When he was making the classic 1973 horror film The Wicker Man, director Robin Hardy always envisioned it as the first part of a trilogy.
It took several decades for the second film, The Wicker Tree, to come to fruition, with Hardy ultimately releasing the film in 2011. When the acclaimed director died in 2016, it was believed that the series had come to an end – but now his sons have completed the project, with the third Wicker Man film, Wrath of the Gods, now premiering in London.
Wrath of the Gods is directed by Justin and Dominic Hardy, who discovered a script their father had written for the third Wicker Man film.
“The person who bought Justin’s old family home said they’d discovered six sacks of letters, scripts and other material pertaining to Robin Hardy and The Wicker Man in the attic,” Dominic, an art historian at Montreal’s University of Quebec, told BBC News.
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open image in gallery“Justin’s first instinct was to burn them, but we couldn’t ignore this original source material. Although we left it unopened for six months or more.”
Justin died of a heart attack earlier this month at the age of 61, with his family describing him as “a man of family, of boundless creativity” who was “so full of life right to the end”.
The original Wicker Man starred Edward Woodward as a Christian police detective who investigates a disappearance on a remote Scottish island. The main villain was played by Christopher Lee, in what became one of his best known roles.
While it would eventually come to be regarded as one of the best horror films ever made, The Wicker Man had a turbulent production, beset by funding difficulties; Hardy was left bankrupt after the film was completed.
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Justin and Dominic, two of Hardy’s eight children from various relationships, also discovered the origins of Wrath of the Gods in their father’s archive.
“He had had been in an airplane and had a turn because his heart medication wasn’t working,” Dominic said. “He had to land in Reykjavik and spend a week recuperating, and he came back with this idea of a theme park around an extinct volcano in Iceland where the Norse gods get upset and mayhem ensues.
“And then he decided it ought to be set in Shetland because of the other parts of the trilogy.”
Wrath of the Gods, filmed in Shetland and starring Francis Magee (Game of Thrones), and Norwegian actor Christiane Schaldemose, will have its premiere in London at FrightFest on Friday.