Kasi Lemmons, Eve’s Bayou, and the Pleasures and Pains of Black Cinema in the 1990s

EVE'S BAYOU 

(Kasi Lemmons, USA, 1997, 108 minutes) 

"The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old."

--Eve Batiste 

Before she made her 1997 directorial debut with Eve's Bayou, Kasi Lemmons had worked as an actor for nearly 30 years. She appeared in national commercials, top-rated television programs, like Murder, She Wrote, and in over a dozen studio pictures, including cult hits, like Vampire's Kiss, Spike Lee joints, like the HBCU musical School Daze, and John Woo action extravaganzas, like Hard Target with Jean-Claude van Damme. 

Her talent, charisma, and fresh-faced good looks made her a natural, and she could have continued down that path, but she wanted to direct, and when she was ready, she made the pivot. She's never looked back since–Lemmons even married an actor, Chicago Hope's Vondie Curtis-Hall, who has also directed feature films, like 1997's Gridlock'd with Tupac Shakur.  

At her peak as a performer, she appeared in two movies that would become immortal; inspiring sequels, prequels, remakes, hours of impassioned --and sometimes heated--discussion, and in one case, an Academy Award for Best Picture: Jonathan Demme's 1991 psychological horror thriller Silence of the Lambs and Bernard Rose's 1992 supernatural horror chiller Candyman. 

Right: Lemmons in Candyman

She's very good in both, but there's a catch. She plays the best friend of leads Jodie Foster and Virginia Madsen--both great--and there's nothing wrong with that; in fact, it was a step in the right direction, though Nia DaCosta's 2021 Candyman sequel took things even further, since it was produced, directed, and populated by Black talent, including the late, great Tony Todd. If the original Candyman started out as white take on a Black legend; now it was an all-Black production. 

In each of the original films, though, Lemmons' characters are doomed. They support their friends, but their proximity to the central malevolence extracts a fatal cost, which encourages the protagonists to commit even harder to solving the mysteries driving the narratives and setting things right. Along the way, though, Lemmons' unlucky friends get forgotten. 

It wasn't racist per se–if anything, Demme was known for his sensitivity to race–but it was par for the course. Black actors in genre pictures up until fairly recently were always the first to die. I have no idea if these sorts of roles encouraged Lemmons to tell Black stories, let alone Black stories centered around women, but I can't imagine that they didn't play a part. 

Left: Lemmons in Silence of the Lambs; as beautifully shot by Tak Fujimoto

And that's exactly what she did in Eve's Bayou, a supernatural-tinged melodrama, set in 1962, about a successful Louisiana family coming apart at the seams--Lemmons filmed on location and it shows. Unheralded Hustle and Flow cinematographer Amy Vincent brings out the beauty in every unique face and every haunted space, but without overly-prettifying anything. About meeting Vincent for the first time, Lemmons told American Cinematographer's Brooke Comer, "There was a spark right away."

Lemmons presents the story from the perspective of 10-year-old Eve (Jurnee Smollett, most recently of Justin Kurzel's The Order), a spirited girl who loves her beautiful mother, Roz (an elegant Lynn Whitfield), and venerates her handsome father, Louis (an especially excellent Samuel L. Jackson, who also produced), the town doctor. And incorrigible ladies man.

The movie begins with a house party where the alcohol flows freely, the ladies are dressed to the nines, and everyone is feeling fine, but two things happen that will threaten to split this proud Creole family apart: Aunt Mozelle Delacroix (a warm, earthy, radiant Debbi Morgan) will lose her third husband (sax player and composer Branford Marsalis) in an accident and Eve will fall asleep in the garage only to wake up to an alarming sight: her father doing things he shouldn't with town flirt Matty Mereaux (Lisa Nicole Carson), who is married to the hotheaded Lenny (Roger Guenveur Smith).

Right: Jurnee Smollett as Eve

There were already signs of trouble. 

At the party, Louis makes a show of sharing a dance with Cisely (a very fine Meagan Good), his eldest daughter. From the look on Eve's face, it's clear that she isn't just disappointed, but that she knows her more conventionally attractive and emotionally compliant sister is daddy's favorite. In fact, everybody does. Like Mozelle and her younger brother, Poe (Jurnee's brother, Jake Smollett), Eve has curly red hair, whereas Roz and Cisely have the straight, shiny hair associated with the moneyed classes. 

When Eve tells Cisely what she witnessed, Cisely refuses to believe her, and even tries to convince her that she misinterpreted the situation. While her deceitful father and willfully naïve sister continue to disappoint Eve, leaving her level-headed mother in the middle, she grows closer to Mozelle, who understands her frustration. She's loved and accepted by her family to be sure, but also considered cursed since she can't have children and has lost three husbands in a row–her rival calls her a black widow–and viewed with suspicion by some townsfolk, because she has the gift of second sight. 

Lemmons takes Mozelle's visions seriously–depicting them as B&W impressions of things otherwise un-seeable–not least because she's never wrong, even as she laments that she's "blind to my own life." Clients pay their money, describe the mysteries eating away at them, and walk away with answers, some of which were what they were hoping not to hear.

Left: Meagan Good and Smollett at the pivotal party

Mozelle's no fuss, no muss approach to clairvoyance stands in opposition to voodoo practitioner Elzora (a thoroughly deglamorized Diahann Carroll, having the time of her life), an older woman who runs a market stall, lives in a rickety shack by the swamp, and traffics in cat bones and other eccentricities. She and Mozelle view each other with suspicion, but her humor, pragmatism, and unflappability provides another port in the storm of Eve's young life. 

All of these conflicts build upon each other until things come to a head and someone else ends up dead. Evie and Cisely learn some hard truths about their family, and even about themselves, and they finally reunite at the end. 

At its best, melodrama is about eliciting an emotional response, and not about recreating reality. Even if you don't believe that second sight is real, Mozelle is undeniably perceptive. A self-described psychic counselor, she listens attentively, empathizes with those who seek her counsel, including her wayward brother, and genuinely wants to help. For all her immaturity–she's only 10 years old after all–Eve shares similar traits. As Mozelle tells her confused niece, "All I know is most people's lives are a great disappointment to them and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain. And if there is no divine explanation at the end of it all, well... that's sad."

Right: Samuel L. Jackson in snack mode

Granted, Jurnee Smollett's performance is rough around the edges--though her side-eye was already on point. Meagan Good wasn't much older, but she was already a more polished performer; it doesn't really matter, since Eve isn't a polished kid, though her excitability contrasts with the adult actors, who bring more shading to their performances, even as their characters can be just as immature in ways less forgivable in grown men and women. 

Eve's Bayou isn't autobiographical, though Lemmons drew from her own background for some of the details. Eve's powers of observation, her willingness to speak her mind–no matter the cost–and her critical thinking skills are valuable qualities for actors and directors alike, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that she was a lot like Eve in her younger years. 

