The Last Sacrifice (Glasgow FrightFest 2025)

On Valentine’s Day, 1945, the body of a man named Charles Walton, was discovered on the grounds of the farm where he worked on the edge of Meon Hill, Warwickshire. Walton’s demise had been a particularly gruesome one – he had been murdered with a pitchfork and bill-hook in a manner which was unusually violent, elaborate, and borderline ritualistic. Rumours quickly spread that Walton was killed as part of a Druidic blood sacrifice, and that the “old ways” were still alive and well in the sleepy Cotswolds village of Lower Quinton – an idea which may have partially been the inspiration behind the 1973 “folk horror” classic The Wicker Man. Now, in 2025, audience members at this year’s Glasgow FrightFest will be invited to hear the evidence for themselves, and decide if the slaying of Charles Walton truly was… The Last Sacrifice.

Directed by documentarian and author Rupert Russell (Freedom For the Wolf), son of beloved cinematic iconoclast Ken Russell, The Last Sacrifice uses both archive material and new interview footage to reconstruct and explore one of the most mysterious and fascinating unsolved murder cases in modern English history. However, if you come to this film expecting new concrete answers as to “who done it” by the end, then viewer beware – Russell’s Last Sacrifice is less interested in being an investigative true-crime doc than it is in being a meditation on the growing social and cultural obsession with the occult that permeated and haunted the mid-century British cultural consciousness.

This approach isn’t inherently a bad one, with Russell opting to focus more on generating an uneasy, hauntological mood, and exploring the cultural impact of media and press speculation around the alleged “witchcraft murder” of Charles Walton, instead of making an attempt at solving an infamous 80-year-old unsolved crime that stumped even the renowned Fabian of Scotland Yard (whose involvement in the case is discussed a great deal throughout the doc itself). When it comes to crafting mood and “folk horror ambience”, The Last Sacrifice has it in spades – in large part due to the superbly atmospheric score by composer Mike Lindsay, which is a consistently sinister and ethereal highlight of the film. Also of note is editor Alexander McNeill’s crafty repurposing and utilisation of archive footage to tell the story of Walton’s murder and the subsequent investigation, with clips from cult folk-horror favourites such as The Blood Beast Terror (1968) and Satan’s Slave (1976) being recontextualised in ingenious fashion – not merely providing a fitting visual accompaniment to the stories being recounted, but in turn strengthening Russell’s argument that Walton’s murder strongly impacted the horror genre in England for decades to come.

Unfortunately, as with witchcraft-obsessed ‘70s Britain, The Last Sacrifice suffers from a crisis of identity that it never fully comes to terms with. As a documentary on the murder of Charles Walton, The Last Sacrifice gives us only a small amount of information spread out incredibly thin over the course of a 90-minute runtime, and even then, the stories and facts recounted feel more like a dramatic reading of the Wikipedia page on the case than they do anything groundbreaking or revelatory. It also doesn’t help that this is a film more concerned with sensationalism and creating an air of mystique than it is with providing solid facts, which means that stories and myths about the killing which have since been thoroughly debunked are left open so as to create a sense of some greater unsolved occult narrative – one which ends up being less interesting than the real unsolved murder case being discussed. Meanwhile, its exploration of the case’s influence upon the wave of films that would become known as the “folk horror” cycle – itself an anachronistic term, as its use to describe an organised, conscious subgenre wasn’t common until around 2010 – is fairly slight outside of some discussion of the aforementioned Wicker Man; with all due respect, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched this is not, to the point that even the 1961 episode of Boris Karloff’s Thriller based directly on the Walton case, ‘Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook’, barely gets a mention.

In reality, only half of The Last Sacrifice seems to be focused around either of its central thematic points, with the rest of the film being devoted to random tangents discussing different areas of occultism in the UK, to greater or lesser value of interest. A thread of discussion regarding attitudes to witchcraft in England ends up turning into an extended love-in for occult figure Alex Sanders, to the point where I wondered if The Last Sacrifice might as well be a modern-day remake of the Sanders-starring pseudo-doc Secret Rites (1971); later, a tangent discussing the “Highgate Vampire” hysteria of the early ‘70s threatens to turn the movie into the equivalent of Room 237 (2012) for Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972).

Whilst my criticisms of The Last Sacrifice may seem harsh, perhaps even damning, they are only so because of how strong the movie is otherwise, particularly from an archival filmmaking perspective – hell, from a filmmaking perspective in general. It’s an unfortunate case of a film which works very well as a “movie”, but doesn’t quite work as a “documentary” to the same level; there’s a lot to love and praise about The Last Sacrifice, not least its genuinely jaw-dropping “epilogue” segment about an unexpected link between the murder at Meon Hill and a beloved children’s television show (in this reviewer’s opinion, the entire film is worth watching for that reveal alone), but as someone who watched the film with the hopes that I would gain some new knowledge regarding the origins of the pagan revival in ‘60s and ‘70s England’s media and culture, I was left desiring more than I was offered.

As an hour and a half of creepy rural ambience and visuals, there are far worse times you could have in the dark in Glasgow this March, even if you shouldn’t necessarily expect to learn anything new if you’re already a seasoned folk horror enthusiast. At the very least, it’s a welcome reminder to keep your wits about you when walking through the fields after dark, lest you encounter someone with a murderous grin and a sharp pitchfork in hand…

Robyn’s Archive – The Last Sacrifice