The Second World War film, The Camp on Blood Island, is best known for its powerful opening scene of a man being forced to dig his own grave before 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 film is set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and deals with the awful and sadistic treatment of prisoners of war by their captors. The 1958 film, directed by Val Guest, is an unusually graphic war movie for its time due to its extreme depiction of human cruelty and barbarism. Its prequel was released 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 explained: “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 thing, we wrote – I think Jimmy Carreras got a poster up, to sell the whole thing, and we had to write to the poster, and it started 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 realise that Hammer Films were a religion: you made them in so many weeks, you did not go over, you made them for so much money, you did not go over. That was your catechism, those were the commandments.”