By building on these thoughts and memories of a different time, she crafted a lovely film filled with beautifully-lit, elegantly-dressed people amidst atmospheric locations, and it's a magical one, too, in ways both literal and figurative, since Lemmons takes the supernatural as seriously as she takes the feelings of a child. Like Julie Dash's 1991 Daughters of the Dust, she offers a vision of Black life light years away from the male-directed movies of the time, and their emphasis on guns, drugs, masculine posturing, and decorative women, and that's no knock on John Singleton, but some of the lesser lights that emerged in the wake of 1991's Boyz N the Hood. 

Lemmons would go on to tell other Black stories, including 2013 Langston Hughes adaptation Black Nativity, in addition to biopics about notable figures, like radio host Petey Greene (a perfectly-cast Don Cheadle) in 2007's Talk to Me, abolitionist Harriet Tubman in 2019's Oscar-nominated Harriet with Wicked star Cynthia Erivo, and pop phenom Whitney Houston in 2022's I Wanna Dance with Somebody, but Eve's Bayou remains her most celebrated work to date. 

In 1997, Roger Ebert named it the best film of the year. In 2018, the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry, ensuring its preservation, and in 2022, The Criterion Collection brought out a 4K restoration--including both theatrical and director's cuts--and yet the film, which made back its cost nearly five times over, received zero Oscar nominations. Go figure.  

Though it definitely stands alone, in some ways it serves as an answer or sister film to Charles Burnett's 1990 To Sleep with Anger with a perceptive, take-no-prisoners Mary Alice and a dangerously seductive Danny Glover as a Southern gentleman just as mired in the bad old ways of the past as Samuel L. Jackson's Louis Batiste. They try to fool, manipulate, and control women, but their days are numbered. In Eve's Bayou, the future is truly female.

Eve's Bayou plays Northwest Film Forum Nov 22 - Dec 1. Images: the IMDb (Kasi Lemmons in Candyman and in Silence of the Lambs), YouTube (Jurnee Smollett), UPTOWN Magazine (Meagan Good and Smollett), Screen Rant (Samuel L. Jackson), and Rotten Tomatoes (Don Cheadle in Talk to Me).

Look at the Stars, Look How They Shine for You: Andrea Arnold's Bird with Nykiya Adams

BIRD 

(Andrea Arnold, UK, 2024, 119 minutes) 

Since 1998, when she released her directorial debut Milk, a short film, UK filmmaker Andrea Arnold has been exploring the lives of women; usually young, but not always, and often grappling with forces beyond their control. 

If they were comfortably middle class, they might go to the police or hire an attorney, but those options aren't easily available to them, and nor have they been brought up to believe that authority figures are their friends. 

More often than not, her protagonists have to figure things out on their own. In 2006's Glasgow-set Red Road, for instance, Kate Dickie's CCTV security operator Jackie has her own unique way of dealing with a sexual predator. 

Like newcomer Katie Jarvis (below), who went toe-to-toe with Michael Fassbinder in 2006's Fish Tank, newcomer Nykiya Adams holds her own with Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski in Bird, Arnold's fifth narrative feature. 

As with Sasha Lane's runaway Star in 2016's American Honey, 12-year-old Bailey is also biracial, though this is never a plot point or complication, just one of a few characteristics that sets her apart from the rest of her community.

Unlike the other women in her orbit, Bailey also avoids girly accouterments in favor of neutral-colored hoodies and track pants, though she does learn to love black eyeliner, which adds goth flare to her practical, utilitarian affect.

In a sign that she sees the world like a filmmaker, Bailey whiles away the time capturing iPhone video of butterflies, crows, seagulls, and horses—any living creature that captures her attention. (Robbie Ryan, Arnold's gifted cinematographer, shot the film, and presumably the video footage, too.)

Bailey is a child of divorce and her tattoo-covered father, Keoghan's boisterous Bug, is more overgrown kid than adult, especially when he zips around the aptly-named Gravesend in Kent on an e-scooter while shouting along to Fontaines D.C.'s "Too Real" (a possible nod to his Irish roots). 

She's Black, he's white, and they live in a graffiti-filled squat where his noisy friends come and go. Her mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), shares a home with Kite (James Nelson-Joyce), an abusive ogre who would frighten Bailey away altogether if she weren't so protective of her younger siblings. 

Early in the proceedings, Bug announces he's getting married to Kayleigh (Frankie Box), a single mother with a toddler, and asks Bailey to wear a tacky pink catsuit to the wedding. She's horrified.

Knowing that it will piss off her father, she encourages her stepbrother Hunter's girlfriend, Moon, to take an electric razor to her hair (Jason Buda plays Hunter). She ends up looking a little like punk singer Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex–hardly the worst thing in the world–though no one is too happy about it.

In the days before the wedding–even though Bug has only known Kayleigh for a few months–Bailey does warm up to her a bit, especially when she comes to the girl's rescue with supplies after she gets her first period.

One morning, after falling asleep in a field, Bailey meets Rogowski's Bird, an androgynous foreigner of unknown origin in an embroidered sweater and pleated skirt. She gives him directions, and he goes on his way, but then curiosity gets the best of her, and she follows him to a council estate. It turns out he's looking for long-lost relatives, so she resolves to help him. 

Bailey feels a kinship, though he's an odd duck. With no place to stay, he hangs out on the roof of the estate where Bailey can see him through her window. It's where he grew up, even if no one remembers his family.

Though Bird resembles a human being, his predilection for rooftop hangouts and preternatural stillness aligns him with birds, which aligns the film, probably unintentionally, with Alan Parker's Birdy, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, and possibly even Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud, all films centered on men who think they're birds, wish they were birds, or have an avian alter ego. 

To aid in Bird's quest, Bailey brings him to meet Peyton, who grew up in the same housing project and might remember his people. What they find is deeply disquieting–more to the sensitive man than to the unflappable kid. 

There's Dave, a little yapping dog in the front yard, three stoners crashed out in front of the TV set, three small children wandering around unsupervised, and Peyton and Skate sleeping the day away upstairs. 

When they awaken, Skate yells and yells for a cup of tea–Bailey's sister, Peena, brings him one–before threatening to kill Dave, calling Bird a freak, and telling Bailey her new haircut makes her look ugly. If you've seen Arnold's potent 2001 short Dog (below), this scenario may feel familiar.

A bad time is had by all, though Bailey and her new friend manage to extract some useful information from the groggy, drug-addled Peyton before Skate, who threatens to expose himself, inflicts any more damage. The two visitors won't be so lucky next time around.

Bailey then sets a plan in motion designed to help Bird, her mother, and her siblings--and remove Skate from their lives. The plan includes a trip to the beach with the kids and a visit to a hardened middle-aged man (played by Sleaford Mods' Jason Williamson), who may or may not be related to Bird. 

