What’s On Shudder? review: Messiah of Evil, 1973, by Gloria Katz and Willard Hyuck
Want it in one sentence? This is a film to watch for the sets and set-pieces.
If you’ve heard of Messiah of Evil the phrase ‘forgotten cult classic’ will probably have gone with it somewhere. And yes, that is definitely the way to view it – both the ‘cult’ aspect and the ‘classic’. It’s a rather beautiful mess, a film that almost works in ways that achieve more than the ways less ambitious movies succeed. It’s best watched in the spirit of enjoying what’s wonderful and not worrying too much about the rest.
Never ignore the psychiatric patient.
So: story. This is a tale told all in flashback, the voice-over narrative of a woman trapped in a psychiatric hospital because what she has to say is obviously crazy. Yep, it’s one of those movies – and if you let yourself sink into that rather dreamlike state of listening to someone’s frantic paranoia, it’ll skate you over the rough patches pretty nicely.
Our heroine is Arletty (Marianna Hill), a nice young woman whose artist father used to go to the little beach town of Point Dune to paint during the summers. Since her mother died he moved there permanently – but now his letters have dried up. The last thing he wrote to her was that she should never come looking for him.
So Arletty, showing the proper spirit, does what any horror movie protagonist would do: she hops straight in her car and goes looking for him. She stops at a gas station just outside Point Dune where the attendant tries to discourage her from going any further. Bad things happen to him when she’s not looking. Really bad.
Point Dune seems empty and unfriendly when she gets there. Her father had one heck of a pad, huge windows, swinging bed and all – but he’s painted murals all over the walls. Good murals. Unsettling murals. Murals of person after person. All of them watching you.
And when you see the townsfolk, you can see where he got his inspiration.
Something is happening in Point Dune.
There’s a blood moon. There’s a dark history. There’s more meat-eating than there should be. Arletty just wants to find her father, and all she has are his diaries in which he writes of the madness and darkness consuming him. Something happened a hundred years ago, and now, in ‘a world tired and disillusioned’, it is ready to happen again.
By way of a male lead, she’s joined by one of those figures that reminds you this movie was made in 1974: Thom (Michael Greer), the paranormal researcher who’s drifted into town like a rock star with his entourage of pretty girls because apparently offbeat academia was glamorous back then. He wheedles his way into staying with Arletty because the town hotels won’t rent to a man with two girlfriends and she’s too depressed to put up much resistance, or maybe too lonely, because this is the emptiest town in the world, even when there are people in it. Or what seems to be people.
These beautiful young folks are not going to come well out of this.
Now, here’s something worth knowing. According to the documentary Remembering Messiah of Evil, the film was so plagued by budget problems that it isn’t properly finished.
Even its co-director Hyuck says the movie ‘doesn’t make total sense.’
The first horror scene, for instance, was supposed to end in more than a scream from a distance – but they couldn’t get the footage. There are moments like this that end abruptly because the film-makers didn’t have any choice and had to make do. Hyuck and Katz’s ambitions were bigger than their budget, and that’s something to respect; you just have to let your imagination work with them a little.
But here’s the real stinger: they weren’t able to shoot the last scene that supposedly explains the supernatural goings-on! I don’t think I can spoil a film with a missing last scene to talk about it here – consider yourself warned if you like – but from what we can gather, the ‘Messiah of Evil’ the whole film has been waiting for, some kind of folk-demon American preacher contaminated by cannibalism amidst the Donner Party, is supposed to come out of the sea and gather to him those who have been waiting. Arletty tells us in voice-over that it happened. We just don’t see it.
In Messiah Of Evil, the Messiah turns up off-screen because they couldn’t afford to introduce him.
There are echoes of various American nightmares in the town of Point Dune – Romero zombies and Lovecraftian locals cast the longest shadows – but the biggest ghoul on screen is the film itself: it’s mostly there but there are some crucial pieces missing. If you watch it for a straightforward plot then you’ll run up against some things it can’t be blamed for: it is strange and uneven and only some of that is on purpose.
