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.
The division between how things appear and how they are, between surface and depth, masquerade and reality, pervades The Last Sacrifice: English people may not be what they seem, the film proposes. “What lies behind the surface ‘green and pleasant land’ that is England, especially the English village?” What may in fact lie behind the pastoral surface is “quite literally the devil within.”
The Last Sacrifice brilliantly explores this tension—the peaceful village, its upstanding tea-drinking inhabitants, and a persistent and irrational violence simmering beneath. The first minutes of the film frame this tension perfectly by intercutting black and white videos promoting the idyllic Cotswolds’ villages with violent disruptive and colorful images of the occult—images that quite literally interrupt, that puncture, the façade.
The Last Sacrifice is structured by three theories about the murder of Charles Walton, all of which Russell broadly contextualizes. The first theory, driven by the initial police investigation, is that Walton was murdered by a local, probably his employer, Alfred Potter, and probably because of money. The official investigation into Walton’s brutal murder was famously undertaken by probably the best-known detective in England at the time, Robert Fabian of Scotland Yard. Fabian launched an exhaustive probe and pursued the possibility of Potter’s guilt, but there was never any evidence that he did it – or even had any reason to. There was (and never has been) any of the usual motives operating in the murder of Charles Walton. Fabian was defeated. And so much more esoteric theories poured into the vacuum opened by his failed case.
The second and third hypotheses about Walton’s murder both involve witchcraft. First, The Last Sacrifice explores the theory that Walton was killed by witches as a ritual sacrifice. There had been a drought and a bad harvest in the region prior to his murder, so this theory proposed that his death was a blood sacrifice designed to regenerate the soil. The theory that there were surviving pagans in Lower Quinton, who practiced a “sacrificial bloodletting,” was proposed by none other than Margaret Murray, whose Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) had argued for the existence of exactly that sort of pagan practice, lingering on around the edges of modernity. Murray visited Lower Quinton and gave an interview to the Birmingham Post on how witchcraft “lives on” in the Midlands.
After proposing the theory that Walton had been killed as a blood offering to the land, The Last Sacrifice explores the existence of witch cults in 1960s and 1970s Britain, including footage of interviews with infamous Wiccans Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders, as well as contemporaneous documentaries (such as Secret Rites from 1971) that illuminated the flourishing of witchcraft and occult practice. Charles Walton’s murder, which became notorious in its own time for its shocking brutality, its incongruence with the sleepy village in which it took place, and for its defying the most famous detective in England, remained notorious (arguably became more so) because it was easily interpreted, after the fact, as evidence that England was swarming with witches.
Indeed, the third theory of Charles Walton’s murder, The Last Sacrifice proposes, is that Walton was himself a witch. In this theory, suspicions again cluster around Walton’s employer, Alfred Potter, but, this time, the thinking is that he killed Walton not over money but because Walton was bewitching his land and animals. The Last Sacrifice delves into the folk practices that persisted in mid twentieth-century rural England—and recounts people who remember a mysterious and terrifying black dog in the area, potentially associated with Walton (presumably, his familiar). Walton is connected with another witch from the same region, Ann Tennant, who was killed in 1875 because people believed her to be a witch. The film also draws out the intriguing connection between a folk tale about another Charles Walton from the area, who, as a boy, allegedly witnessed a spectral hound in 1885. Could this Charles Walton, imbrued in the supernatural as a child, be the same Charles Walton who was perhaps killed for dabbling in dark folk magic? (The answer is, no, almost certainly not—but it’s an interesting question!)
I can honestly say that I’ve never watched a documentary that so compellingly illuminates a single, notorious historical event. There is a continual and complex interweaving of the details of the Charles Walton murder—including its decades-long afterlife—and the England in which it was embedded, an England that was, in the words of one commentator, “going nuts.”
Most brilliantly (and most distinctively), in my view, though, is the way that The Last Sacrifice weaves fact and fiction, making a point, I think, of suggesting the blurred boundary between the two. While the film does officially—some of the time—make this distinction with frequent labeling (‘Fact’ and ‘Fiction’) at the bottom of the screen, it is in the end impossible to draw a clear line between the two. Rupert Russell knows this, I think, and plays with the blurred lines. As the film makes clear, Charles Walton’s death emerged into the spotlight again in the 1960s and 1970s not only because of the actual rise of Wiccan cults and various occult practices in England (and documentaries about that rise) but also because of the rise of fictional film—most particularly the rise of folk horror. From the beginning, The Last Sacrifice interweaves clips from folk horror films along with narration about the ‘real’ case of Charles Walton. Films that loom large in Russell’s documentary include The Wicker Man, The Blood Beast Terror, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Eye of the Devil, The Devil Rides Out, The Witches, Robin Redbreast, Doomwatch, and An American Werewolf in London. Sometimes these films are named as (fictional) films, but sometimes they are not.
Scenes from The Blood Beast Terror play as the circumstances of Walton’s murder are detailed
Sometimes, moments from these films feature as a kind of ‘re-enactment’ of the Charles Walton case. Most notable in this regard is the way that scenes of Sgt. Neil Howie’s (Edward Woodward) arrival on and travels around Summerisle in The Wicker Man play during commentary about Fabian’s arrival in Lower Quinton. When the documentary takes up how tales of witchcraft circulated in the mid-century British press, the film cuts in a scene from Robin Redbreast in which Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) says (of witchcraft), “I’ve read about it in the Sunday papers.” And, later, scenes from Doomwatch play during The Last Sacrifice’s discussion of tales of the black dog and their connection to Walton.
These fictional folk horror films aren’t presented as substantively different in nature than the lore swirling around Walton’s murder. They are part of it. The Last Sacrifice shows how the border separating fiction and fact breaks down, how fiction is influenced by fact but also how fact—specifically, how our understanding of the ‘facts’ of a murder case—are deeply influenced by fiction. The Last Sacrifice offers not only an exhaustive investigation into the Charles Walton murder and the explosion of the occult in mid-century England. It also serves as a meditation on—indeed, a dramatization of—the interwovenness of fictional and documentary storytelling.
Some of the excellent commentators include Ronald Hutton, Jonathan Rigby, Diane Rodgers, Tim Stanley, Simon Read, and Leila Latif.
Bottom line: watch this brilliant documentary as soon as you’re able! We’ll update as soon as it becomes available.
