Or so it seems.

To go into the specifics of how our sympathies turn would be to spoil the deftness with which Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Schaeffer pull this all off. I'll just say that they slowly layer the bawdy gaeity of the islanders until before you know it, it's become not jolly but unsettling. Their trickery and mockery of Howie becomes not playful but sinister. And it's soon made horrifyingly apparent that this new-old religion of sun and sky and sea is just as interwoven with delusion, with dogma, and with death as its monotheistic, cross-bearing supplanter. It's all brought home in a line delivered with the simultaneous existential terror and supreme confidence of the fanatic by Christopher Lee, playing Lord Summerisle, when he's asked what will happen if the crops fail despite the islanders' rituals: "They. Will. Not. Fail!" They will not fail, because they cannot fail, it is inconceivable, they have willed it not to be so so it must not, cannot be so. Its failure would be horror to them. And their success is horror to Sgt. Howie--and, eventually, to us.