50 years on from the making of The Wicker Man (1973), director Robin Hardy’s lost papers come to his filmmaker son

Justin has always been conflicted over the exalted claims made about The Wicker Man, his father’s magnum opus: for him, the film destroyed his family. He has no photographs of Robin Hardy in his house. His brother Dominic, whom Robin abandoned as a baby, has been more distanced. Their father’s film is a set of fragmented stories: benighted production, brutal editing, critical reception, financial failure, and later revival.

Then, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Justin receives a letter from a woman he’s never met. She has found a cache of Robin’s personal papers that have been sitting untouched in the attic of Justin’s childhood home since the 1970s. Would he like them?

Using these newly uncovered sources, along with the Hardy family’s own letters and photographs, Children of The Wicker Man investigates what Robin Hardy’s creative contribution to The Wicker Man was, and considers who was truly sacrificed. In the process, the brothers discover an unlikely heroine: Justin’s mother Caroline, who bankrupted herself paying loans to her husband and the film, only for him to leave when it flopped. For all women behind artist husbands, this book reveals a series of heroines: the mothers of the children of The Wicker Man.