Deep Cuts from the Horror Archives: The Evil Messiah (1973) Cinemax

★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸 on 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz

Messiah of Evil features a delightfully unsettling early ’70s crossover between art film and horror, paving the way for horror tropes to come.

The achievement of the years 1973 Evil Messiah is almost as shrouded in mystery as the film itself – I’ve heard many stories about the unfortunate events surrounding the director-screenwriter pairing, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s film, all of them unclear and possibly false. Funding pulled at the last minute and used to pay for someone else’s roof, the pivotal “It all comes to light!” » scene never filmed due to lack of financing, the producers edited and released the film without the director’s knowledge, releasing under several different names, one of which was nearly sued for being too similar to George A. Romero’s “Living Dead.” In fact, “Evil Messiah” is essentially the 70s version of clickbait: who is the Evil Messiah? What harm? Don’t come to me – and even less the directors – with these questions, because we don’t know.

A synopsis of the Evil Messiah

Evil Messiah begins with a man running down a narrow, dark street, pursued by an invisible force. A young girl appears to help him by guiding him to an idyllic Californian garden, where he relaxes by a swimming pool. She approaches and quickly slits his throat with a razor blade. Thus begins a beautiful arthouse ride through the tasteless horror of California’s seaside towns.

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were fresh out of film school when they made this film. Four years of training led them to create what they call a “pretentious” vision of horror, infused with cinematic and cultural references. As pretentious as it may be, Evil Messiah offers a visually beautiful and delightfully confusing story. And the meths all over the set probably didn’t help make things any clearer, either for us or the crew. (Despite all my previous claims that nothing could be confirmed about the background of this film, Huyck confirmed it in an interview, which makes a lot of sense for the film – we gotta love the 70s). The couple went on to write the screenplays for several acclaimed films, including American graffiti (1973, directed by 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 her letters stop arriving, she worries that something has happened to her. In search of him, she travels to the small seaside town of Point Dune, California. There, residents say they almost never saw his solitary artist father. Before she even reaches Point Dune, the mood is off. While stopping to refuel, 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 disturbing paintings of a town and its people. There, Arletty attempts to piece together what happened through the erratic entries in her father’s diary.

During her search, she meets a strange womanizer, Thom (Michael Greer). He is accompanied by his “travel companions” Toni and Laura (Joy Bang and Anitra Ford). When she first meets the group, they question a drunken old man, Charlie (Elisha Cook Jr.), about strange events happening at Point Dune. According to him, 100 years ago, strange things started happening when the moon began to turn red, causing a change among the townspeople… “It was as if the redder the moon was, the closer people got to hell,” he warns. The foretold prophecy comes true once again as Arletty continues to search for answers to her father’s disappearance before it is too late.

Trends defined by the Evil Messiah

Incredibly, Evil Messiah seems to predict horror tropes that would later appear in the 70s and 80s. You could say it’s a harbinger of horror. A remarkable scene takes place in a fully lit and seemingly abandoned supermarket. Laura, looking for signs of life, turns the corner and sees townspeople eating raw meat in the deli section. She runs frantically around the store, chased by zombies in costumes. The zombies corner and consume Laura in an aisle surrounded by household cleaning products. Alongside cannibalism and the consumption of supermarket products, Messiah of Evil uses zombies to criticize American consumerism. This was years before George A. Romero made an iconic parallel between his undead and consumerist greed in his opus, Dawn of the Dead (1978).

In another scene, a blurry Arletty shouts a warning (and a promise) from the lobby of a mental institution: “No one will hear you scream!” » It is famous, six years later, Stranger made a similar promise on its posters, albeit with a space theme.

Assessment:

What I liked best about this film was undoubtedly the cinematography and the set design. The characters move through Arletty’s father’s house, literally haunted by figures painted on the walls behind them. Bright colors and ominous lighting in spaces that should feel safe, like a supermarket or movie theater, put you on alert. All this adds up to amplify the feeling of being followed and monitored by the city itself. This creeping feeling is found in both the murals and the plot. As uncomfortable paintings watch over our characters (and us), Point Dune also falls toward its inevitable bloody fate. Credit the set design to production designers Joan Mocine and Jack Fisk, the latter of whom went on to work with David Lynch on several trippy films.

The strange in-between state of the early ’70s – post-hippie, post-Vietnam, post-Manson Murders and middle-everyone-having-an-existential-crisis – haunts every frame of Evil Messiah. Surprisingly, the true horror of Messiah is not necessarily the vampiric, cannibalistic zombie townsfolk. It’s that strange, isolating mediocrity of suburbia, consumerism, and Techniscope (a cheaper version of Technicolor). This discomfort and this feeling of waiting for things to get worse marks both the plot (waiting for the final stage of the “Blood Moon”) and the period of the early 70s. It is exactly what makes Evil Messiah shine.

Final Thoughts:

While Messiah It’s confusing, and yes, it’s clear they didn’t film several final scenes, I think it works. Because we’re really supposed to understand horror? Isn’t the depressing feeling of being watched by invisible eyes in a small town something beyond intellectual comprehension? If you’re okay with the slower pace of older horror films and don’t mind being a little lost sometimes, Evil Messiah definitely worth the detour. And maybe you can finally find out once and for all who the “Evil Messiah” is.

Comment by Lucia Granja

Messiah of Evil is currently available for free on Tubi. Look here: Evil Messiah (Tubi)