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| The Last Sacrifice |
On Valentine’s Day in 1945, an elderly man was found by a hedgerow in a quiet Cotswolds village. He had been murdered in a bizarre, ritualistic fashion. The crime, which was never solved, led to one mystery after another, and had a tremendous influence on British culture. Rupert Russell’s latest documentary, which is screening as part of the Frightfest strand at the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival, explores the stories surrounding the killing itself and examines its impact at a pivotal moment in the island’s history.
With a background in sociology, Rupert, who is the son of Ken Russell, has spent most of his career in film working on political documentaries. When we connected, shortly before the festival, I asked if he sees this as a different way of looking at politics.
“It's interesting,” he says. “I'd say politics isn't quite the right word, but it's a more explicit analysis of British society. I think people watch the film and they go ‘Oh, this is a film about today and it's about Britain.’ And there's actually about eight lines that refer to that, but people can fill it in and make their own connections. Which is more interesting, actually, than us telling people things. But, yeah, it is different to my other films.
“I focus on all these big global topics, connecting the dots. I think I'd been to 20 countries, almost half of those war zones, and I was pretty exhausted by it. I think there was also fatigue from the audience as well. That genre was really big in the Vice era. There were lots of young people going out to interesting parts of the world and getting into the thick of it. For this film, I wanted to change track completely. I wanted something fresh, I wanted something new. And I only watched The Wicker Man for the first time. It must have been in 2022.”
I don’t succeed in concealing me surprise. He laughs.
“It was just one of those films, you know? Everyone has a list of those classic films they just never got around to watching. And then I actually did watch it. And to me, the scene that really stood out was the scene of Howie on the mountaintop where he's pleading for his life. I was just like, ‘God, that's just what it feels like to me in Britain where you're like shouting at the television about Brexit and how none of this is going to work.’ And then Boris Johnson is the kind of Summerisle figure going ‘I know it will.’ It’s that feeling of being trapped on this kind of island of madness and no one listening to reason.
“For me it really, really resonated. I spoke to my friend Tim Stanley, who's actually in the film. I said ‘God, I just saw Wicker Man. This is really a film about Britain today. It's so interesting.’ Tim goes ‘Well, you know, there was this real murder that happened in the Cotswolds in 1945.’ And that was kind of the beginning of it.
“I thought the fact there was basically no visual archive of the time was actually an opportunity because you could tell the story of this sort of murder through all the films that it inspired. That's actually more interesting to me because then you're in the realm of identity and myth-making, which is what all these films are. I knew that it could work as a documentary – it had this true crime piece that everybody really likes – but it could also be, to use Foucault's phrase, a kind of history of the present. We could use Britain's national identity crisis in the Sixties, the end of Empire. And I don't think it's a coincidence that folk horror has come back in the last ten years. This genre that was huge in the late Sixties, early Seventies, sort of disappears for a long time and it resurrects in the last ten years and it finds this audience.”
I ask if he feels that we're in a similar social moment now.
“Britain's never stopped having an identity crisis,” he says. “I think it flares up like a chronic disease, and I think that just as the end of Empire really questioned Britain's place in the world – who are we? How do we see ourselves? Because identity is relationaI – I definitely think in the last ten years that question has been put to us, but I don't think it was ever resolved. I mean, I'm a a creature of the 1990s. I grew up on the end of history and I think Britain was much more confident. It was the era of Rule Britannia, it was them putting the Union Jack on the Mini, it was Austin Powers, it was the Spice Girls. We had redefined ourselves in the world as the arbiters of cool, of a new sort of thinking, technology, culture. And that all falls apart, right? That whole mythology of the late 90s, early 2000s, really falls apart.
“By the Iraq war, by 2003, that's all over. And you then have the financial crisis, then you have austerity, then you have Brexit. So you have in my lifetime, at least, the rise of the Nineties and then this sort of collapse. I think that by 2016 and afterwards, it becomes an acute crisis that has political ramifications, economic ramifications, beyond identity. But at its heart, I think that we experience the British people as a crisis of identity, even though the material things are still there, if that makes sense.”
We talk about the slow establishment of Christianity in Britain, often misunderstood as if it were a sudden or complete thing, and the curious mixture of today of genuinely old traditions with unclear origins and, as one of the film’s contributors, Ronald Hutton, has noted in his work, ‘ancient’ rites invented out of whole cloth. Rupert says that it’s something he never thought about until he came to work on the film.