Then, Bailey finds that 14-year-old Moon is pregnant, the same age as Bug and Peyton when they had her. If her father swears he has no regrets, it's clear that her mother does, not least since she abandoned her first child.

Just when it seems as if things can't get much worse, Arnold shifts into magical realist mode. In light of her work to date, it might seem as if it comes from out of nowhere, except she dropped hints along the way, most significantly when a crow does Bailey a crucial favor involving Moon and Hunter who end up in their own real-life Romeo and Juliet scenario when her middle-class parents forbid Moon from seeing her working-class boyfriend. 

After establishing a vérité tone, with Robbie Ryan's tactile attention to earth, sea, and sky, the shift to another realm doesn't quite work. From the title of the film to the name of Rogowski's traveler to the numerous shots of seagulls and crows through various viewfinders, it's just too on the nose. To Arnold's credit, it–I won't say what "it" is–is mostly a practical effect with what looks like a CGI flourish at the end. 

After that, she returns to reality, except not. There are details that seem real, but based on everything the director has depicted, these things and events probably don't exist and aren't really happening. It's like Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, which ends with what feels like the culmination of a young man's fantasy. Arnold rights the ship with this move into trickier, more ambiguous, less showy territory. 

Though she follows in the footsteps of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh in her empathy for underprivileged Britons, she’s from a different generation and background, and her films often feature the kinds of pop songs her characters would enjoy, and that's more true than ever of Bird, which lends it a buoyancy not always found in the works of her predecessors, though if I wanted to make a direct connection, I would say that Loach's deceptively simple, deeply moving Kes might have served as a possible inspiration. 

But back to the soundtrack, which includes an original score from the reclusive William Bevan, aka Burial, alongside tracks from the Verve, Coldplay, and Sleaford Mods. Bailey jokes that her father is turning into a guy who likes "dad" music, and he doesn't reject the tag--he embraces it.

These aren't people who are trying to be cool; they lean into whatever makes them feel good, for better or for ill–for Peyton, alas, it's drugs, but it's fun to watch Bug shouting along to his favorite songs, touching to see him use others, like Blur's "The Universal," to convey sentiments he can't quite express, and amusing to watch his entire posse go ham on Sleaford Mods' "Jolly Fucker" like a reverse Terrence Davies where unity comes not from the poetic ballads of yore, but profane screeds about "elitist hippies" and "arrogant cunts." 

I run hot and cold when it comes to Barry Keoghan, who pushes too hard with some performances–the same ones other critics tend to praise, like his off-kilter outcasts in Yorgos Lanthimos's The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Emerald Fennell's Saltburn, and even Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, but he's in the zone here as an affectionate, immature, get-rich-quick-with-stupid-schemes guy who knows how to have fun, but not how to run a household. 

Franz Rogowski, on the other hand, does what he can with a construct that never feels quite real, though that may have been Arnold's intention.

Bird provides the support Bailey needs when she needs it, and almost plays like an older version of herself. 

The German actor, a true one-of-a-kind, has done his finest work for Christian Petzold and, especially, Sebastian Meise in gloriously queer 2002 drama The Great Freedom, which is sexier from top to bottom–pun intended–than Ira Sachs' widely praised and comparatively timid Passages.

That leaves Nykiya Adams: the best reason to see the film. Andrea Arnold has a knack for casting and eliciting mesmerizing performances from inexperienced actors, except they're not really inexperienced in terms of the lives they--and their characters--have led. Like Katie Jarvis and Sasha Gray before her, Adams breathes life into a young woman to whom she could probably relate, guided by a director who knows how to showcase her gifts and ensure that she's never overpowered by her more recognizable costars.

Adams never pushes too hard; she just becomes Bailey, lives her life, tries to lift her loved ones up in the process, and quietly breaks your heart. 

MUBI releases Bird exclusively in New York theaters on Nov 8 and nationwide on Nov 15. Seattle preview screening on Nov 14 at Regal Thornton Place. Bird video and stills courtesy of MUBI. All others: The Guardian (Nykiya Adams and Barry Keoghan / Holly Horner/PR), Aemi (Dog), and Le Rayon Vert Cinéma (David Bradley with his kestrel in Kes).

Lipstick Cherry All Over the Lens: Christina Hornisher’s Tinseltown Tale Hollywood 90028

HOLLYWOOD 90028 

(Christina Hornisher, 

USA, 1973, 

76 mins) 

"I always liked seeing people as they really are. A camera does that. It doesn't hide anything. It makes you see what's underneath."--Mark 

It's not unusual for a novelist to write about a novelist or a filmmaker to make a film about a filmmaker. It's less unusual, though not uncommon, for a filmmaker to make a film about a cinematographer, even less so when it comes to a photographer, like David Hemmings in Antonioni's Blow-Up.

Though cinematographers play a key role in the filmmaking process, they aren't seen as storytellers in the same way as directors, writers, or editors. Instead, they serve as our eyes–the audience's eyes. We see what they see, or more to the point, what they want us to see, regardless as to whether the director is calling the shots or whether they're given carte blanche to shoot as they see fit or with significant input. Sometimes the director and cinematographer are the same, but there are more films made by these double threats, like Steven Soderbergh/Peter Andrews, than about them.

Cinematographers are essential, and yet they're seen as comparatively introverted. I couldn't say whether that's true or not, simply because we don't hear from them as often, and many are more interested in doing the work than promoting themselves. As portrayed on screen, they often come across as highly skilled, on the one hand, and...kinda weird on the other. 

So it goes with Mark (musician Christopher Augustine from sunshine pop band Every Mother's Son), the protagonist of experimental filmmaker Christina Hornisher's sole narrative feature. Mark works as a cinematographer for adult film director Jobal (musical collaborator Dick Glass), who specializes in peep show loops. 

It's a living, but like his focus puller predecessor in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Mark would prefer to work in features. It doesn't matter whether it's for money, prestige, or the chance to work on projects of greater artistic merit. To quote Gang of Four, "To have ambition was my ambition." Mark doesn't have much–tellingly, his birdcage is empty–but at least he has that.

Hornisher's script, which does not fuck around, never spells it out, and nor does it need to. Plus, Mark isn't especially talkative, which fits his antisocial character, and also serves as a boon to non-professional actors, like Glass, with little dialogue-memorization experience, though Augustine had some. 

The director, writing under the pseudonym Paul Hansen, wastes no time in revealing Mark's true specialty: killing women. The obvious theory is that he's a misogynist, and he is, but his work in the adult film industry has activated impulses that were already there. Hornisher doesn't blame pornography per se--Mark also visits strip clubs and adult bookstores--but it's an inciting factor, and he doesn't appear to have been doing it for long.

