The Last Sacrifice
To believe is one matter; to demonstrate that belief so conclusively that an uninvolved party of sceptical mindset may also be convinced is quite another. Following the murder of seventy-four-year-old farmworker Charles Walton on the evening of Wednesday 14th February 1945 on Meon Hill in Warwickshire, despite a comprehensive investigation and a known suspect, the police could not guarantee successful prosecution, but proposing this incident was influential in British horror of the following decades documentary filmmaker Rupert Russell presents a stronger case.
Its UK premiere at FrightFest at the Glasgow Film Festival, The Last Sacrifice is both engaging and entertaining, neatly tying together vast amounts of evidence, some familiar, some obscure, some rare and some unique with many of his subjects newly interviewed, from contemporary newsreels, feature films classic and modern, archive documentaries, and police reports covering the unsolved murder, Russell’s thesis presented comprehensively and convincingly.
Walton “by all accounts a harmless old man,” even with World War II still being fought across Europe the killing made headlines, beaten with a stick, stabbed with a slash hook and pinned to the ground with his own pitchfork, a vicious attack at odds with the pastoral setting in which it took place, yet within a few hours walk is Long Compton where seventy years before Ann Tennant died after being attacked with a pitchfork, the killer stating she had been a witch, and further down the road are the Neolithic Rollright Stones, the hills and fields of the region saturated with superstition and folklore.
The murder of Walton in a village of less than five hundred thoroughly investigated by Chief Inspector Robert Fabian of the Metropolitan Police, the motives were considered, a grudge, a robbery as were the means, and while the implements used may have been simply those to hand, what if they were chosen specifically, a ritual killing, perhaps by the people of Lower Quinton who to Fabian seemed indifferent, maybe by outsiders, though while this is the backbone of the documentary there is more to it than that single incident.
Intercut with repurposed footage from horror films of the era, reacting to the events as they are recounted as though all were one and the same story, The Last Sacrifice, if indeed the killing was such, is presented almost as a patchwork dramatisation, the killing most obviously reflected in but not limited to the folk horror genre from Robin Redbreast and The Wicker Man to Midsommar and Men, the film benefitting greatly from the restoration projects undertaken on many essential works in that fertile field in recent years, the colour and sharpness of the prints flawless.
Though the limitations of the source materials of the archive documentary footage means it cannot be presented in the same way, this does not diminish its significance, the occult and witchcraft increasingly seen as valid if unusual lifestyles and beliefs through the sixties and seventies, contemporary thought considering it an explosion rather than that practitioners were always present in significant numbers, simply preferring to remain hidden, and throughout the subjects interviewed are calm and rational, their rituals no stranger than those of the Catholic Church or other village festivals, “England’s darkest secret” stepping into the light without fear or shame.
Glasgow Film Festival continues until Sunday 9th March