“The whole Wicca, Pagan thing, I just thought was a bit mad. But I didn't know anything. It was just a knee jerk thing. And then actually the more I got into it, the more interested I was. That was one of the interesting things about doing the background research. That was one of the hardest things to do in the film and I hope we've been successful. No one's complained about it, but it is separating out the Wicca movement. We don't go into the whole genealogy of it. There are other films and books, Ronald Hutton's written all of them, right?
“There’s Crowley and others before, in the 19th century, through to [Gerald] Gardner. And then there are a whole bunch. I mean we focus on Alex Saunders, but there were others, right? There's Anton LaVey in America as well. So you have a big picture of the modern Pagan witchcraft revival versus folk traditions which are much older, and we don't really know the origin of them. I think the interaction between those two things is really interesting, and I think that the interesting thing about the Walton murder is it's right at that switchover - the Walton murder happens right at that moment. Wicca's just getting going. Gardner's just written his first book and it's 1949. Gardner's just starting to lay this out as a thing.
“At the same time, a lot of those folk beliefs around magic are actually starting to die out. Was there this more folk-based idea of magic and witchcraft that wasn't systematised in the way that Wicca was, or was there just a more localised kind of understanding of, as Ronald Hutton says, how to break the curse of a witch by spilling blood? That was quite a common kind of folk belief around Warwickshire.
“I definitely did not want to make an academic film which is what this could have become. It was just us trying to balance these two kinds of things, and it's not necessarily completely clear because there's so much overlap. You talk to people like Geraldine Beskin, who runs the Atlantis bookshop, and she has quite a different take on this. She's like, ‘Well, my great grandmother was a witch before Gardner.’ I think a lot of people like her, who’ve got more of a lineage, they straddle both and they just got incorporated into the new Wicca movement.
“It was a difficult hunt to find everybody. We got Janet Farrar, who was one of the last remaining witches of that late Sixties, early Seventies era, who could really, really speak to what was happening at the moment. All these folk horror films were being made in London, and then you've got the Highgate vampire palaver, so she could really speak to that. Leila Latif, who's a brilliant film critic, was very prescient on updating it and bringing it up to today. Tim Stanley is very interesting. He's a film enthusiast and folk horror enthusiast but – we didn't put this in the film – his grandmother was actually a clairvoyant and he's a convert to Catholicism, so he had a lot to say about this. I mean, that was the idea, to try and get a mix and not lean too much into the film stuff, but try and get first person people like Geraldine and Janet and then Gavin [Bone] as well, who all consider themselves to be witches.”
It's a fascinating topic, but one that could lead a person down endless rabbit holes. How did he shape it and give it a sense of completeness?
“Well, we organised the film around the three different theories of the murder. The money theory was the first theory that Fabian came up with during this police investigation. You then have Margaret Murray's theory, which emerged quite quickly afterwards. In 1951, Murray was roaming around the Cotswolds, doing her own thing, talking to the Birmingham Post. The blood sacrifice theory came in, which is by far the most influential culturally. That set up the folk horror genre from her theories. And then the third one was probably the most commonly believed about the murder specifically, which is that Walton himself was a witch.
“Murray's theory is he was killed by witches – a coven from Birmingham that came down to the Cotswolds to do the sacrifice. And then the third one is that this wasn't an external group of witches coming in, it was more townsfolk killing the local witch, or local cunning man, as they might have called him. That actually becomes the most common theory. So those were the three buckets that we put things in, and then I used them as jumping off points into the story. And then the way in which it was structured was to constantly keep on coming back, to always be playing with this theme of fact and fiction wherever possible, showing what the interconnection is between these two things.
“That was why I loved the Highgate vampire story, even though it's a bit of a detour from our A story. I kept it in because I love how the arrows in that are completely confused. People will say the Highgate vampire inspired Dracula AD 1972. Then there was this Hammer movie that actually predates the Highgate vampire, and then the witches believed that it was people inspired by that movie. What goes in, what way? I loved how it was all messed up. I think that word that Jonathan Rigby uses, that word bleeding, is really nice. You know, reality, fantasy, all bleeding into each other. And that was almost like a microcosm of the era.”