In a pre-credit sequence, he walks down the Sunset Strip. It's dark and neon-lit, but hardly devoid of hustle and bustle. It's like the vision of Times Square in Allan Moyle's Times Square; a glimpse of a pre-gentrified tourist destination filled with mom and pops and grubby locals, rather than well-scrubbed tourists.

In a diner, Mark spots a hippie chick with long, frizzy hair and a beaded headband (the mysterious Dianna Huntress, who appears to be biracial, like her part-Puerto Rican director). They hit it off, and she takes him home, setting the mood by placing a record on the player and sharing a joint. 

Cinematographer John H. Pratt, in his sole feature, and camera operator and future professor John-Pierre Geuens (Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural), Hornisher's ex-husband and the father of their son, zeroes in on the Janis Joplin and Paul McCartney--his 1970 self-titled solo debut--records in her collection, but that's not what we hear on the soundtrack. 

Instead, it's USC grad and future superstar composer Basil Poledouris (Conan the Barbarian) in a jaunty mood. While I don't believe Hornisher had the budget for any major label hits–there aren't any on the soundtrack–she struck gold with Poledouris, who does fantastic work from start to finish. At first, I thought his theme for this sequence was too bright and poppy, in a mod 1960s way, but it becomes darker and wiggier as events take a turn. 

After the couple retires to her couch, the woman takes off her top and then her jeans. Mark removes nothing--though he will towards the end--while caressing her body in a gentle, admiring way, but then his hands graze her neck, and it's clear what's about to happen. Quick as a wink, his caresses turns to squeezes; she struggles, slumps, and dies. 

Geuens then zooms in on his light blue eyes and freezes the frame.

Along the way, we get a good look at the unnamed woman's naked body. Though the term "female gaze" indicates a film made by a woman, I reject it in this case. Hornisher's gaze is female only in the sense that she is, and if I didn't know the director was female, I wouldn't have guessed. Most of the nudity involves women, including the peep show loops which feature one to two female performers and one robed man in an eerie S&M scenario.

I'm not suggesting that any of this is sexist or exploitative. It was par for the course at the time, and avoiding or minimizing nudity wouldn't have been true to the milieu in which Mark operates. Hornisher's gaze is female more in terms of context. We see naked women, just as he does--and just as John-Pierre Geuens does--but that's all he sees, and form follows function, since Hornisher doesn't allow us to get to know any of them until the end. Prior to that, it's a character piece about a man who grew up with, works with, lusts for, and doesn't understand the first thing about women. 

There isn't a lot of violence in the film, and there are only a few victims–obviously, one is one too many, but Mark isn't a relentless Rodney Alcala-type killer–and it's never prettified. It's fast and blunt. He does his thing with crisp efficiency. No fuss, no muss, and zero regrets, because he's one sick bastard. 

It's also how Mark executes his day job. He shows up with his equipment in a big metal case, sets things up, enjoys a smoke before the performers arrive, and gets to work. In the first such sequence, the set is on one level, while Joban watches from the second. If Mark works dispassionately, the rotund Jobal pants, sweats, and licks his thin lips in a lascivious manner. 

Before the shoot begins, a performer walks down the steps from one level to the next, as Geuens films her from below, upskirt-style. It's Hornisher's not-exactly-female gaze in full effect, because this isn't necessarily what Mark sees in this instance; it's what Hornisher and/or her camera operator has chosen to show us. It's creepy, sexy, and funny all at the same time. 

Though Jobal attempts to make small talk with Mark between setups, the DP isn't having it. He neither likes nor respects his employer, not least because he's a stained-tee slob who won't loan him a camera to work on non-porn reels in his spare time (in reality, Augustine and Glass were friends). With only sex loops to show prospective employers, Mark's chances of landing a legit gig are slim to none, though he tries, with mounting desperation. 

When he isn't working, Mark walks around Los Angeles taking pictures, since he's also working on a portfolio. This entails a trip to the Los Angeles Zoo, which may or may not be symbolic, since he focuses on the lions and tigers, and he's definitely an apex predator himself--though they're locked behind bars and he isn't. 

He also fields calls from a domineering sister who predicts Mary Lynn Rajskub's Elizabeth in Punch-Drunk Love, the most amusingly bossy of seven similar sisters. In both cases, overbearing mothers and sisters are posited as reasons why both men, Mark and Adam Sandler's Barry in P.T. Anderson's 2002 picture, are so angry and discombobulated by women. 

Hornisher does something unusual in this sequence and layers Mark's sister's voice, so it sounds like she's speaking from several mouths at once. She's putting us in his head, and it's as disorienting as it is discomforting, though the entire brother-sister dynamic–in both films–feels somewhat misogynistic, if more intentionally so in the case of Hollywood 90028.

Mark and Barry may not be suffering from the angel/whore complex that afflicted Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, but their condition represents a branch from the same tree, since they believe one good woman can solve all their problems, except they aren't really looking for women; they're looking for miracle workers. Barry finds one in the person of Emily Watson's Lena, and the film ends on an idyllic note, whereas Mark falls for adult film performer Michele (Jeannette Pilger),who isn't an angel, a whore, or a miracle worker; just a woman feeling lonely while her musician boyfriend is out of town (in 1975, life imitated art when she married British bass player Pete Sears).

So, the two begin an affair, which involves a spaghetti-making sequence that shows Mark's rarely-seen fun side, a photography session in Griffith Park, and a drive through Bunker Hill during which Mark laments the real estate speculation degrading the Los Angeles in which he has resided for a third of his 29-year-old life (like Michele and Hornisher's military father, he relocated from the Midwest). 

While I found most everything he said relatable, the monologue also suggests that the times are changing, Mark isn't, and he's going to get left behind as second wave feminism renders Marlboro Men like him obsolete. 

While seeing Michele, who he treats with respect, Mark picks up a bubbly hitchhiker (future costume designer Gayle Davis), who recalls 1970s actress Joy Bang, for a day of frolicking on the beach in Venice and in a sailboat on Marina del Rey, but when she starts to speak in a multi-layered voice that recalls his sister, his mood darkens, and he does what he feels he must. 

Meanwhile, Mark decides Michele is The One. The feeling isn't mutual. If she doesn't feel she was leading him on, he's not the kind of guy who knows how to pick up on social cues–or even to listen to anything a woman is really saying–but I won't give away the ending. It's better to discover for yourself, assuming I haven't completely turned off any prospective viewers. All I'll say is that there's one ending and then another. One is inevitable, while the other is shocking, but more in execution than in narrative terms. 

After the penultimate sequence, Geuens, by way of helicopter, moves away unsteadily from the Hollywood sign, where the film came to its conclusion, much as in Hornisher fan Ti West's recent slasher homage MaXXXine. There is no score, only the sound of the wind. He keeps moving further away as the sign gets smaller and smaller and finally disappears. 

