10 Horror Sequels Not Worth Waiting Decades For

Even though it is a cult film in every sense of the word, the original 1973 Wicker Man has enough of a following that there have been plenty of attempts to get a belated sequel off the ground.

In the 1980s, Sleuth and Frenzy writer Anthony Shaffer, whose screenplay was adapted by Hardy to make the original film, wrote a script treatment called The Loathsome Lambton Worm that Hardy rejected. Hardy himself pitched a sequel entitled The Riding Of The Laddie in the early 2000s, taking advantage of Christopher Lee's Lord Of The Rings-based boost in fame.

Unable to secure funding, Hardy eventually published his "partial sequel" as a novel entitled Cowboys For Christ in 2006 before finally getting the chance to adapt it for film after the Wicker Man remake bombed. Retitled once again to signpost its link to the original, as The Wicker Tree, it was released in 2011, just 38 years after its predecessor.

It's unclear whether the movie, in which an American Christian evangelical pop singer travels to Scotland to convert the locals and gets caught up in pagan rituals, is a direct narrative sequel or just a thematic one. (Lee's role, reduced to a cameo due to his ill health, as the mentor of the pagan Scottish laird could be said to be Lord Summerisle but the movie neither confirms nor denies it).

What is more obvious, though, is that The Wicker Tree is a complete letdown, a tedious and uninvolving film damned with the faintest of praise that at least it's a better twenty-first century Wicker Man than the Nicolas Cage remake.