Messiah Of Evil

A 1973 curiosity which has been released under several other titles – most notably Dead People – yet never quite taken off, Messiah Of Evil has recently been restored and is screening as part of the Retrospective strand at the 2023 Dundead film festival. It’s an oddly structured, messy yet atmospheric film with its roots in HP Lovecraft tales, Night Of The Living Dead and Carnival Of Souls, clearly an influence on a lot of subsequent genre work yet easy for even quite serious fans to overlook altogether. Although the first half is very slow, once it picks up, there’s enough genuinely weird stuff to make you glad you didn’t.

The story revolves around Arietty (Marianna Hill, fresh from her equally disturbing role in High Plains Drifter), a woman who goes looking for her estranged father after he sends her a series of increasingly urgent-sounding letters and then falls silent. Reaching the small Californian coastal town of Point Dume, she learns that he was indeed staying there, but finding out what has happened to him proves rather more complicated. The locals are distinctly peculiar and not exactly conversational. When she takes a chance an accepts a lift from a seedy truck driver, he’s more interested in showing off his unusual eating habits than in giving her information which she can make sense of.

Isolated and increasingly worried, Arietty falls in with an uncharacteristically flashy young folklorist (Michael Greer) who is likewise bent on uncovering the secrets of the town. Between his sartorial choices and his poly relationship, he might seem as if he has no secrets of his own, but here, even the outsiders are not what they seem. He, however, does manage to find something out, by plying an old drunk with alcohol, dooming the man in the process. It’s a classic Gothic motif, but the way it is presented most strikingly recalls the encounter with old Zadok Allen in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, to which the film bears an increasingly strong resemblance.

After a lot of scene setting, the film delivers, almost out of nowhere, an intense and fully committed mythology which takes night scenes already set against a pitch black sky to a still darker place. Mostly done through direct exposition, it’s nonetheless compelling, and the tonal shift which accompanies it adds to our sense of Arietty’s helplessness. Some critics have complained that the film explains too little, resolves too little and gives its characters too little agency, but that represents a misunderstanding of the point of cosmic horror, which genre this very much belongs to. What’s important is that it builds its scenario with an elegance and sense of completeness which enable one to believe in the future scenario it promises.

Some other elements here are not so strong. Thom’s desire to sleep around and casual disregard for his partners is presented as proof of his masculinity (however else we interpret him); an inevitable and forgivable trait. His partners, meanwhile, pay for their sexual choices as women in horror films often do. It’s trite stuff to find in a work of this kind, but it does have the virtue of being realised in a pair of beautifully disturbing scenes. Meanwhile, we get an additional take on the strangeness of the townspeople by way of some of Arietty’s father’s art, which is simple but very effective and complements the increasing strangeness of the cinematography.

The strong idea at the centre of the film might have struggled to sustain it due to the meandering nature of the narrative, but strong set pieces keep it interesting and somehow the disparate parts of the film successfully build into something special. Though it still falls short of its potential, it’s an intriguing piece of work which horror fans interested in the history of the genre should definitely catch if they can.