Like Gloria Katz, who made Messiah of Evil with her husband Willard Huyck, Christina Hornisher graduated from UCLA film school, steeped herself in the art house cinema of the 1960s, and released her first feature in 1973. Over the years, distributors would slap a variety of titles on both films in order to attract the grindhouse crowd to minimally successful returns. In the case of Hollywood 90028, that included Twisted Throats, The Hollywood Hillside Strangler, and Insanity.

Katz went on to work on seven more feature films, mostly as a writer, while Hornisher was out (she died two years before her film started to make the rounds again in 2005). The new Grindhouse Releasing three-disc set has plenty of information about her background, the cast, and the production, but less about her afterlife, though Marc Edward Hueck, who appears on one of the two commentary tracks, uncovered all he could for the essay "Christina Hornisher: Alone With That Obscure Image of Yourself," in which he compares her career to that of Barbara Loden and Kathleen Collins. 

Hollywood 90028 is a cynical, tough-minded film about sexism, misogyny, and the ways Hollywood grinds up strivers, like Mark and Michele, and spits them out. 

If the acting isn't necessarily award-worthy, the performances are consistently compelling, it looks great, and Miklós Rózsa protege Basil Poledouris elevates every scene, from folk-oriented melodies with flute and strings to charming passages with woodwinds and chimes to more aggressive moments with standup bass and violin scrapings–phenomenal stuff that always enhances and never overwhelms or detracts from the story.

Hornisher's film follows in the wake of chillers like Paul Vecchiali's The Strangler, William Grefé's Impulse, and the audience-implicating Peeping Tom, which exerted as much of an influence as Blow-Up, while inspiring or at least predicting the Tinseltown visions to come from a generation of contemporary filmmakers who have discovered and embraced her once-lost film, including West, Anna Biller, Nicolas Winding Refn, The First Omen's Arkasha Stevenson, and Palme d'Or-winning Sean Baker of Anora fame.

I wouldn't say it's a happy time at the movies, but it's a memorable one, and I regret that it's the only one we ever got from this visionary filmmaker.

Grindhouse Releasing's 4K restoration of Hollywood 90028 ships on Nov 26 (read about the restoration here). Extra features include Christina Hornisher's short films, Dick Glass in The Erotic Director, a CD with Basil Poledouris's score, two commentary tracks, and a 28-page booklet with photos and essays. Images from Mondo Digital (Jeannette Pilger as Michele in a photo taken by Mark), the IMDb (Christopher Augustine as Mark), Rock! Shock! Pop! (Augustine with Dick Glass), FilmScene (Mark closeup), Hollywood Theatre (Mark and performer), Grindhouse Releasing (Blu-ray art and Pilger in a Mark photo), and Sitges Film Festival (the filmmaker).  

Demon Pond: An Aquatic, Electrifying, Gender-Bending Folk Horror Fantasy from 1970s Japan

DEMON POND / Yasha Ga-Ike / 夜叉ヶ池

(Masahiro Shinoda, Japan, 1979, 124 minutes) 

Demon Pond is the kind of film that could get by strictly on aesthetic terms. 

 

It's such a feast for the eyes and ears, it almost wouldn't matter if there wasn't much story or if the story didn't make much sense. 

On the contrary, it makes perfect sense, not least since Pale Flower director Masahiro Shinoda treats the text like a poem. There are certain concepts and phrases that are repeated so often they become incantations of a kind, and not in an irritating way, but in a rhythmic, hypnotic way, specifically "demon pond," "dragon god," and the necessity of ringing a bell to keep the god complacent and the pond under control. 

I wouldn't have expected an adaptation of a 1913 Kabuki play to prove so coherent—particularly to those, like myself, who don't know much about Japanese folklore or Kabuki theater--let alone to have much in common with an American neo-noir from 1974 or a British sci-fi film from 1976, but the 1970s, throughout the industrialized world, were marked by high unemployment, rising food and energy costs, and battles over natural resources, particularly oil and steel. It's not completely surprising that cinema across the globe would reflect these concerns, however obliquely. 

Granted, when Izumi Kyōka wrote his original play, the economy was booming, though Japan was also meddling in the affairs of other Asian nations, and he had problems of his own involving poor health and a leaky rental home. Tsutomu Tamura and Haruhiko Mimura adapted his play for the 1979 film, while Keishi Nagatsuka adapted it for a live version filmed by Takashi Miike for a 2005 video release.

Demon Pond revolves around a community's compulsion to control their region's water source by any means necessary, directly linking it with Roman Polanski's Chinatown, in which John Huston's amoral business tycoon will do literally anything to control the flow of water into Los Angeles, and Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of the 1963 Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie's parched alien will travel as many lightyears as possible to slake his thirst. 

In a larger sense, it's a timeless concern since the human body is made up of 50-60% water. When our supply of the stuff evaporates, crops die, livestock die, and we die. That's the state in which Demon Pond begins. 

Our entry into this prewar world is bespectacled teacher and botanist Gakuen (Kurosawa favorite Tsutomu Yamazaki), who travels by train and by foot to Shikami, a remote, mountain village in the former Echizen Province to get a look at its storied Demon Pond. It's a legitimate impetus for his journey, except he also intends to track down Akira (matinee-idol handsome Gô Katô), a colleague who went missing three years before, possibly intentionally, and to convince him to return to modern society.

 

Once Gakuen arrives, it's as if he's entered a reverse Shangri-La, the mythical paradise from James Hilton's 1933 novel, which would inspire major motion pictures both very good and very bad. It's at this point that a clash begins between the modern and the rational and the ancient and the superstitious. 

I don't mean to burden this thoroughly Eastern tale with too many Western references, but in a sense, Gakuen is a sort of Captain Bligh to Akira's Fletcher Christian--Akira, in other words, has gone native--though they're both basically good guys with different belief systems, and they'll join forces when the village turns against them, but more on that later.

Gakuen has to find his friend first, which doesn't happen right away, and Shinoda hasn't even revealed his ulterior motive yet. The teacher explores the village, which appears to be abandoned, before he notices any people, none of whom are especially welcoming; the ongoing drought has put everyone in a foul mood. Gakuen is also thirsty after his long journey, and after wandering through a mist-enshrouded forest, he happens upon a bucolic spring—not the Demon Pond—in a clearing overlooking the village. 

 

There's a cozy cottage on one side and a belfry on the other, but he's mostly struck by the slim back of a woman in a pastel kimono and traditional nihongami hairstyle, leaning over the water, possibly gazing at her reflection.

 

Without turning around, she senses his presence and begins to speak. She has a sweet, halting voice, but there's something otherworldly about it; she doesn't sound male, but she doesn't sound completely female either. 

 

When she finally turns to face Gakuen, he gives a start, either due to her alabaster beauty or to the intensity of her gaze, possibly both. Like Akira before him, he's instantly enchanted by Yuri (Kabuki legend Tamasaburô Bandô), a dreamy, ethereal figure the villagers view with some suspicion. 

