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.
