★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Written and Directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz
Messiah of Evil offers a deliciously confusing early 70s cross between art film and horror, setting the stage for horror tropes to come.
The making of 1973’s Messiah of Evil is almost as shrouded in mystery as the movie itself—I’ve heard many stories of the ill-fated events surrounding the power directing and screenwriting couple, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s movie, all of them unclear and possibly untrue. Funding that was pulled out at the last minute and used to pay for someone else’s roof, the pivotal “Everything is revealed!” scene never filmed due to lack of said funding, producers editing and releasing the movie without the director’s knowledge, releases under several different names, with one almost sued for too closely resembling George A. Romero’s own “Living Dead.” In fact, “Messiah of Evil,” is basically the 70s version of clickbait—who is the Messiah of Evil? What evil? Don’t come running to me—much less the directors—with these questions, because we don’t know.
A Synopsis of Messiah of Evil
Messiah of Evil begins with a man running down a narrow, dark street, chased by an unseen force. A young girl seems to help him by guiding him into an idyllic Californian backyard, where he rests by a pool. She approaches and quickly cuts his throat with a razor blade. So begins a beautiful arthouse ride through the wishy-washy horror of California beach towns.
Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were fresh out of film school when they made this movie. Four years of training led them to create what they have referred to as a “pretentious” take on horror, infused with film and cultural references. However pretentious it may be, Messiah of Evil offers a visually beautiful and delightfully confusing story. And the methamphetamines all over the set probably didn’t help make anything any clearer- for us or the crew. (Despite all my earlier claims about nothing about the background of this movie being able to be confirmed, Huyck confirmed this in an interview, which makes a lot of sense for the movie- we gotta love the 70s). The couple went on to write scripts for several acclaimed movies, including American Graffiti (1973, dir. George Lucas) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).
Our main character is Arletty (Marianna Hill), a young woman who begins to receive increasingly alarming and mysterious letters from her estranged father (Royal Dano). When his letters stop arriving, she becomes worried that something happened to him. Looking for him, she travels to the small beachside town of Point Dune, California. There, locals claim they hardly ever saw her reclusive artist father. Even before she reaches Point Dune, the vibe is off. While stopping for gas, Arletty encounters a gas station attendant who appears to be shooting at nothing in the dark. He warns her to leave quickly.
When she arrives in Point Dune, Arletty stays at her father’s house, where almost every wall contains trippy and ominous paintings of a town and its inhabitants. There Arletty attempts to piece together what happened through her father’s erratic journal entries.
On her search, she meets a strange womanizer, Thom (Michael Greer). He is accompanied by his “traveling companions” Toni and Laura (Joy Bang and Anitra Ford). When she first meets the throuple, they are interviewing a drunk old man, Charlie (Elisha Cook Jr.), about strange events in Point Dune. According to him, 100 years ago, weird things began to occur when the moon started turning red, causing the townspeople to change… “It was like the redder the moon got up there, the closer the people were being jerked toward Hell,” he warns. The prophecy foretold plays out again as Arletty continues to search for answers to her father’s disappearance before it’s too late.
The Trends Set by Messiah of Evil
Incredibly, Messiah of Evil seems to predict horror tropes that appear later in the ’70s and ’80s. You could say it’s a horror harbinger. One standout scene happens in a fully lit, seemingly abandoned supermarket. Laura, looking for signs of life, turns a corner to see townspeople with eating raw meat out of the deli section. She runs frantically through the store, chased by suit-wearing zombies. The zombies corner and consume Laura in an aisle surrounded by household cleaning products. Paralleling cannibalism with the consumption of supermarket goods, Messiah of Evil uses zombies to critique American consumerism. This was years before George A. Romero iconically paralleled his living dead with consumerist greed in his opus, Dawn of the Dead (1978).
In another scene, an out-of-focus Arletty screams a warning (and a promise) from the hall of a mental institution: “No one will hear you scream!” Famously, six years later, Alien made a similar promise on its posters, albeit space-themed.
Evaluation:
My favorite part of this movie was unquestionably the cinematography and set design. Characters move around Arletty’s father’s house, literally haunted by figures painted onto the walls behind them. The bright colors and ominous lighting in spaces that should feel safe, like a supermarket or a movie theatre, set you on edge. All this adds up to magnify the feeling of being followed and watched by the town itself. This creeping feeling carries through both the wall paintings and in the plot. As discomforting paintings watch our characters (and us), so too does Point Dune fall towards its inevitable bloody fate. Credit the set design to production designers Joan Mocine and Jack Fisk, the second of whom later worked with David Lynch on several trippy movies.
The weird in-between state of the early 70s—post-hippie, post-Vietnam, post-Manson Murders and mid-everyone-having-an-existential-crisis—haunts every frame in Messiah of Evil. Surprisingly, the true horror of Messiah isn’t necessarily the vampiric, cannibalistic zombie townspeople. It’s that weird isolating mediocrity of suburbia, consumerism, and Techniscope (a cheaper version of Technicolor). This discomfort and sense of waiting for things only to get worse mark both the plot (waiting for the final stage of the “Blood Moon”) and the early 70s time period. This is exactly what makes Messiah of Evil shine.
Concluding Thoughts:
While Messiah is confusing, and yes, it’s clear that they didn’t film several final scenes, I think it works. Because are you really supposed to understand horror? Isn’t the sinking feeling of being watched by unseen eyes in a small town something that goes beyond intellectual understanding? If you’re okay with the slower pacing of older horror movies, and don’t mind being a little lost at times, Messiah of Evil is completely worth the watch. And maybe you can finally figure out who the “Messiah of Evil” is once and for all.
Review by Lucia Granja
Messiah of Evil is currently available for free on Tubi. Watch here: Messiah of Evil (Tubi)