For a book that not many people know about or have read, James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) has had quite an impact on cult cinema, particularly in the ’70s. For reasons that would take too long to go into here — and thanks to its influence on Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces — it turns out that Frazer’s non-fiction investigation of religion, mythology, folk tales and the subsequent journey to science has since shaped films as seemingly far afield as The Wicker Man , the very first Star Wars , and Apocalypse Now . Well, you wouldn’t necessarily ever put those three films on a triple bill, but, once you see it, there is a certain overlap, mostly in the concept of the unwitting hero, a man chosen by fate, and not necessarily for the better.

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