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Posted on October 27, 2024

Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice: Murder and the Occult in ‘That Green and Pleasant Land’

Dawn Keetley

Rupert Russell’s new documentary, The Last Sacrifice (2024), explores the infamous murder on February 14, 1945, of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in the village of Lower Quinton in Warwickshire, England. The Last Sacrifice is about so much more than that, however, as Russell brilliantly embeds the still-unsolved murder of Walton within the explosion of the occult, paganism, and witchcraft conspiracies in mid twentieth-century England.

The Last Sacrifice is not only about who killed Charles Walton and why, then, but about how this baffling murder case became entangled in some of the profound changes occurring in mid-century Britain. As one of the key commentators in the documentary, film historian Jonathan Rigby, puts it, the enigma of who killed Charles and Walton is also “the enigma of Britain itself.” Was Britain’s “pagan past,” he asks, “secretly alive in the present?” Check out the trailer.

Posted on October 3, 2024

The Leech Woman: The Aging Female Body as Shock

Dawn Keetley

The essay below is drawn from an article I published in 2019 called “The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film.” I’m excerpting (and adapting) part of the article here because the film it’s about, a very much undervalued film by Edward Dein from 1960 called The Leech Woman,[i] is not only a brilliant film but uncannily anticipates Coralie Fargeat’s equally brilliant film, The Substance (2024). You can see the outlines of The Substance in The Leech Woman, both in its structure and its preoccupations – and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this earlier film. If this essay does nothing else, then, I hope it sends more people to The Leech Woman. But, more specifically, I think the arguments I make about The Leech Woman here are really relevant to The Substance.

Posted on August 25, 2024

Oz Perkins’ Longlegs as Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

Oz Perkins’ 2024 film, Longlegs, is at first glance a serial killer film, with references abounding to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and, to a lesser extent, David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Perkins has been quite explicit in interviews, however, that he lures viewers in with this promise and then gives them something else. That something else is an occult horror film: some critics have pointed to the influence of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), but I see more pronounced echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976). The “Hail Satan!” refrain—which serves not least as the last line of the film—definitively evokes Rosemary’s Baby.

Longlegs is, though, also folk horror—and I will be developing this perhaps not-so-obvious claim at greater length in an article I’m working on. Thus far, no one has identified the film as folk horror, except for one brief post that compares it to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (An interesting comparison!)

Posted on August 4, 2024

Radical Slasher: In a Violent Nature

Dawn Keetley

Canadian filmmaker Chris Nash’s 2024 In a Violent Nature is an effective, pared-down slasher. It is also a commentary – and at times a rather brilliant one – on the slasher.

The killer’s perspective . . .

Ever since Vera Dika’s and Carol Clover’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s, it has been commonplace to talk about the way that slashers take the point of view of the killer. Dika writes about the slasher’s distinctive “moving camera point-of-view shot,” which allows for identification “with the killer’s look” (88), and Clover mentions the slasher’s “I-camera [used] to represent the killer’s point of view” (45). Slashers that famously deploy this I-camera include Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). (In the early 1980s, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert offered a famous polemic against exactly this characteristic of the slasher.) In a Violent Nature made me realize, however, how limited this claim actually is.

Posted on July 16, 2024

Exploring a Filming Location: Alan Garner’s Red Shift – St Mary the Virgin

Dawn Keetley

Alan Garner’s writing is famously bound to the land. One of his best-known novels, Red Shift (1973) is set in Cheshire, Garner’s native county in north west England. Indeed, the novel features specific places and events in Cheshire: Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 in the village of Mow Cop, split between the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire, and St. Bertoline’s Church in Barthomley, Cheshire, the site of a Royalist massacre of twelve suspected Parliamentarian supporters in 1643. When the novel was adapted (by Garner himself) for television for the BBC’s Play for Today series, directed by John Mackenzie and airing on January 17, 1978, the adaptation was filmed on Mow Cop, with the folly featuring prominently.

Even though St. Bertoline’s in Barthomley also features in the novel and the adaptation, it did not appear in the film. Instead, the crew traveled 140 miles north and east to film the church scenes in North Yorkshire. I discovered this fact after listening to a brief interview that accompanied the BFI’s DVD release of Red Shift in 2014, in which assistant director Bob Jacobs describes his search for the perfect church – and that he found it in the “North Ridings of Yorkshire.”