The moment I saw her face, it occurred to me that Bandô might be a man. I wasn't sure, and I watched the entire film without making any attempt to confirm my suspicion. Gender aside, it's paramount that the character works, and she does, marvelously. In Kabuki theater, much as in Elizabethan times, female parts are played by men. Yamazaki and Katô were veteran movie and television actors who knew how to perform for the camera, and they're both very good, whereas Bandô was a celebrated onnagata making his screen debut, and he definitely holds his own. 

 

In case you're wondering how the performance was received in the States, Janet Maslin, for one, was impressed. As she wrote in 1982, upon the film's New York premiere, "Mr. Bando, known simply as Tamasaburo in Japan, is a female impersonator of astonishing subtlety. As Yuri, the village woman, he is delicate and demure, speaking in a soft, feminine voice that is perhaps the most convincing part of his impersonation," adding that "he painstakingly imitates the manner of a woman and does it so unobtrusively that the audience may have to remind itself that this is no actress."

If Yuri didn't look completely female to me, this plays to the film's strengths, because the character's androgynous affect adds to her mystique. Is she human...or something else? Is she good...or bad? 

 

Like Margo (below) in Frank Capra's 1937 version of Lost Horizon, will she age rapidly and die instantly if she leaves Shikami? After all, Shinoda suggests she's rooted to the land in a way the other villagers aren't. 

 

At first, Gakuen seeks simply to rest and replenish before continuing on to the Demon Pond, but he's intrigued by Yuri, who is opaque in her responses, revealing almost nothing about herself. 

 

She means to be polite and hospitable, but it's clear that she would also like him to leave. It was unclear to me at this juncture whether Gakuen represented a threat to her livelihood or whether she represented a threat to his, but once he realizes he's being watched, the teacher uses delaying tactics to uncover what she's hiding, which leads him to her husband, a white-haired gentleman who rings the bell three times a day to keep the village from flooding. 

In short order, he finds that it's his old friend in disguise. Akira removes the wig, and tells his story. Unlike most plays, Shinoda uses brief, effective flashbacks throughout the film to fill in the characters' backstories; it's one of the ways he keeps things cinematic--the stunning cinematography from Noritaka Sakamoto and Pale Flower's Masao Kosugi is another. 

Like Gakuen, Akira entered the village as an explorer. En route to the Demon Pond, he met Yatabei (Jun Hamamura), who had been ringing the bell three times a day for 50 years. The bell keeper takes a shine to Akira, tasks him to carry on the tradition, and then dies. Akira feels obligated to honor his commitment, and when he meets and falls in love with Yuri, that's the end of that. He sets down roots, and despite their status as outcasts, puts aside all thoughts of returning to his humdrum life. 

 

The more the men reminisce, the more antsy Yuri becomes. She knows what Gakuen is up to, and doesn't want to lose the love of her life, not least since he's also her protector. When Akira agrees to accompany Gakuen to the Demon Pond, she fears he won't return. Fortunately, he does--but not quickly enough.

Lest that scare you away, rest assured that the villagers don't kill Yuri, but they do put her life in jeopardy. After gathering together to determine what to do about the drought, a fat-cat politician convinces his unworldly, uneducated constituents that a flood is the only solution, but it doesn't occur to them to question exactly what that entails. A flood isn't simply a heavy rain, but they've never experienced one before, and nor are they convinced that daily bell-ringing has kept one at bay--though they're willing to take the risk. Further, if the land surrounding the village isn't without water; they haven't found or sought a way to harness it, relying instead on rainwater wells rather than a modern plumbing system. 

Knowing their plan might fail, they decide to up the ante with a sacrifice. Naturally, only the most beautiful virgin will do. At first they settle on the daughter of Yoju (Hatsuo Yamaya), who Shinoda previously depicted poaching a fish from Yuri's property, but he and his wife insist that the village's young men have been having their way with her. This elicits snickers, not at the idea of a sexually-active young woman, but because they know just how aggressive their sons can be, and what they describe sounds more like rape than consensual sex. Not exactly a charming lot. 

 

Yoju then suggests the beautiful Yuri, which gives everyone pause. She may be married, but because they doubt her humanity, they agree that she's the perfect choice. It isn't stated explicitly, but they seem to think that her relationship with Akira is more spiritual than physical, even as they know she didn't emerge from the ether. Like everyone else, Yuri once had a mother and a father, except both had died before the story begins, and aside from the fact that she doesn't talk, dress, or move like the other village women who eschew her refined ways, she and her husband don't have any children in an era in which that would've been considered unusual, if not suspect. 

More unusually, Yuri spends her time alone talking to a porcelain doll she cradles like an infant. We can interpret all of this as we wish, and the villagers don't remark on any of it, but Shinoda prioritizes showing over telling, and I never felt he was winking at the audience about Bandô's gender. The screenplay doesn't suggest that Yuri could be a man or even a true androgyne, and nor does the actor play her that way; she's a woman, full stop, though just when it seems as if her relationship with Akira exists on a higher or alternate plane, the two share a long, passionate kiss. 

At first I thought the actors might be miming, like Will Smith in Fred Schepisi's John Guare adaptation Six Degrees of Separation--who agreed to play a gay character on screen, but refused to kiss costar Anthony Michael Hall--but as the camera moves from the back to the side and then right up next to the couple, it becomes clear that they're really kissing. 

 

Since Bandô was a Kabuki superstar, I doubt it harmed his reputation, but it may have represented a risk for Katô, though I don't know if it caused any controversy. At least Demon Pond saw release in 1979 rather than, say, 1959. Japanese cinema was hardly tame in the 1970s what with the bold visions of Shinoda's New Wave peers Shōhei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima, even if societal norms weren't progressing quite as rapidly. 

Before the villagers arrive at Yuri's cottage with their torches, much like the witch-hunters of 17th-century Salem, Shinoda introduces the animistic  creatures of the Demon Pond in an elaborate sequence that plays like a cross between Powell and Pressburger's take on Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann and "The Devil in the Dark" episode of Star Trek. 

 

In other words, it splits the difference between the fantastical and the stage-bound, and the glorious score from composer Isao Tomita, a master of Moog and Mellotron, even evokes Jerry Goldsmith's haunting Trek theme when he adds a ghostly choir. At other times, Tomita specifically references Modest Mussorgsky and especially Claude Debussy, much as he had done on his landmark 1974 album, Snowflakes Are Dancing.

 

At first, the artifice disappointed me after all those realistic locations, but I warmed up to it. If Shinoda had constructed the entire film in this lysergic manner, Demon Pond might have developed a cult following like Nobuhiko Obayashi's immortal House from two years before. He's gathered every kind of creature, from anthropomorphic crabs and catfish, slathered them in greasepaint and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters-style costumes and surrounded them with gnarled coral foliage, and yet the ground is clearly a wooden stage coated with black semi-gloss.

