England still likes to remember itself its B&W heyday: BBC newsreels narrated in perfect RP, thatched cottages, fields rolling merrily into eternity.
Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice starts inside that bucolic dream — and then slashes it open.
On Valentine’s Day, 1945, on Meon Hill, Warwickshire, elderly farm labourer Charles Walton was found murdered with his own tools; pinned to the earth with a pitchfork, his neck slashed by a billhook.
The killing was never solved. Russell’s documentary claims the Walton case did more than stain a hillside — it helped invest the grammar of British folk horror.
When Scotland Yard’s star inspector Robert Fabian arrived in Lower Quinton, he expected cooperation. Instead, he found silence. A village closed ranks; testimony dried up. Russell argues that this refusal — the outsider investigator confronted by a smiling, withholding community — became the prototype repeated in The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, and the pagan nightmares of Hammer.
Before Sergeant Howie ever sailed to Summerisle, Fabian lived the part.
From there, the film expands beyond true crime. As rumours of witchcraft and ritual markings overtook evidence, fantasy filled the vacuum. Russell shows how belief came to matter more than fact, and how the Walton case became a folk-horror seed from which filmmakers, aided by the sensationalism of the tabloid press, eagerly harvested dread.
Hammer’s bonfires and wicker rites, he argues, didn’t come from nowhere — they came from a Britain already convinced its countryside hid older laws.
The documentary’s strongest idea is the feedback loop between reality and imagination. In the 1960s and ’70s, as post-imperial Britain drifted through social upheaval, occult revivalism surged. Wiccan covens, psychedelic paganism and tabloid satanic panics fed into folk horror — and folk horror fed back.
In scenes that looked suspiciously like a Hammer film, Londoners became convinced a vampire haunted Highgate Cemetery — because Hammer had filmed one there. Cinema bled into belief and belief, in turn, fed into cinema in the form of Dracula A.D. 1972. Horror became, perhaps not unusually, a hall of mirrors; though rarely as conclusively as here.
Russell carries this thread into the present, nodding to Kill List, A Field in England, even as recently as 2019’s Midsommar; showing how modern folk horror still obsesses over ritual and complicity. The real horror, Russell suggests, is not a human sacrifice in a field but a nation that would rather invent witches than face the banal horror: our own capacity for collective violence.
Visually, The Last Sacrifice is intoxicating. Russell cuts between pastoral newsreel, lurid film clips, and pagan imagery in a rhythm that resembles spell-casting. At times, the documentary risks, for better or worse, becoming the very thing it studies, another folk-horror trance; though the erudite talking heads, a mix of authors, film experts, and historians, keep us grounded in something resembling fact, or at least informed opinion, if only speculatively so.
The self-entanglement is revealing. Was Walton a witch? Is his death connected to the earlier occult murder of Anne Tennant in 1875? Questions with no answers, yet the speculation itself informs the mood, the culture. When reason fails, rural memory persists and mythmaking steps in. Even Fabian of the Yard himself later embroidered his memoirs with black dogs and occult shadows.
By its end, The Last Sacrifice leaves the case unsolved but the viewer unsettled. It plays less as a whodunnit than as a folk-noir diagnosis of Britain: a conceptual indictment of a country whose legendary, perhaps superficial politeness overlays something ancient, irrational, and occasionally violent.
Horror cinema didn’t create that darkness. It merely revealed it. The monsters in our folklore, outlandish though they may be, always come from somewhere.
The Last Sacrifice is currently screening across the UK.
