True story behind terrifying WW2 movie with ‘most powerful opening scene’ | TV & Radio | Showbiz & TV | EUROtoday

The Second World War movie, The Camp on Blood Island, is greatest identified for its highly effective opening scene of a person being compelled to dig his personal grave earlier than being fatally shot. A harrowing intertitle then follows, stating “this is not just a story – it is based on the brutal truth”. The eye-opening movie is ready in a Japanese prisoner of battle camp and offers with the terrible and sadistic therapy of prisoners of battle by their captors. The 1958 movie, directed by Val Guest, is an unusually graphic battle film for its time attributable to its excessive depiction of human cruelty and barbarism. Its prequel was launched six years later and was named The Secret of Blood Island.

Val shared the true story behind that terrifying opening scene in an in-depth interview with the History Project.

He defined: “When I read the original story – the reason this came to be by the way was that somebody had met the manager of the Lyric Theatre, who had been a prisoner-of-war and who had some odd pages of a diary he had written on odd bits of bumph and toilet paper and everything he could find, and they had one or two things in them, they weren’t a publishable diary and I think it was Mike Carreras who said, no it was Tony Hinds who said, ‘What a terrific idea, to take a Jap prisoner-of-war camp.’

“So from the odd notes of this factor, we wrote – I feel Jimmy Carreras bought a poster up, to promote the entire thing, and we needed to write to the poster, and it began from that.”

The grave-digging scene where the British soldier is killed was reportedly chosen to convey the harsh realities of war instead of easing viewers into the drama through a traditional narrative.

The film, which is just one hour and 22 minutes long, has a 71% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hammer Films executive Anthony Nelson Keys was told troubling stories from a friend who was a Japanese prisoner of war, which reportedly sparked the idea for the film.

Reflecting on working for Hammer Films, Val shared: “You have to understand that Hammer Films had been a faith: you made them in so many weeks, you didn’t go over, you made them for a lot cash, you didn’t go over. That was your catechism, these had been the commandments.”