Best documentaries at FrightFest 2024, including movies about a cult classic and a horror legend

Here are the best documentaries we saw at FrightFest 2024, including a movie about the life and times of Christopher Lee, and a film about his masterpiece, The Wicker Man.

FightFest takes place in London’s Leicester Square every August Bank Holiday, screening the best horror movies from all over the globe across five terror-filled days.

There’s everything from monster movies and found footage flicks, to folk and body horror, to comedies and psychological chillers. Indeed, you can read our write-up of the best movies at FrightFest 2024 here.

But there’s also movies about the making of movies, and this year is no different, with three new documentaries catching our eye over the long weekend.

Children of the Wicker Man

Hardy Pictures

Children of the Wicker Man is one of the most striking and original documentaries about the making of a movie, as it also serves as a character study of the man who crafted the horror classic, shot by two of his children.

Robin Hardy is the director in question, while Justin Hardy and Dominic Hardy are his sons, who had a troubled relationship with their father because of the initial failure of The Wicker Man, as well as its eventual success.

Sorting through newly unearthed photos, footage, and files from the early 1970s, they retrace Robin’s steps, from ad-man to moviemaker, and from family man to deadbeat dad. 

The behind-the-scenes story of The Wicker Man is fascinating, with major studios turning the script down, and principal photography interrupted by daytime arguments and nighttime affairs. The film was then snuck out and promptly disappeared without a trace, before rediscovery, redistribution, and re-evaluation as a masterpiece.

But much of that story is already out there. What’s more interesting is the simmering anger and resentment that the investigating duo feel towards the film, and its part in their family’s implosion. All of which ends on an unexpectedly positive note, as the Hardy boys ultimately make peace with The Wicker Man.

Generation Terror

Generation Terror tackles a pretty mammoth subject, charting how the horror genre has developed over the course of the 21st century. Though it starts by tipping its hat to the nihilism of 1970s horror and the wild creativity of 1980s horror, there’s also a sizeable section on 1990s horror.

But then we’re into the 2000s, and the influence of 9/11 on movies like Hostel and Saw in America, as well as sections on burgeoning global movements, like J-Horror and the French Extreme. Though the film could do without an extended passage on the making of House of 1,000 Corpses. 

The critical talking heads don’t bring much fresh or original to the party. But filmmakers like Neil Marshall, Alice Lowe, Jeffrey Reddick, Vicenzo Natali, Adam Wingard, and Simon Barratt offer genuine insight on the subject.

Chris Smith and Joe Lynch are the MVPs of this piece, managing to be both funny and insightful when explaining how video stores and multiplexes affected viewing patterns during the period, as well as how the election of George W. Bush changed the horror landscape forever.

The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee

The Wicker Man star Christopher Lee takes center stage in this engaging biopic about a remarkable life. Peter Serafinowitz voices Lee from beyond the grave, with the actor appearing onscreen as a marionette – which is better than that sounds.

Doing cradle-to-grave, Lee was born to an aristocratic family, and attended public school before working as a spy during WWII. But then the theater called, and while the fact that he was “too tall and foreign looking” initially stalled his movie career, soon Hammer came a-knocking.

As the studio moved into the macabre, Hammer cast Lee as Frankenstein’s monster. Followed by Dracula, where just eight minutes of screen-time turned him into a horror icon. Though the doc also covers Lee’s disdain for a genre he believed to be beneath him. 

Lee loved The Wicker Man, however, and enjoyed his Italian period with Jess Franco and Mario Bava, before playing a Bond villain in The Man With the Golden Gun. But fallow decades followed, as did some awful heavy metal albums, until Lee’s career was resurrected by George Lucas and Peter Jackson.

Lee’s villainous turns in the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies introduced him to new generations, cemented his legacy, and got him the respect Lee believed he deserved. Though the doc does end with him having yet another dig at the genre for which he’ll ultimately be remembered.

For more scary content, check out our piece on if horror movies are the new summer blockbusters, as well as why it’s a sin that Blink Twice and Strange Darling were released on the same day.