But what is there is really worth a watch.
Don’t get me wrong: Messiah of Evil isn’t perfect. It has all the hallmarks of a talented team’s early work. It has moments of brilliance tempered with uneven flow. It has a well-written script that needed harsher editing so we don’t end up with moments like the one where Arletty sits in her father’s chair while the voice-over tells you, ‘I sat in my father’s chair.’ It has some messy fringes.
It is also possibly the most 70s film I’ve ever seen, and that’s both a good and a bad thing.
It’s mystic and stylish and willing to take risks. And it has, well, inequalities – in the framing as well as the world.
I don’t much care for carping, but there are some things to say, so let’s get the negatives out of the way.
Messiah of Evil has some aspects that are quite confusing until you think about how times have changed, and some of those times needed changing. Why does anyone put up with the philandering Thom, for instance? The guy’s a snappy dresser, but he’s enormously selfish and he talks to both his girlfriends with barely-veiled contempt, and neither of them seems to like him very much either. He’s the kind of guy who puts the moves on Arletty by pressuring her into helping undo his waistcoat and then saying ‘You don’t just unzip a man and say goodnight.’ (He doesn’t actually force her when it’s clear she’s too tired to be into it, but that’s about the best you can say for his notions of consent.) It watches like we’re supposed to find him charming, but one generation’s Lothario is another generation’s sleazebag. And his girlfriends are pretty fed up with him. What is holding these people together?
Well, it’s an era where a lot of women didn’t have jobs and it’s clear that both are dependent on him financially; when one of them, Laura (Anitra Ford), finally decides she’s had enough, her best plan is to make it to the city and hope an ex will take her in. And it helped a lot when I read up a bit for this review and realised that the right word for this situation wasn’t ‘throuple’ but ‘groupies’. This is a film by a husband and wife team, Willard Hyuck and Gloria Katz, so he’s not as James Bond as he might be and his bimbos are still people, but there’s no getting around it: you’ll have to try and like a guy that modern tastes would probably consider entitled to a good kick in the pants. The phrase ‘period piece’ is your friend here.
It helps that Thom is played by Michael Greer, one of Hollywood’s first openly gay actors, notorious for his role in the controversial 1969 comedy The Gay Deceivers – he’s the guy shrieking the iconic line, ‘I may not know my flowers, but I know a bitch when I see one!’
That’s partly just interesting film history – Messiah of Evil was his last major role – but it also probably helps him temper the archetype he’s playing: his relationship with Arletty doesn’t read so much as lustful as of a genuine, if tentative, meeting of minds.
Thom’s lines age badly, but Greer’s performance is less stereotypical and menacing than it might have been and manages to tread the line pretty well, so let’s give some credit to a brave man whose career would probably have risen higher if he hadn’t been out. Greer does a good job with a difficult part here.
The film is also about as groovy as you’d expect when it comes to ableism, and unlike with Gloria Katz for the female characters, there wasn’t someone in a power position there to leaven the lumps. The first scary evildoer we encounter is played by Bennie Robinson, a black actor with albinism who was apparently on unemployment at the time of shooting, and had to work on a location whose owner was so racist that Robinson wasn’t allowed to eat there. So let’s be clear that Robinson isn’t at fault: he was working under rough circumstances and he does what he can with the material. It’s just that the material he had was ‘funny-looking crazy guy’, that tired old trifecta of physically atypical, intellectually disabled and morally deranged that’s mercifully moving to the fringes of horror nowadays. (At least unless Ari Aster succeeds in dragging it back to respectability, perish the thought, but that’s a philippic for another day.)
So there are things in this movie that may leave a bad taste, no pun intended. But what’s there and what works is really quite special.
Hyuck and Katz weren’t horrorheads.
They were a couple not long out of film school who took a break from working on the script of American Graffiti to sketch out a low-budget horror movie. They weren’t even all that immersed in contemporary horror. Hyuck mentions a fondness for the old Universal monster movies and the works of H.P. Lovecraft – and yeah, the latter definitely shows – but what they really enthuse about is the arthouse movies of Michaelangelo Antonioni. Literary allusions and cinematic landscapes: that’s what they were all about.
