The Last Sacrifice Review (Glasgow Frightfest 2025)

**Engagingly divergent documentary The Last Sacrifice examines how a brutal pitchfork slaying in 1945 influenced folk horror from its 1970s peak, primarily The Wicker Man, to its current revival.**

When farm laborer Charles Walton was found brutally murdered in a quiet area of rural Britain, renowned detective and television star Robert Fabian was brought in to maintain his perfect record of solving cases. However, he encountered a wall of silence from the uncooperative locals and faced a whirlwind of ominous folklore. This situation mirrors the premise of the cult classic The Wicker Man, and Walton’s tragic death inspired its creation.

His nefarious demise also served as a perfect vehicle for the sensationalist Sunday supplements to incite a frenzy of devil worship-based paranoia among the British public. As such, it became a focal point for many cultural touchstones during the class war, national identity crisis, and the fevered breathlessness of the blossoming sexual revolution.

Rupert Russell’s impish documentary attempts to weave all the strands that frayed from the killing into a cogent tapestry. While it may not always succeed, it is a wild and refreshingly entertaining ride. Although often more sensational and melodramatic than the tabloid journalism it critiques, the tone is deliciously self-aware, and the source material is extrapolated vividly through elegant montages bursting with cult credentials.

Quietly satirical and loudly appreciative of the bushes and breasts of 1970s satanic fuckery the film darts from cultural signpost to social landmark with impunity. The infectious mix of archive footage, dramatisation, barking mad anecdotes, bountiful nudity, and lovingly inserted movie clips tunnels a rural rabbit hole where the Highgate Cemetery vampire cuddles up to the Teletubbies. Despite teetering on the brink, it never falls into self-parody. However, the craziness of the subject matter, its earnest delivery, and patchwork visuals create a curious netherworld between Chris Morris’s style of mockery and György Pálfi’s masterful Final Cut: Ladies & Gentlemen.

The film uses conspiracy as currency to pay a debt to social history, and one can’t help but draw parallels as our present timeline is trampled under the bootheels of the new world clusterfuck. The film suggests that morning tea cups clinking with the shivers of tabloid demonising was somehow intrinsically British. Given our modern nation’s tendency to translate a lack of empathy and understanding into mistrust and anger, it’s hard to disagree.

At the heart of Russell’s mischievous case study is the paradox of how rebellious outliers with exotic belief systems can accidentally shape mainstream culture in ways that traditionalists can only dream of. This is ironic in the extreme, considering the outliers are the ones embracing traditionalism in its purest incarnation, ancient folklore in hypnotic symbiosis with paganism and satanic homage.

Also fascinating is the cyclic nature of its assembly. Walton’s death influenced horror movies, and this film cannibalises constituent parts of those movies to birth a fresh mythos that casts his legacy back into the mists of uncertainty. This engaging deconstruction aligns with the revitalising spirit of paganism and hints at the bastardisation crucial in the practice of dark arts.

The film prompts us to question whether the murder indeed was the final ritualistic sacrifice in modern Britain, presenting differing viewpoints. Yet this genial documentary leaves us no doubt that it seduced celebrated filmmakers of the era, who spawned a lurid horror movement that left audiences hooked by Satan’s claw.

Much more than a companion piece to a classic occult thriller, The Last Sacrifice is a revised social document from a country steeped in sexual illiteracy fueled by religious repression and a fear of the unaccustomed. It reminds us that our nation’s past, however murky and quirky, gives us more comfort and connection than the dislocated present.