(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.
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)
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