And it’s up there on the screen. The first murder scene, set in a gas station, had to be filmed without the actual murder because of shooting difficulties – but the gas station shining out in a wilderness of nowhere is one of the most liminal places I’ve ever seen on screen. Arletty’s artist father painted murals all over his house, and they’re really good. Everything that’s visual and sound design, everything that makes up the texture, is mesmerising. This is budget pulp of the best kind: the kind made by people who really love the good stuff and make a film that’s just better than it needs to be.
For instance: there’s a scene (mild spoilers) where Laura, the more intelligent of Thom’s girlfriends, realises this relationship is a dead end and leaves in the middle of the night. In that most traditional of horror mistakes, she sets out on her own.
She has one of those ‘disturbing car rides with a weirdo’ scenes horror is so known for – Bennie Robinson again, doing his game best – but that’s not what does for her.
Laura gets away from the car and goes into a supermarket. Outside the night is black; inside the lights are bright as an operating theatre. Down the aisles she goes, Little Red Riding Hood in her pretty tie-dye, marooned in fluorescence, lost amidst a forest of shelves. At the end of them, there are people, watching, staring. It’s quiet: no soundtrack. You can hear how far from help she is, how far from normality. It’s in the echo of her footsteps.
And then in the quiet munching she hears as she rounds a corner to the raw meat counter.
And then in the footsteps of every deranged carnivore as she runs and they give chase.
It’s not especially gory, but it’s one of the eeriest pursuit scenes I’ve seen in a horror movie.
Messiah of Evil knows how to use the quiet as well as the roar, the light as well as the dark.
The story has loose threads, but there’s a real elegance to the cut of it.
There’s a curious balance to the emotional tone: we end up getting attached to characters it would be easy to dislike because they’re played and shot with real humanity – and at they same time there’s a distance. Everyone is filmed with a kind of restraint and coolness that gives us no guarantee that they’ll come out of this alive. And indeed, mostly they don’t, and the artistic poise of the camera following them means we don’t feel as bad about that as we might, even when there are paint-splattered stabbings and violent cannibalism before our eyes. We’re watching a film about an artist’s daughter made by actual artists, and they understand when to step back and view the canvas as a whole.
There’s a point where Thom suggests his younger and less sophisticated girlfriend Toni (Joy Bang) get out of the way by going to see a ‘film’. She doesn’t know what he’s getting at. A ‘movie?’, he suggests. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘a show!’ Nothing good comes of this for her, of course, but we can take one thing out of it: Messiah of Evil may not quite work as a show, and it has holes as a movie – but as a film, there really is something there.
In the Heart of Hidden Things (The Gyrford series) by Kit Whitfield
Jedediah’s father walked out of his life forty years ago. Now he’s back. He won’t apologise, he doesn’t explain – and, impossibly, he hasn’t aged a day.
If you asked the folks of Gyrford, they’d tell you Jedediah Smith looked up to his father. After all, Corbie Mackem was the Sarsen Shepherd: the man who saved the Smith clan from Ab, the terrifyingly well-meaning fey who blighted a whole generation with unwanted gifts.
Corbie was a good fairy-smith. And if he wasn’t a good father, well, that isn’t something Jedediah likes to talk about. Especially since no one knows where Corbie’s body lies: the day of his son’s wedding, forty-odd years ago, he set off to travel and was never seen again.
These days Jedediah is a respectable elder, more concerned with his wayward grandson John than with his long-buried past, and he has other problems on his mind. There’s the preparations for Saint Clement’s Day, and the odd fact that birds all over the county have taken to hiding themselves, and the misbehaviour of Left-Lop the pig – which has grown vegetation all over its back, escaped its farm and taken to making personal remarks at folks in alarmingly alliterative verse.
But then disaster strikes. Ab is back. And Corbie, thought long dead, returns to Gyrford – younger than his son . . .