The real star of the underwater show, however, is Yuki, the dragon princess--played by Tamasaburô Bandô in glamorous garb, including a glittering gold crown. By ringing the bell three times a day, Akira has been keeping his wife and fellow villagers safe, but unbeknownst to him, he has also been keeping the princess imprisoned. Yuki has a love of her own, but she can't fly away to be with him unless Akira stops ringing the bell. Taken literally, this arrangement confirms Yuri's earthliness, while also suggesting a psychic connection between the two women, since they look alike, their names are similar, and of course, they're played by the same actor. 

I won't say what happens to Gakuen, Akira, or Yuri, only that the ringing stops, unleashing the kind of tsunami that could stop Godzilla in his tracks. This shouldn't come as a spoiler, since the film has been leading up to it for almost two hours, hence the repeated warnings about the bell's magical properties. The bigger question is how it affects everyone, both above and below the water, and whether or not Shinoda was able to pull it off. 

 

Considering that the new Criterion Collection release comes with an entire featurette about Nobuo Yajima's effects work with miniature sets and optical printing, it's fair to say that he does. Though computer-generated imagery can provide more photo-realistic phenomena, practical or analog effects provide a tactical quality that computers can't quite duplicate. What started as a folk horror fantasy with a psychological thriller vibe shifts into full-on action-adventure-meets-disaster movie mode once all watery hell breaks loose. 

While Demon Pond was in production in Japan, an American actress named Dena Dietrich was starring in a nine-year series of television commercials for Chiffon margarine that are imprinted on the psyche of every viewer glued to the tube in the 1970s, because although we may not have been paying much attention to the product she was shilling--I wasn't, at any rate--her catch phrase became an instant and enduring classic: "It's not nice," she cautioned mock-ominously, "to fool Mother Nature." 

In a manner of speaking, that's exactly what the villagers do. Decades, possibly even hundreds of years before, representatives of the real and spiritual realms had formed a covenant. By messing with a protocol designed to keep things in alignment, they set a demon loose. 

Demon Pond, which is filled with water imagery, uses the substance to symbolize life and death. As long as we have it, we live, but if we lose it, we die, except the film's true subject is love. We can literally live without it, but is that really living? In Masahiro Shinoda's lush, romantic, bigger-than-life take on Izumi Kyōka's text, the answer is a resounding No.

 

Demon Pond, in a 4K restoration overseen by Shinoda and Tamasaburô Bandô, is out now on The Criterion Collection. 

 

Extra features include an enlightening interview with scholar Dudley Andrew on Shinoda's career and an essay on the film from critic Michael Atkinson. 

 

Images from Janus Films (Bandô as Yuki and as Yuri with Gô Katô), the IMDb (Tsutomu Yamazaki and Mexican-American actress Margo Albert), Japononfilm (Yuri with doll), Reactor (William Shatner in "The Devil in the Dark"), and Festival de Cannes (Yuki and the creatures of the pond).

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s 1973 Messiah of Evil: Drive-In Fare with Artistic Flare

MESSIAH OF EVIL 

(Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, USA, 1973, 90 minutes) 

"My father always said that you're about to wake up when you dream that you're dreaming."–Marianna Hill's Arletty 

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's freaky melodrama Messiah of Evil is of its place and yet placeless. The Los Angeles couple made the film in 1971, and set it along the Southern California coast--it was filmed in Malibu, Venice, and Echo Park--except it feels more like the Euro-cult films coming from France, Belgium, and Italy than other American horror films of the '70s.

Huyck and Katz, associates of George Lucas–with whom Huyck went to USC–even named leading lady Marianna Hill "Arletty," a reference to the French star of Marcel Carné’s epic wartime picture Children of Paradise. Plus, it's a name you never hear in the United States–or at least I never have. 

The film opens in grindhouse mode with a bleeding man (director Walter Hill!), scared out of his wits, running down a suburban street late at night. He collapses at a well-appointed home where he sees a preteen at the door who seems sympathetic to his plight. She watches as he falls to the ground and walks toward him. He looks at her expectantly as she leans down, presumably to help him back up on his feet. Instead, she slashes his throat. And the credits commence. We'll never see either character again. 

Huyck and Katz then shift to the hallway of a mental institute, an iconic shot with a blurry, shimmering figure in the distance, who becomes recognizable as an attractive woman as she moves down the hall and toward the light (I've seen versions of this eerie sequence in other horror films since). Her voice-over, which will continue throughout the film, begins at this juncture as she explains that "they did something" to her.

The directors then flash back to whatever the hell brought her to this place. She recounts the story, but it isn't clear who she's talking to, if anyone, and whether or not it really happened; the clues, however, indicate that it did. The man in the prologue, for instance, isn't part of her remembrance.

Arletty then describes the series of strange letters she had been receiving from her artist father, Joseph (Electra Glide in Blue's Royal Dano), who lives in Point Dune, where she grew up (I don't recall mention of a mother). With each letter, he grows more paranoid, so she hits the road to check in on him. Instead of having her read the letters, the directors hand this portion of the voiceover to Dano. It's one of the reasons the film feels like a mid-century melodrama–strip the horror elements away, and it's an extended conversation between a concerned daughter and an imperiled father.

Our heroine hasn't even entered Point Dune before things get weird. The gas station attendant (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's Charles Dierkop), for instance, is more interested in playing with his rifle than assisting customers, but when Arletty arrives, followed by a Black albino in a red pickup (Bennie Robinson, who made one film and became immortal), the attendant helps her first and then him. When the man steps away, the attendant peeks under the tarp in the back to find three red-eyed, white-faced stiffs. After that, he tries to act normally while sending Arletty on her way, but the attendant and another ghoulish guest will soon have a tussle--like Arletty, the driver is also headed to Port Dune. 

Once she arrives at Joseph's house, she finds it locked, so Arletty breaks in, and makes herself at home. Her father is nowhere to be seen, but his floor-to-ceiling paintings cover every wall of the main room, a studio with a bed on a platform suspended from the ceiling. Jack Fisk, soon to become Terrence Malick's trusty production designer, did the honors, while Joan Mocine, Katz's UCLA roommate, provided the paintings, which depict empty malls and men in suits, both recalling and predicting Romero's Night and Dawn zombie films, except Huyck told Mike White of The Projection Booth that he was more inspired by Universal horror (this interview is included with the 2023 Radiance Blu-ray). He and Katz were also fans of Antonioni. 

Nonetheless, after they ran out of money and moved on to American Graffiti, for which they wrote the screenplay, a Chicago distributor would release it under the title Return of the Living Dead to capitalize on the similarities. Romero's production company took legal action, and the title went away. 

