I found the nudity in Wicker Man used to supremely creepy effect -- like when all the naked virgins were "jumping the fire" trying to conceive a god's child? Even that crazy dance that Britt Ekland did was so spooky when taken with the music and what she was trying to do to the poor bastard next door. The best part, though, was that you didn't really know what was going to happen up until the very end. You're sort of lulled into thinking that maybe these were just nice, naked pagans peacefully dancing around the ol' Maypole and then...whammo.

In the excellent X-Files take on the hicktown human sacrifice thing ("Die Hand Die Verletzt"), they at least had the sacrifices happening not to unwitting travelers but to townspeople who had lost their satanic faith and not kept up the old rituals. Once the devil had meted out some punishment, Mulder and Scully were free to go unscathed. I seem to recall that SPN's version of the story focused on some unspecified prosperity (i.e., that town had survived while all the towns around had economically died), but there were definitely apples involved.