Messiah of Evil

Malaise.

I caught Messiah of Evil (1973) at the Metrograph the other night. It was my second viewing, and for whatever reason I connected the movie to Luigi Bazzoni’s disorienting Footprints on the Moon. They’re entirely different movies, but they both evoke this sleepy boredom that feels more crippling than any sort of jump scare.

I think nothing scares me more than being utterly bored with myself.

—

Messiah is actually more like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971). It has the same framework—institutionalized woman looks back on the events that fractured her mind—and features hippies front and center. But Messiah is far more nightmarish, a nihilistic project that centers on a zombie apocalypse in a small California coastal town, your classic metaphor for all sorts of societal decay.

Directed and written by husband and wife duo William Huyck and Gloria Katz, Messiah is a low-budget, zombie flick that has made its way to cult status. Huyck and Katz would go on to write American Graffiti and a few other films, but this is their gem, one of the more chilling 70s horrors I’ve seen. It begins with Arletty (lol), a young, beautiful, and haunted woman who receives ominous letters from her estranged artist father, who has been working in the ghostly beach town Point Dune.

Arletty makes her way to Point Dune, and despite encountering a few clear omens on her way, including a creepy albino man with an empty stare (giving Lynch) she arrives to her father’s home—a colorful bachelor pad decorated with his life-like murals of people in black, white, and gray. Everything in Point Dune is wrong. The streets are practically vacant, and Arletty, at first, feels like a sleepwalker in her father’s home. As she reads his journals, she senses that something’s amiss, but she can’t quite figure it out.

She’s eventually joined by Thom and his two female companions, stereotypes of polyamorous hippies with their long hair, doped-up ways of speaking, and overall indifference to the potential danger around them. Thom eventually takes to Arletty, which enrages (and isolates) his friends, which culminates in two of the more bizarre horror sequences I’ve ever seen on film.

One of the woman, Laura, leaves the group, angry that she can’t pull Thom away from the town. She stumbles upon a Ralphs grocery store and enters to find it pretty empty. That is until she spots the meats section, where she sees several members of the town gorging upon packages of raw meat. They don’t know notice her at first, but when they do their eyes are empty, soulless, but hungry. Laura tries to run away, and what ensues is an incredible scene, almost silent save for the sound of footsteps as she tries to evade the horde of zombified people who narrow in on her. She’s locked in, and what then happens is matter-a-fact, without the frills or score you expect from the bigger movies. They attack her and begin to eat her. And then we cut away.

The other sequence may be an all-timer. Toni, the other woman, leaves to go see a movie. The theater, at first relatively vacant, starts to fill up with overly pale town figures, many who bleed from their eyes. Toni doesn’t notice as they pile in around her, but when she does she runs around the theater as the zombies, in no rush, wait for her to realize there’s no hope. Then, right in front of the screen, they devour her.

There’s a Lovecraftian silliness to it all, and Messiah also gives us some rather unnecessary exposition about the root the town’s curse, but there’s something at its core that lingers with me. It’s themes are bountiful: a critique of consumerism, of homogenization, etc. But it’s all about the mood here. There’s an underlying despair that creeps up on you. It happens sleepily, as Arletty begins to see a nightmare take full form.