Messiah of Evil (1973)

Directed by Willard Huyck and co-written by Huyck with his wife Gloria Katz (both of who would go on to work with George Lucas, writing American Graffiti (1973), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Howard the Duck (1986), the latter also directed by Huyck – they also acted as uncredited script editors on Star Wars (1977)) Messiah of Evil is a genuinely strange film that owes as much to Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) as it does to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).

It begins with an arresting prologue in which a feeling man (Walter Hill, future director of The Driver (1978), The Warriors (1979) and Southern Comfort (1981) among others, and co-producer of Alien (1979)) having his throat slashed by a young woman. The main thrust of the narrative begins with Arletty (Marianna Hill) heading for the small Californian coastal town of Point Dune (“just a piss-poor little town, deader than hell” according to a local gas station attendant (Charles Dierkop)) in search of her estranged artist father (Royal Dano). His house on the beach has been abandoned but he left behind a diary warning of a darkness that he feels is overtaking the town, of suffering dreadful nightmares and addresses Arletty directly, warning her not to try to find him. Arletty falls in with visiting young aristocrat Thom (Michael Greer) and his two female companions, Toni (Joy Bang) and Laura (Anitra Ford) and Thom is warned by local drunk Charlie (Elisha Cook Jr) about the coming of the “the blood moon” and “the dark stranger.” Laura is killed by a pack of ghouls she finds eating raw meat in the local supermarket, Toni goes to the cinema only to be menaced by a growing crowd of the same flesh-eaters gathering unseen by her in the seats around her and the town prepare sfor the return of the eponymous messiah, a former minister and survivor of the Donner Party disaster who, a hundred years ago, had arrived in Point Dune to spread a new religion based on evil and cannibalism.

Co-star Anitra Ford later claimed that the film was never actually finished, that the material shot before the investors got cold feet and pulled out was turned over to a French producer who stitched it together as best he could. Which may go some way to explaining the curious, dream-like quality of the film. Things often happen out of the blue with no explanation, character motivations remain obscure and we’re none the wiser at the end as to what really happened in Point Dune than we were at the start. Ordinarily this would be maddening but there’s something about Messiah of Evil, a feeling of Lovecraftian weirdness that makes it instead one of the most interesting and rewarding low-budget horrors of the early 70s.

The fact that the story is told in flashback by an unreliable narrator (the film is told in flashback by Arletty, an inmate in a psychiatric hospital) also gives the film a get-out-of-jail-free card. None of what we’re watching may be anything more than the delusional, paranoid fantasies of a disturbed mind. One of the victims of the curtailed production was the climax, much of which was never shot and which now seems ambiguous to the point of incomprehensibility. But the fact that Arletty could be making all of this up at least gives us a reason to accept it without too much argument.

Huyck and Katz had only recently graduated from the film school at the University of Southern California, then a hot bed of creativity that gave us Ron Howard, Hal Barwood, George Lucas, John Milius, John Carpenter et al, and bring an arthouse sensibility to a film that its backers would no doubt have preferred to have been a straight Night of the Living Dead clone. Together with director of photography Stephen Katz (Gloria’s brother and future cinematographer of The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), The Blues Brothers (1980) and Gods and Monsters (1998)) they conjure several haunting images and in the scenes in the supermarket and the cinema create two unforgettable set pieces. Much of Stephen Katz’ work has been undone over the years by shoddy, badly cropped and poorly transferred video copies but the film’s original widescreen photography is often breathtakingly gorgeous and deserves to be seen in all it’s luminous glory (the print available on Amazon Prime at the time of writing, summer 2020, is an abomination and best avoided).

Mariana Hill gives a suitably disconnected performance, drifting morosely from one bizarre happening to the next, again suggesting that this is nothing more than Arletty’s distorted memories or even a fully-fledged fantasy. Of the supporting cast, Bennie Robinson is perhaps the most memorable, a towering albino with an unnerving stare and appetite for beach rats. He appears early in the film, unnerving both Arletty and the audience in a scene at a gas station (where a nosy attendant reveals that his pick-up truck is full of dead bodies) but disappointingly tends to meander in and out of the narrative as and when Katz and Huyck remember him.

Messiah of Evil has been released under a number of titles over the years. It was shot as The Second Coming, re-released as the appropriate but on-the-nose Dead People and the trashy Revenge of the Screaming Dead and ran into legal problems when a distributor tried to put it out as Return of the Living Dead, a move that brought it to the attention of George A. Romero and Richard P. Rubinstein’s Laurel Entertainment who attempted to sue. The Motion Picture Association of America got involved and ruled that Romero did not hold exclusive rights to the words “Living Dead”, but still advised that the film’s title be changed.

Under any title – but avoid those terrible video releases – Messiah of Evil is a flawed but remarkable film, an atmospheric, often inscrutable but always fascinating oddity that vanished into semi-obscurity for far too long. It would make a particularly nice double bill with that other great American horror film of the early 70s that features a mentally ill young woman being menaced by supernatural forces that may or may not be real, John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971).