Messiah of Evil (1973)

When a young woman travels to a small Californian coastal town to search for her missing father – an artist who has been researching the town’s strange history - she suspects something sinister is afoot. Before long, she discovers the town is home to a mysterious blood cult of moon-worshipping, living-dead people intent on summoning an ancient evil entity from the depths of the ocean…

Written and directed by Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, Messiah of Evil is surely one of horror cinema’s best kept secrets. Unfurling as a kindred spirit of Carnival of Souls and Night Tide, its story follows outsider characters who exist on the lonely peripheries of society, navigating liminal spaces and wandering, phantom-like, through an uncertain, dreamlike narrative. It’s an utterly bewitching film, replete with striking imagery, eerie lighting and sound design, and saturated in a morose atmosphere. Just the year before, Katz and Huyck had written American Graffiti (directed by George Lucas), a nostalgic and bittersweet coming-of-age drama about the last days of innocence of a group of small town high-school graduates. Set in the early 60s, it depicts the beginnings of the counter-culture movement and all the hope that it brought to younger generations of Americans who felt at odds with their parents’ generation. Messiah of Evil is the dark side to this; set in the early Seventies when attitudes to ‘hippies’ began to sour in the shadow of the Manson family and the Tate-LaBianca murders, it depicts a group of young people imperilled by an older generation of ghouls in an isolated coastal town.

Katz and Huyck have conjured a vivid slice of California Gothic, with themes of the past returning to haunt the present, ancestral secrets and hereditary madness eventually pulsating to the fore of proceedings. The nomadic characters move through the story as though sleepwalking, drifting from place to place as they seek an ever-elusive truth. All the while they discuss their dreams. It’s hypnotic and creepy stuff. Certain imagery foreshadows the work of David Lynch, particularly the shots of a lonely road at night, lit only by headlights as a vehicle hurtles headlong through the dark and into the unknown. With its measured pacing, striking production design and photography, Messiah also demonstrates the influences of Euro-horror on its style and atmosphere. Lighting and set design evoke memories of the work of Dario Argento (particularly Inferno) and Mario Bava. Special mention must be made of the production design and art direction by Joan Mocine and Jack Fisk (who would go on to work with David Lynch).

The interior of Arletty’s (Marianna Hill) father’s spawling beach-house home is astoundingly realised, toying with the viewers’ – and the characters’ – perception and sense of space. Murals of stairways, doors and verandas overlooking strange vistas create the illusion that the house is vaster in size than it is, and that the spaces within it stretch on as far as the eye can see. Cinematography by Stephen Katz enshrouds proceedings under a veil of deep reds, blacks and blues, enhancing the menacing atmosphere and elevating an unshakable sense of dread. The coastal setting enhances the sense of liminality, rendering the town a purgatorial space which hovers between the sanctuary of the land, and the deep, unknowable depths of the sea. Strange fires are seen burning along the beach during night-time scenes, as the town is beset by shadowy figures. Further nightmarish imagery is conjured in the dialogue, such as when Arletty meets a blind art dealer and describes how the dealer’s hand 'moved like a pet spider over my face'.

Alongside Marianna Hill, the cast includes the fabulous Michael Greer - as a dandyish lothario also in search of Arletty’s father – and Elisha Cook Jr., - who cements his status as the true successor to Dwight Frye as a sympathetic, melancholy town drunk who meets a mysterious demise after failing to convince anyone of sinister goings-on (he played a similar character in House on Haunted Hill and Salem’s Lot). Several set pieces really stand out, not least the scene where Laura (Anitra Ford) is menaced in a brightly-lit supermarket by a group of blood-thirsty ghouls who have been congregating around the meat counter, and when Toni (Joy Bang) pays an ill-fated visit to the cinema only to be surrounded and consumed by a horde of black-eyed, undead patrons. There’s dark humour when we see the title of the film she watches: 'Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye'. Tension mounts as the rows of seats behind her are gradually occupied by dark-suited denizens of the town as they silently file into the theatre. Her death occurs right in front of the blank cinema screen, a neat moment of reflexivity which contemplates death and violence as entertainment in cinema. That both moments take place in deserted settings usually populated by crowds of people adds to their eerie power. 

The sound design sustains a portentous sense of dread throughout, as desolate night winds whip along the beaches and through the empty streets, and surf crashes upon moon-lit shores. Characters whisper about sacrifice, the ocean, madness, and ‘each of us dying slowly in the prison of our minds.’ As we near the climax and tension continues to mount, echoes of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead feature in a distressing denouement as the survivors are besieged by the local residents 'like packs of wolves'. Are they vampires? Zombies? The blood cult at the centre of the mystery is left tantalizingly vague, with various Lovecraftian diary entries hinting at a mysterious ‘Dark Stranger’ set to return to earth from the sea to create chaos and bloody destruction. An evocative, deeply creepy flashback involving the Donner party, cannibalism, a test of faith and the founding of a new religion create an impression of who the ‘Dark Stranger’ is. There are Lovecraftian rumblings in whisperings of his return to earth from the depths of the sea into which he disappeared a century prior, and how he will emerge as a messiah who will usher in a new era of death, silence and bloodlust.

If you like the sound of a Dario Argento remake of Carnival of Souls, then Messiah of Evil is for you. It’s a deeply atmospheric, effective and moody work that is finally beginning to find a wider audience. One to completely immerse and lose yourself in. Alone. In the dark...