Some people read “horror movies” as synonymous with “scary,” but the vast majority of films in the horror genre are far from frightening. Most aren’t even trying to be scary as they’re instead looking only to entertain, thrill, and occasionally startle. These are all worthy goals, but when a horror movie sets out to unsettle and scare… and then actually succeeds? Well, that’s something special right there.
There are various ways in which a filmmaker might try to unnerve viewers, and the most difficult is arguably atmospheric. 1974’s Messiah of Evil may be a low-budget feature, but it’s a masterclass in capturing a disturbing and disquieting sense of place. Its eerily empty seaside town just seems off, and when its occupants do arrive, all pasty-faced and quiet, the film’s increasingly upsetting atmosphere finds incredible terror in mundane locales like supermarkets and movie theaters.
Fans of the film should seek out the “Father’s Day” segment of 2016’s Holidays and Mickey Keating’s Offseason (both coincidentally starring the great Jocelin Donahue) for some similar vibes. Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Messiah of Evil (1974)
Commentators: Genre film experts Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower
1. The film went through various titles during production, including The Second Coming and The Blood Moon. It was also released at various points as Return of the Living Dead – a short-lived venture quickly shot down by George Romero’s lawyers – Dead People, Revenge of the Screaming Dead, Blood Busters, and Return of the Damned.
2. The man running and dying before the title card drops is future filmmaker Walter Hill.
3. Co-writer/director Willard Huyck attended UCLA alongside the likes of George Lucas and John Milius, and all three competed against each other with short films in a film festival at the time. The Los Angeles Times’ review of the fest singled out Huyck’s short as the best of the bunch.
4. Huyck never found his peers’ level of success as a director, but he did go on to direct 1986’s Howard the Duck. He had more luck as a writer alongside his fellow co-director/writer Gloria Katz, and went on to co-write American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and more.
5. Katz’s brother, Stephen Katz, is the film’s cinematographer, and he went on to shoot The Blues Brothers, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, and more.
6. Newman draws a line, of both style and themes, between this film and other “counter culture-inflected, slightly Lovecraftian” movies like The Witch Who Came from the Sea, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, and the work of French filmmaker Jean Rollin.
7. “There’s a kind of wry wit to this film, but the characters exist in this sort of [Michelangelo] Antonioni J.G. Ballard-type ennui as they drift to their dooms,” says Newman, and this kind of line is exactly why you get him and Thrower on your commentaries.
8. Thrower adds that the dialogue walks a fine line between the pretentious and the more Lovecraftian, literary means of communication. “If you try to speak Lovecraft out loud, it’s kind of difficult to bring that off without adopting a very melodramatic persona to do it.”
9. Huyck and Katz were locked out of the editing room after they finished filming, but what followed wasn’t “a hack job.” The people who stepped in clearly knew what they were doing and made their best efforts to complete the film and stay true to its intentions.
10. We watch as Laura (Anitra Ford) walks through an eerily empty town, and Thrower comments that the feeling we get from it is sadly relatable these days after we’ve all been through the pandemic lockdown.
11. Newman suggests there’s been some debate over the years as to what exactly the “monsters” are in the film. Zombies, vampires, possessed people, a cult… “It’s good that you can’t define” what exactly these folks have become. Part of that, of course, could be due to the filmmakers being unable to film the intended, bigger, more clarifying ending.
12. The score is by Phillan Bishop, and they talk about how it’s among the early electronic scores in cinema. They mention a few more examples, including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and a common thread between them is their place in the horror genre, something that speaks to the genre’s typical low budgets more than anything else.
13. Gloria Katz cameo at 55:35 as the woman selling tickets at the movie theater.
14. The film on the theater marquee is 1950’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a James Cagney crime picture, that was chosen strictly for the terrifically appropriate title.
15. They reach the film’s most memorable scene – Toni (Joy Bang) takes a seat in an empty theater only for the seats to fill up behind her as the trailers play – and Thrower recalls a similar incident he experienced. In his case, he had gone to see Mario Bava’s Shock, took a seat in a fairly full theater, and turned around barely ten minutes into the film to realize that he was the only one there.
16. “If you really tap into the mood of it, then it really does start to pay off,” says Thrower regarding the film’s slow burn that explodes with legitimate horror at various points, like the supermarket and theater scenes.
17. The edits during both the supermarket kill and theater kill drive home one of the film’s themes on rampant consumerism consuming us all. As Laura is eaten, we get cuts to the empty supermarket aisles, and when Toni is attacked, we see shots of empty theater seats and a concession stand.
18. The stunt performer set ablaze towards the film’s climax is Buddy Joe Hooker, who went on to have a long, distinguished career in stunts as both a performer (Prophecy, The Entity, The Guardian) and a second-unit director (Mannequin, Gleaming the Cube, and Vanilla Sky).
19. They agree that the only real disappointment here is that the film’s ending wasn’t completed and was instead hobbled together by producers and editors after the fact. The bookends here, that Arletty (Marianna Hill) is simply a crazy woman recounting her madness via voiceover – as opposed to these events having really happened – do feel like an unfortunate afterthought.
Quotes Without Context
“It’s that strange moment when the political revolution of the sixties has died away and fizzled out, but all the love children and hippies are left trying to work out what to do next.”
“People tried to do Lovecraft in the sixties, but in a way that made me think they’d never read a Lovecraft story.”
“I think that’s true of this house as a whole; it looks incredible, but you’re supposed to find it unnerving and off-putting.”
“If the camera panned away from the youthful shenanigans of American Graffiti and went down a different street, you might find the beginnings of the horror developing in this story.”
“Another theme in this film is that cops are useless.”
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