#RITUAL DAVID PINNER SERIAL#

Killed and dismembered, but not necessarily in that order. A young man becomes the Sacred King, who is to be killed and dismembered for the good of the land. Glory be! I won’t summarize it in too much detail here, except to say that it portrays a modern day village pagan cult in terms absolutely and explicitly drawn from Margaret Murray, and from Frazer’s Golden Bough.

After many years of being unobtainable, it is now on Youtube.

Christopher Lee bought the film rights from Pinner in 1971.Īnother influence was the widely viewed (and utterly chilling) 1970 television play Robin Redbreast. Although this film changes many details of the Pinner novel (notably the changed setting, from Cornwall to Scotland), that book clearly was the source, and is now acknowledged as thus in all the many writings on the film. That brings us neatly to the film directly linked to Ritual, namely The Wicker Man, which likewise has a child-murder theme.

#RITUAL DAVID PINNER SERIAL#

This might reflect the British fascination with serial child murder following the horrific Moors Murders of the mid-1960s. In this instance, the murder victims are children or teens, with a strong sexual element. The Lower Quinton horrors inspired another pivotal work, namely David Pinner’s 1967 novel Ritual, in which a visiting detective has to solve occult-related deaths in an English village. It was assuredly broadcast in the UK in the early 1960s, because I saw it then, although I don’t know precisely how it might have influenced later works. It is a genuine and pioneering example of the Folk Horror genre, although its American origins mean that it is virtually never listed in that canon. I watch the episode whenever I can, although it is definitely a guilty pleasure. On the positive side, the final struggle within the local stone circle is terrific. At points in the story, the heroine must see and be horrified by the spectral black dog that featured so centrally in the Walton myth, but the actual beast cast in the role may be the least frightening mutt ever put on screen. If you suspend critical judgment, Hayfork and Billhook is actually great watching, with one disastrous exception.

I raise that question because I am conscious of the fantasy military life of the much better known Christopher Lee, who starred unforgettably in the classic 1973 film of The Wicker Man.) (I have never quite determined how authentic those reported heroic deeds were. The script was by a popular English actor and television writer of the day called Alan Caillou, who took his name from his wartime nom de guerre in British special forces. This is a ludicrous parody of contemporary rural England where witchcraft beliefs run riot, witches are commonly murdered, and everyone knows about the dark sacrificial rituals that proceed unchecked in the ancient stone circle. This depicts something very close to the Walton case, with a Fabian-style detective investigating dark doings in a backward English village – I mean, really backward. The Walton story received something like canonical form on television in 1961 in an episode of Boris Karloff’s wonderful Thriller series, entitled Hayfork and Billhook. That story, as described by detective Robert Fabian, became the foundation of a whole genre of fantastic fiction, Folk Horror, and this spilled over into the real world. In 1945, English villager Charles Walton was gruesomely murdered in what sensationalist media decided was a sinister “witch murder,” even a human sacrifice, in the community of Lower Quinton.

Ritual david pinner