The cold open to Messiah of Evil (1973) promises first-rate grindhouse, grimy as you like: a man running for his life down a suburban sidewalk collapses outside a wooden gate. A young girl invites him inside her backyard, where he splashes his face with water from a fountain. Thinking himself saved, he kisses her hand, then she brings the other hand down with a razor to slice his throat open (as we ourselves are stabbed with the synthesizer). We won’t be seeing either of these characters again, but first message received: don’t reach out in this world unless you’re ready to bleed. Style is the second message—the backyard shimmers with reflected pool light and establishes the kind of vibrant red and blue color palette that I associate with Italian giallo. The opening doesn’t quite prepare us for what becomes an entrancing mood piece that looks backward to old-fashioned literary Gothic and forward to John Carpenter, whose Prince of Darkness would make a tremendous double bill with Messiah of Evil.
Written and directed on a minuscule budget by William Huyck and Gloria Katz—the married couple who also wrote American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for George Lucas—Messiah of Evil feels like an H.P. Lovecraft tale but with a sympathetic female protagonist (the true beyond for good old HPL). Arletty (Marianna Hill), presently losing her mind in an asylum, relates in flashback the story of how she went looking for her artist father (Royal Dano), gone missing from his California beach house in a “neon stucco town.” She links up with Thom (Michael Greer), your classic seeker of arcane knowledge and rather unsympathetic male love interest, who aids her investigation and comes on to Arletty with lines like “My zipper’s stuck.”
Thom’s hands are already full because he travels in a swinging threesome with Laura (Anitra Ford) and Toni (Joy Bang), two groovy ’70s kids who do not fare well once the zombies come a-roving. But “zombie” isn’t the right word—these local townsfolk who bleed from the eyes and dress conservatively have more in common with the preoccupied ghouls of Carnival of Souls than with the dazed revenants from Night of the Living Dead. The blood-red moon has transformed them into cannibals and true believers who await the fulfillment of a prophecy: an evil preacher known as the Dark Stranger will soon walk out of the sea to corrupt first the town and then the whole world. Suffice to say, it’s a heady mix of ideas, but the stark images and atmospheric dread stay with you long after the plot is forgotten.
The film gets really interesting around the midpoint. Alone at the beach house, Arletty discovers that a portrait of herself, painted by her father, is bleeding red tears of blood. Her voiceover begins to intersect with her father’s voiceover, taken from the pages of his journal, as she repeats lines that he himself wrote: “I felt like I was losing control.” There is a queasy thought transference at work as father’s morbid ideas begin to populate her brain. Arletty’s mental breakdown is magnified by the spatially disorienting interiors of the beach house with its Gothic windows and walls painted with optical illusions. The filmmakers place her and other characters precisely within the wide anamorphic frame, using forced perspective to isolate them in space, stared at by painted human figures so that we feel like everyone here is under watch yet alone.
Like Carnival of Souls, another film about dissociation and loneliness, Messiah of Evil makes perfect use of its abandoned open spaces. You’re on your own in this purgatorial dream. There is never any question of banding together to stop the evil—instead, characters wander off by themselves to meet their annihilation along empty streets, in empty supermarkets, or in empty cinemas. In my all-time favorite scene set in a movie theater (in a film that isn’t Demons), Toni munches on popcorn and watches a goofy Western starring Sammy Davis Jr. I won’t spoil it except to say that the sequence made me think of Tippi Hedren sitting by the playground in Hitchcock’s The Birds.
The film gets under your skin because it suggests that evil isn’t the result of curiosity—opening Pandora’s box—but incuriosity, or an indifference to the fate of other people. Toward the movie’s end, a key character tells us that our evil messiah will return from the sea “to a world tired and disillusioned.” I don’t know about you, but the moon outside my window right now is blood red. I’m afraid the Dark Stranger is due to arrive here at any moment.🩸
a writer living outside Philadelphia, is currently working on a horror project set in western Pennsylvania. He co-wrote the movie Anamorph, starring Willem Dafoe.
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