Many horror films from the late 1960s and the early 1970s are marked by disillusionment, by a sense of slipping reality, a malignant and sometimes surreal sense that the world is not a kind place. Films like Night of the Living Dead, The Devils, Straw Dogs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre emerged from a period of televised war and damning political scandals which they’ve gone on to transcend. Rarely (if ever) talked about in the same breath, but no less incisive and perhaps even more prescient than those films, Messiah of Evil is a remarkably underappreciated part of the horror canon.
A brutal cold open is followed by our protagonist Arletty’s (Marianna Hill) paranoid rantings from the psychiatric hospital where she is being held. The rest of the film is told in flashback, stemming from Arletty’s voyage to the isolated city of Dune Point to find her estranged father. Once there, she reads his diaries, shacks up with a trio of dope-smoking layabouts, and finds that there is something evil lurking in Dune Point that may have taken her father.
The central mystery, while intriguing, is almost secondary to the atmosphere and imagery that this film delivers so beautifully. Deep, chiaroscuro lighting isolates characters in vast fields of black, immediately creating a sense of unreality. When Arletty arrives at her painter father’s house, she finds that he has created murals out of every room in the house – uncannily mundane images of shopping mall escalators and waiting rooms populated by looming, stentorian figures.
It is not until very late in the film’s third act that we even discover who the titular messiah is. The insidiousness of Dune Point instead manifests in a kind of Stepford Wives meets Dawn of the Dead critique of capitalism. Leaving the group and trying to make her way out of Dune Point, the character Laura finds herself on the deserted main street. Shop signs are garishly lit up, window displays are full and brand names are fully on display, but the place is absolutely empty, a facade of modern comfort. In the supermarket, as chintzy jazz plays over the speakers, Laura discovers the town people, shortly before becoming their victim.
In recontextualising familiar, mundane, supposedly safe spaces like the shops and the supermarket, Messiah of Evil is positioning itself squarely in the modern world, despite the much older nature of its eventually revealed threat. There is something lurking not just beneath, but within these institutions, not as a perversion of them, but as an intrinsic part of them. We find out later that the link is humanity’s desire to consume.
Another remarkable, terrifying scene comes with a trip to the movies. On-screen is a Western, the most American of all genres, here presented as a mish-mash of horrific violence and destruction with no sensation of plot or character. It’s a strikingly bold filmmaking choice to deconstruct the Western in this way, and in doing so reflect on the action taking place in Messiah of Evil as reflective of the old, violent, colonial America that still lingers today.
Five years before Romero’s Dawn of the Dead used zombies to critique the behaviours associated with rampant capitalism, Messiah of the Dead arguably did the same, adding to it much more pointed, caustic thoughts about the violence inherent in a capitalistic society. The curse in this film spreads not by physical contact, but just by being there in Dune Point’s atmosphere of apparent mistrust and rage.
At one point, Arletty says “I remember my father saying that you’re about to awaken when you dream that you’re dreaming.” These layers of dreams and reality are also integral to the film. In its most sensual, uncanny moments, the film has the very texture of a dream. Is Arletty waking from a dream and entering the real world as she enters Dune Point? Is she entering a nightmare realm from which she needs to awaken? Or is Dune Point a nightmare in the dream that was her real life?
If all is a dream, then who defines reality?
Returning to the psychiatric hospital where Arletty now lives, she tells us in voiceover that no one believes her, but the curse of Dune Point is inevitably spreading. “We sit in the sun and wait. We sleep. And we dream. Each of us dying slowly in the prison of our minds.” In the middle of a pleasant dream of safety, of shopping, of going about our lives, are we complacent in allowing evil to fester inside of our comfortable modern existence?
Messiah of Evil tells us that history inevitably repeats. In failing to heed the warning of Arletty, or countless others like her, we have sealed our fates and another dark stranger is coming to take their place at the helm and lead us back into the self-destruction consumption that defines us.