At her father’s beach house, a Malibu location that appeared in Michael Curtiz's mother-daughter melodrama Mildred Pierce, Arletty finds a diary with more insane ramblings, but no other clues, so she sets out to meet with a few people who might know where her father has gone. None of them do, but they're all quite entertaining–this is just that kind of film–including a shifty gallery worker (Morgan Fisher), a wild-eyed wino (Elisha Cook, Jr.), and Thom, a folklorist and dandy (cabaret performer Michael Greer from Fortune and Men's Eyes) and his lady loves, Laura, a stylish model (The Big Bird Cage's Anitra Ford) and Toni, a sporty teenager (Maidstone's Joy Bang in the final film of her five-year career). 

If Arletty was more pragmatic, she might meet with a cop, a detective, or even a private eye, except she doesn't, though they'll come calling when the body of a middle-aged man washes up on the shore. Before she even has the chance to make her next move, she wakes up one night to the sounds of an intruder. Instead of Joseph, she finds Thom, Laura, and Toni. At first, it seems as if they might mean to do her harm, but they're just free-lovin' freeloaders looking for a place to crash. They're also looking for adventure. 

One night, Laura heads into town on her own. When the albino trucker offers her a ride, she looks at him and the men in the cargo bed, all staring up at the moon. She shrugs. "Sure," she says, and gets in. The albino proceeds to ask if she likes Wagner (pronounced with a strong "w" and a short "a"), shows her a "beach rat"--a small dark rodent–pops it in his mouth, crunches, and swallows. Just when you're expecting him to chomp on her next, she asks if she can get out. The rat-eater complies and drives away. 

Crisis averted, except it's pitch dark, and she's surrounded by empty houses. 

Laura then spots a man who appears to be beckoning her, so she follows him to a well-lit, all-night supermarket. It appears to be devoid of people, so she walks around, and catches a few quick glimpses of other customers. Finally, she finds a large group (played by former NASA employees) all gathered around the meat section, gobbling up the stuff–until they see her, and give chase. Are they vampires, zombies, or something else? Huyck and Katz don't say, though a flashback, featuring Cisco Pike director Bill Norton, attempts to explain their origins. The creatures have pasty skin and red-rimmed eyes, but it's never clear what they are, other than very bad news for any human being who crosses their path. 

After Laura goes missing, Thom and Toni have their own encounters with the creatures. The other big set piece takes place in a Venice movie theater that Toni appears to have all to herself. The cashier (played by Katz) even turns off the marquee lights advertising 1950s noir Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye after Toni enters, indicating that she won't be selling any more tickets. 

Nonetheless, the pasty people enter the theater one by one, while Toni sits near the front obliviously munching popcorn–she retrieved it from the concession stand herself, since there was no cashier around. I won't say what happens next other than that Demons' Lamberto Bava and Interview with the Vampire's Neil Jordan--possibly even Anguish's Bigas Luna--would appear to have seen this masterful Hitchcockian sequence. 

Toward the end, Arletty does, in a manner of speaking, find out what happened to her father. After that, she does all she can to escape Port Dune, since her companions have been dropping like flies and the town's zombie population seems intent on making her their next meal. 

The film ends with Arletty in the mental institute. Either she made the whole story up, or the ordeal drove her mad. It's also suggested that she inherited her father's propensity for mental illness as much as his artistic nature. 

Though Messiah of Evil was made in 1971, it wouldn't open theatrically until 1974 due to a variety of production and distribution issues. Because Huyck and Katz ran out of money, they weren't even able to film the entire screenplay. Ironically, the duo had only made a horror film because they couldn't get funding for anything else, and they would never work in the genre again, though they would find their place in Hollywood as Oscar-nominated screenwriters and script doctors. Huyck's directorial career, alas, would end with his misbegotten 1986 take on Marvel's Howard the Duck--an accidental horror film of a kind--which I saw upon its original release. If I can imagine watching and enjoying Messiah of Evil a fourth time or more, one go-round with the weird and creepy Howard was more than enough. 

When critics finally got a look at Huyck and Katz's first film, they weren't all that thrilled either, with the exception of Robin Wood, who declared it one of the best of the decade. The qualities that made it unique were initially seen as flaws. 

As Huyck would later declare, "We made an art film," but since it was marketed as drive-in fare, it's unlikely viewers were expecting all the literary, art, and "pretentious film school references," as horror historian Kim Newman puts it in his rapid-fire commentary track with author and musician Stephen Thrower. The narrative ambiguity must have also proved frustrating, though that's among its strengths, and why it rewards multiple viewings along with the eye-popping set pieces and game performances.

Messiah of Evil would eventually find its audience, leading to last year's deluxe Blu-ray edition, which also features a video essay from editor and podcaster Kat Ellinger, a documentary featuring film critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Maitland McDonagh, a printed essay on the film's fine art inspirations from Bill Ackerman of the Supporting Characters podcast, and the 2019 audio interview with Huyck (Katz passed away in 2018). 

Over the years, the film has been compared to John Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire, both from 1971, but the differences are just as striking as the similarities. Rothman's film, for instance, now streaming on the Criterion Channel, takes place in the desert and features an acoustic score, whereas Messiah of Evil takes place by the beach and features an electronic score (Jack Fisk would also provide production design for Rothman's Terminal City). Both conjure up the beauty and terror of bad dreams that just don't want to end. Though some of the modish Messiah outfits are suggestive in the usual 1970s way, Huyck and Katz's film is devoid of nudity, whereas Rothman's film has plenty.

If today's critics see the film as a commentary on free love, consumerism, and/or the anomie of modern life, Huyck and Katz were mostly just trying to launch their career by working in a genre for which they didn't feel any special affinity, though they filled it with references to art they found meaningful--from Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft to Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha--so I wouldn't call it impersonal, and nor am I suggesting that those readings are invalid; I'm just not convinced they were trying to make any sociopolitical statements, with the exception of one: cults are bad. The Manson murders, after all, had taken place two years before.  

That said, I've long had a preference for horror films made by non-horror directors, like industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey's haunting Carnival of Souls, to which Messiah of Evil has also been compared. They're not all good, of course, but the way these filmmakers tend to ignore, flout, or subvert the well-worn rules of horror goes to show how malleable, expansive, and adventurous the genre can be, so here's to Willard Huyk and Gloria Katz for giving their first film everything they had. It shows, it thrills--and it endures.

 "They're waiting for you! And they'll take you one by one and no one will hear you scream. No one will hear you SCREEEAAAM!!!"--Arletty

The 4K restoration of Messiah of Evil is out now on home video through Radiance Films. Images from Elements of Madness (Blu-ray cover art), DVD Beaver (Walter Hill), the IMDb (Charles Dierkop and Joy Bang), Vague Visages (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Anitra Ford), and Final Girl (Marianna Hill)