I venture that the film doesn't seem concerned just with exploring histories, but also with the way that people interpret histories and the way that people get sucked into that experience.
“Yeah,” he says. “I definitely saw the whole film as a mirror. I think the horror is really a projection of paranoia. Filmmakers have different paranoias which they draw upon. A lot of those things are quite obvious. But folklore is fascinating because it's really about a paranoid society. Sociology is obviously the reason why I got into the genre once I discovered it. What I love about folk horror is that you can see quite explicit moves by the filmmakers to really put in their paranoias about society. I mean, we don't go into this in the film – we axed them for clarity – but we had a segment in there about the comparison between British and American folk horror films. I think in the British films – I'm talking really about the late Sixties, early Seventies ones – it's all about class.
“It's always some representative of the new middle class, of the post-war British consensus. So it's a teacher in The Devil's Own, it's a policeman in The Wicker Man, it's a doctor in Plague Of The Zombies, right? They all do the same thing. They all go from the city to the countryside and what do they find? They find a conspiracy between the aristocracy and the peasantry. The aristocrat is a sort of puppet master that's going to use the old religion to manipulate the populace against the new world of Britain. And so there's an idea that the old feudal lords are tapping into the old religion to subvert the new Britain.
“That's really, really clear in the original Wicker Man script. It’s even more explicit about Summerisle owning the island. They actually cut out the first scene from the remake, where the person on the page goes ‘This is private property.’ That word keeps on being repeated throughout. He owns the island. Compared to the American folk horror films, like in the American remake of The Wicker Man, it's a commune, right? It's completely different. So that's what's scary. Everyone owns everything else. It's a complete inversion of the British paranoia. In the Sixties we feared too much capitalism; they feared too much socialism. And in the American ones, they always go somewhere foreign. So they go to England in American Werewolf In London; in Midsommar, they go to Sweden. Even in the Wicker Man remake, he goes on a plane, which I think is quite symbolic, even though technically it's off America, off the mainland, at least.
“In the American ones, it's all about the culture. Americans, they're always concerned that it's religious ideology gone mad, which is what the Americans fear. Which we can understand. That's their paranoia, which is different to ours. So that's how I got into it. We can look at these films as mirrors, and I think that's what interested me so much about the Walton case. Because there's such an absence of evidence, it really invites you to bring your own theories, to project your own paranoias about rural Britain and what's really going on.”
It's a really well edited film. Where did he begin in developing the montages of film clips? They were a high priority, he says.
“My number one priority was getting the right editor. I do not like a lot of the editing styles. You can look at these by switching on any Netflix doc, and it's just a drone shot of suburbia with people talking on the phone, which is not what I wanted. I thought ‘What could be a really interesting approach to making a film made up of other people's films?’ And I thought, ‘Why don't I go and get a trailer editor to do this?’ Because trailer editors, literally what they do is they get a film and they make another film out of it. So I went to Intermission Film. They made a trailer for one of my first films. I thought they might be producing partner on making the documentary. They were like, ‘Yeah, this is great.’ And they found Alexander McNeill, and we worked on it together and came up with a number of editing techniques and styles.
“One of the interesting developments on that was we initially laid it down almost all from horror films in the first pass, and we began to realise that it was scarier and more interesting if we actually pulled back and started editing in just normal archive of Britain to the extent that you then couldn't tell which was which. That was the sweet spot. So in that opening montage, almost every shot is a switching between a horror film and real Britain. And the fact that you can't tell what is which, I think makes it scary because it grounds it and it makes it more believable.
“We then used a lot of flash frames. He pulled back each even further as he went to the edit. He's pulling back and pulling back so that when you did see some of these images, it'd be more interesting if they were just flashes. And you can think of that almost analogous to a rumour or gossip – that it's ‘Oh, did you hear this?’ And it's like a flash. So yeah, it was pretty much the most important thing, coming up with an editing style that could blend fact and fiction in an effective way.
“The feedback's been great so far. We've not been at that many – just a handful of festivals so far. I think what was interesting, as I said to you at the top, is that people are immediately getting that it's a film about Britain, which I actually really like because that's quite varied as a theme. It makes me happy, and I really hope it sparks a discussion beyond the horror community so that other people who might be feeling weird about Britain can tap into it.”
