The cursed story of ‘The Wicker Man’ has a new tragic chapter

The son of original creator Robin Hardy tells us about upcoming sequel ‘Wrath Of The Gods’ and the sudden death of its director

In 1972, when Dominic Hardy was 12, he left his hometown of Montreal to spend Christmas in Britain. His father Robin Hardy had just wrapped his new film The Wicker Man and he brought Dominic along to a private screening in London’s Soho. Written by Sleuth’s Anthony Shaffer and starring Christopher Lee as the aristocratic Lord Summerisle, alongside Edward Woodward and Britt Ekland, its unique flavour left a lasting impression. “I have a memory of the sexuality and the horrific violence that closes the film,” Dominic says, matter-of-factly, over video chat.

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He would hardly be the only one unable to forget what he saw. The Wicker Man’s bloodied and bruised history has been well-documented, from producers British Lion shredding the film in the edit to a belated release in America and, finally, cult fandom. After a lost stash of notes, letters and illustrations belonging to their father was discovered in an attic, Hardy and his half-brother Justin further explored the phenomenon in the 2025 book and companion documentary Children Of The Wicker Man, almost a decade after the death of their father.

All set on mysterious Scottish island Summerisle, this granddaddy of British folk horror has endured in a way few films ever do. “It is a film of major, major ideas that were important in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” says Hardy. “I would liken it to so many other products of that time, like The Beatles… they just tapped into what was going on in people’s minds in the larger culture, and continue to do so. The film’s pitch between paganism and Christianity is not treated in any kind of superficial glib way, but is really handled as a serious question.”

It hasn’t stopped there. This month sees the world premiere of Wrath Of The Gods at London’s FrightFest. The sequel was spawned from an original idea found in that cache of hidden attic correspondence. Arriving after their father’s belated 2011 follow-up The Wicker Tree, it completes a trilogy of films that are more spiritual cousins than story-driven successors. It also comes tinged with sadness. Just two weeks ago, on July 31, Justin – who directed the film from a story conjured by he and Dominic – died of a heart attack. He was just 61.

“He was the one person to have inherited our father’s heart,” explains Hardy. “Our father famously had a massive heart attack at 41 and then had heart trouble through the years, ending in bypass operations. But he made it to 86.” A decade ago, Justin had been diagnosed with heart-related issues, what his half-sibling calls “the beginning of signs of a hardening of the arteries”. Despite receiving stents and looking after himself, it wasn’t enough. “I think that there must have just been a vulnerability in the heart that looked like a little time-bomb.”

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Of Robin Hardy’s eight children (spread across six relationships, including five marriages), Justin was the one that followed his father into directing, his credits including the Emmy-nominated The Last Dragon and BAFTA-nominated The Relief Of Belsen. “I saw him two weeks before he died,” says Hardy, “and he was talking about the new scripts he was writing. He was heading in what he called a Scandi-noir direction, and also true crime horror. I mean, the irony is just terrible. It’s on the cusp of that, that he was taken from us.”

It’s another tragic chapter in the cursed history of The Wicker Man, which flopped on release and left its director, and his family, close to bankruptcy. As Children Of The Wicker Man revealed, Robin Hardy owed his former wife Caroline – Justin’s mother and an uncredited executive producer on The Wicker Man – the equivalent of £1million in today’s money. After he left her, Justin and his sister Bella to “jumpstart his career in Hollywood”, as Dominic puts it, she was forced to sell the family home. She died in 1984, aged 51, suffering from alcoholism.

While Wrath Of The Gods is touchingly dedicated to Caroline, Dominic Hardy’s own relationship with his father remains complicated. Raised in Montreal, where his parents met, he didn’t properly meet his father until he was six. “I saw very little of him over my whole childhood and adolescence. But as so often happens with cases like that, he loomed very large in my imagination and my appreciation,” says Hardy. “I might have had any number of reasons to not have a relationship [with him] as an adult, but the opposite was true. I sought him out. And he was very appreciative of that.”

No doubt, he’d also be appreciative of Wrath Of The Gods, which pushes on from the concept that Robin Hardy first conceived. “Dad had wanted this film to be a [about a] Disney-like corporation that tries to put a theme park in an extinct volcano in Iceland, only to have the real gods revolt,” explains Hardy, who developed a treatment with Justin that took the idea in a different direction, albeit remaining in tune with the Norse mythology of their father’s idea.

Situated “on the other side of Scotland” to The Wicker Man’s setting, the story follows Anna (Norwegian actress Christiane Schaldemose), a grieving widow who returns to the remote isle of Hel to bury her late husband after his suicide. Echoing the journey in the original of Edward Woodward’s puritan copper Sergeant Howie, who arrives on Summerisle to uncover the mystery behind a missing girl, Anna is seen as the outsider by locals, a symbol of bad luck, at a time when children begin to disappear on the island.

“This one has more focus and is a very, very serious film. It’s perhaps much more consciously designed to have suspense be built around an ethical problem – the abduction of children on a small island,” says Hardy. “So it’s not treated as a game the way Shaffer and Hardy did [the original]. It’s much more visceral, I would say. I think it’s important that it is at once completing the ambition or the hopes of our father, but it is very much Justin’s film.”

Shot in Shetland, with locals cast in all but the main roles, the film also includes a potent part for Francis MaGee, who recently appeared as the gruff ship’s captain in Rose Of Nevada (although Peep Show fans will remember him as ‘techno pioneer’ The Orgazoid). Calling his character Tulloch “wholly original”, and “someone who makes the action move”, Hardy seems delighted that they scooped up MaGee, a man with “the kind of physique and attitude that we imagined”.

Hardy, who lectures in art history, isn’t done yet. “There is a vast community of people who love The Wicker Man who are just hungry for new stuff,” he says. Already, a Brazilian publisher is planning a deluxe illustrated Portuguese translation of The Wicker Man’s novelisation. “This will present the novel to a new generation and a new linguistic community,” says Hardy, who hopes that it could spur further translations (as yet, there are no French or Spanish versions) and even graphic novels.

Beyond that, Hardy hopes there could yet be more of his father’s hidden treasures unearthed. “We would love to find one day – we are hoping it exists – the storyboards that he drew for The Wicker Man because he was a very good illustrator.” What is clear is that 53 years after the release of the original, the film remains a towering achievement, as embedded in popular culture as the sacrificial effigy that adorns the poster. “It’s become a public icon,” says Hardy. “It’s left behind its origins and it thrives. It lives on its own.”

‘Wrath Of The Gods’ screens at FrightFest in London on August 28