Children Of The Wicker Man

Historically, few horror films have ever excited as much interest as The Wicker Man, which has been the subject of a substantial amount of analysis in the form of essays, books and documentaries. This documentary, however, does something quite different. Made by Justin Hardy and Dominic Hardy, who describe themselves as two of the various spawn of director Robin Hardy, whom he scattered around the world, it explores the personal consequences of the groundbreaking film and, in so doing, provides a new angle on ongoing debates about the way we deal with great art created by messy human beings.

“Why did I want to make The Wicker Man? Why did Ahab want to catch his white whale?” wrote Hardy senior in a letter to Caroline, Justin’s mother, many years after he had abandoned her. Ahab, however, did not draw on his wife’s finances to support his ambition, and his child was fully grown before he let it consume him. Caroline’s fate would be a lot harder, and the children’s likewise – and it was part of a pattern, with Dominic’s childhood even more grim. They have both survived it, with varying degrees of damage, and, despite growing up separately, have both become historians. It is this craft that they drew on to process the box of papers that emerged after their father’s death.

The film is partly an analysis of those papers, partly reminiscence and partly a travelogue of sorts, as the brothers visit key locations from the film and their own past. The anger that they both – understandably – feel makes it difficult, initially, to get a clear appraisal of the man at the centre of it, but their academic training and growing sense of the significance of the project, as it develops, sees them slowly find a way of setting this aside. This also makes room for the relationship between the two of them to develop and to provide a more positive way of thinking about family. Their sense of their father as monstrous gives way to a shared appreciation of a certain song from Monty Python And The Holy Grail, about brave Sir Robin who boldly ran away.

Robin was a charming man with a sort of innocence about him which might have come from not fully grasping the fact that other people had needs too, and that they mattered as much as he did, but quite how far this got him is a fascinating story in itself. The popular concept of genius is thoroughly subverted here as his sons examine how he stumbled from one failure to another, repeatedly alienating everybody around him and sabotaging his own career, yet somehow always managing to find another heiress who would devote herself to saving him. The chaotic production of The Wicker Man was just one early entry in this catalogue of disasters and recoveries, and the question that underlies this film is whether anybody more balanced and reasonable could have brought it to fruition at all. That and the counterpart question: was it worth it? Art is little compensation for damaged lives and yet, in the course of this, we see the brothers gain a new perspective on what The Wicker Man meant, and perhaps find some comfort in that.

Children Of The Wicker Man screened as part of Frightfest 2024.