Last night was Halloween, and I finally got round to watching Wickerman. The film has been referenced so often during my seven years in Scotland that I that I genuinely believed I'd seen it before. If it’s possible to give away spoilers to a film released over 50 years ago here they are. Wickerman follows the investigation of a policeman on Summerisle, a remote island off Scotland which has the advantage of volcanic soil and a warm gulf stream. The isle is famed for its apples and bountiful fruits that have made it prosperous.

The policeman is there to get to the bottom of a missing child case as 14-year-old Rowan has disappeared for almost a year. Things are very strange from the off, as a group of men refuse to help him onto the island unless sanctioned by the Lord of the Isle and deny all knowledge of the child. Soon we find orgies in graveyards, ritual worship of the phallic maypole and generally good-natured paganism ft. leaping over bonfires and general pageantry.

It soon becomes clear that the harvest has failed and that human sacrifice is required to appease the earth’s gods. The policeman is imprisoned within an enormous wicker man and set on fire, as the ultimate sacrifice of virgin, law and man all in one. As he cries out to his God, he tries to reason with the mob claiming that ‘if the crops fail this year, who will you kill’. Will it be a never-ending cycle of slaughter until there is no one left on the island? Watching the wicker burn away as the inhabitants of the island frolic and sing beneath gave me an uneasy feeling that had nothing to do with Halloween.

In April this year, 140 bodies of children were found in Peru in a temple. They were dated to the 500 years ago when the Chimú empire reigned. Each body bore signs of ritual death, making it the largest sacrifice discovered to date. Scientists at the site found a clue as to why so many may have been slaughtered in the layer of mud that covered the bodies. Researchers suggest it was the result of severe rain and flooding on the generally arid coastline, and probably associated with a climate event related to El-Niño. The Chimú had sacrificed their most precious resource, children, in order to appease the rain god. Clearly, this tactic didn’t work, as the Chimú empire fell within the next twenty years.

Watching Wickerman it was hard to not associate the changing of seasonal patterns with the current ‘caravan’ of immigrants, largely made up of climate refugees who are walking toward the US. Troops along the border have been tripled to 15,000 as Donald Trump insists on there being ‘dangerous people’ amongst those in the procession. After this months UN report that has announced we have twelve years to get our act together or set in action climate feedback where we are all essentially doomed, it can feel as if we are sacrificing more and more people to climate change. In this context the idea of ritual sacrifice becomes more and more pertinent, but rather than bloodlust or puritanism, perhaps en mass self-sacrifice is needed in a way that manifests itself in a stronger way than opt-in meat-free Mondays and recycling correctly.

This months budget barely nodded towards recognising climate change. From this and a general lack of action on a national level from politicians, yesterday saw the declaration of Extinction Rebellion, a group of climate activists who created a manifesto that calls for an end to current inaction on climate change. 15 protesters were arrested and that was just the beginning of civil unrest that Extinction Rebellion say will bring London to a standstill over the next few months. The protesters have all expressed willingness to be arrested as it is a small price to pay in the grand scheme of climate change. As the climate continues to become more extreme, we must all ask what kind of sacrifices we might be willing to make.