Talk with Justin Hardy

The Wicker Man is widely considered one of the great classics in horror cinema. Its success took time and came at a significant cost for director Robin Hardy and not least for his family. The upcoming documentary, The Children of The Wicker Man, tells the critical yet tender story of a flawed genius who sacrificed everything to the movie gods.

Children of The Wicker Man is made by Robin Hardy’s sons Dominic and Justin and follows their dealings with the film’s effect on their lives and the lives of their family. The disastrous reception put them in a financial crisis, and Robin Hardy left both his wife and children when he left Great Britain.

Children of The Wicker Man is the story of two men who try to come to terms with the «Citizen Kane of horror films2, but most of all with the man who made it. It is a critical, but intimate, portrait of a fallible genius who sacrificed everything for the film gods, and a map of The Wicker Man’s wondrous journey through history.

Several years after The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy finally got his place in the horror film canon, and in 2012 he released the sequel The Wicker Tree. This was not the last chapter either, and until his death in 2016 Hardy worked on a third film, The Wrath of the Gods. Today, Dominic and Justin are working to complete their father’s last project, and with it complete the narratives in the pagan universe Robin Hardy founded in 1973.

With that, we welcome Justin Hardy to Ravenheart to present and talk about both projects, as well as the legacy of The Wicker Man.