ancient forces of nature and superstition. Long a holy grail among soundtrack aficionados, this lavishly packaged and annotated release has been prepared from recently discovered master tapes with a clarity and presence that gives the late Giovanni"s haunting music the gratifying showcase it"s so long deserved. --Jerry McCulley