There are many great articles and essays, but written and video, about just how much the 2006 remake of the Wicker Man dumbed down pretty much everything from the 1973 original (such as how the protagonist of the original, Sgt. Howie, is a devout Christian who refuses to have sex until he gets married gets him earmarked as a symbolic target for the titular sacrificial ceremony vs the remake having Nicholas Cage's protagonist coming to the island looking into the disappearance of his hitherto unknown daughter because the director didn't think that it would be believable for an adult man to be a virgin), but one of the most glaring comes in how both movies approach the subject of folk horror.
In the original, the folk religion the inhabitants of Summerisle practice is in fact a 19th century re-construction of various British folk traditions, which was explicitly invented by Christopher Lee's character's Victorian ancestor to rebuild a sense of community on the island while modernised agricultural science would save the islanders from the economic hardship that was causing them to move to the mainland.
In this sense, Lord Summerisle's religion was a constructed religion with a deliberate policial/social intent, in the same manner that the Welsh Druidic revival from approximately the same period (such as the one championed by Dr William Price), was intended to create a shared cultural heritage for the Welsh people after centuries of English colonial rule... Even though, due to the historical Druids never actually writing things down, Price and his peers kind of made up a lot of stuff to fill in the gaps.
In the case of the Wicker Man, the fact that the religion is made up of disparate bits and pieces from around the UK culturally (the song Sumer is icumen in that features in the movie is written in 13th century Wessex English, for example, while Summerisle is located off the coast of Scotland for example). Indeed even the titular Wicker Man has no actual historical basis, beyond it being something the Romans claimed was a practice in the British Isles prior to their colonial efforts... when it's also noted the Romans intentionally made stuff up about their enemies to justify their invasion and conquering them. Add to that how the Druids didn't write things down, and you can understand why Price and his peers had to get Inventive).
Hence the horror of the situation for Sgt. Howie. Not only is he being horribly murdered in a "pagan" sacrifice, but Lord Summerisle had already told him the religion was artificially created less than a century ago to control the worker population. So while the islanders may have believed there was a mystical significance and justification for Howie's horrible death, the guy who orchestrated it didn't actually believe in the religion himself and it was all a move to keep his tenants and workers compliant and under his thumb.
All of this historical context stands in contrast with the 2006 Wicker Man's version of Summerisle... which was founded by escaped Salem witches, and have explicit supernatural powers. No ambiguity, no historical context, and the closest to a social point is drawn from the director's own heavily misogynistic views on women.
Like, dude, America in the early 1800s was lousy with new religions (that's where the Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists and so on hail from) AND British folk magic traditions, you could have had something new in the same vein as the original but you had to choose the stupid options instead!
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