Some films never die. They just keep demanding sacrifices.
In the case of The Wicker Man (1973), those sacrifices have been many and varied: Those made in the service of shooting and releasing the film, and dealing with financial fallout. The effort and energy expended by scholars, historians, and critics attempting to assign meaning to it. The money spent on tickets, physical media, and other memorabilia by a growing group of rabid fans, of which I am one.
There have also been two other films: The remake The Wicker Man (2006) and director Robin Hardy’s sequel, The Wicker Tree (2011), neither of which fared particularly well with critics or audiences.
But Children of the Wicker Man (2024) is a film that gives far more than it takes. It tells the story of Robin Hardy and his family through the eyes of his sons Justin and Dominic, revealing the difficult truth behind what Cinefantastique called the Citizen Kane of horror films making it unlikely you will ever see The Wicker Man the same way again.
Severin has released Children of the Wicker Man on Blu-ray, which offered me the chance to talk to Dominic Hardy who shed further light on the painful but worthwhile process of examining his own relationship to his father and his work. For those wanting go even more in-depth, Severin has also released a book by Justin Hardy and Dominic Hardy, Children of the Wicker Man, as a companion piece.
It could be said that people have made a sort of wicker man out of The Wicker Man: Laying their sacrifices at it’s feet, crowning it with many crowns, and so forth. Some have even seen the death of the self-appointed Christian judge Capt. Howie in the wooden effigy as some sort of blanket assailing of religious expression or thought.
I think nothing could be further from the truth. The Wicker Man exists for me as a cautionary tale. In the end, the film offers us nothing to celebrate at all. A setting sun drops down through a red sky lit by hellish flames, a human form collapsing, as those who have misunderstood the cosmos dance, murdering a fanatically religious but innocent man with their own insane zealotry.
Indeed, it's a tale for our current times, since our world seems so bent on finding human sacrifices to creeds, political identities and ignorance. I approached this documentary expecting anything but religious revelation but walked away with a revelation as spiritual in nature as it is moving.
My wide-ranging conversation with Dominic Hardy can be found in the video below.