Sometimes films fall into undeserved obscurity, but some also get surprising revivals. This seems to have happened with the moody Messiah of Evil, filmed in 1971 and released in 1973. Over the years, the transfer quality on the VHS release and some free streaming services didn’t do its reputation any favors, but now that it’s available on a decent Blu-Ray from Code Red, and streaming on Shudder, the visuals, with strikingly creepy set-pieces and dream-like atmosphere, can get their due. It was even featured on Elvira’s 2021 Halloween special!
The plot, in which a young woman visits a beachside town in search of her missing artist father, puts it in the sub-genre that evokes H.P. Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth”: an isolated small town where outsiders seem unwelcome, and increasingly sinister townspeople worship beings from the past. While Lovecraft famously had his own unique pantheon, the films that get tagged “Lovecraftian” tend to have older pagan gods, witchcraft cults, or in this case, a mysterious prophetic figure who represents the forces of darkness.
Other films with similar elements include The City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel) and Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which like this film uses California locations and gets some eerie ambience from a night-time gas station. In Messiah, it’s a Mobil station, with the connotation of “mobile,” as the characters are. They also both have characters similar to Lovecraft’s Zadok Allen, a drunken derelict who reveals too much to the newcomer.
I watched Messiah of Evil with the director’s commentary specifically to find out if the “Lovecraftian” elements were purposeful. Co-writers and directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (probably best known for their relationship with George Lucas, having worked on American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and other films) both verify this. Katz refers to the “Lovecraftian mood,” and how creating this mood and its dreamlike quality, going for “creepy and unsettling,” was more their intent than character development or traditional narrative. Houyck says that Lovecraft was “a big inspiration,” that he had been a fan since childhood, and that a reference to “the Old Gods” was indeed meant to evoke Lovecraft.
This certainly isn’t the first Lovecraftian film -- The Haunted Palace came out in 1963 and The Dunwich Horror in 1970 -- but it’s still an interesting and very early entry. While people like Huyck did grow up reading Lovecraft stories, the author certainly wasn’t a household name well-known to the general public at this time, long before the era of Cthulhu plushies or even Re-Animator.
The commentary contains other interesting anecdotes, like that the original title, Blood Virgin, was rejected for sounding like a porn film. The working title was The Second Coming, after the poem by William Butler Yeats, but people thought that sounded even more like a porn film! Oddly, it was briefly released as Return of the Living Dead, 12 years before the cult zombie film, although George Romero put the kibosh on a tagline about there being “no more room in hell.”
The Yeats reference struck a chord with me. Joan Didion’s famous essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was written shortly before this, in 1968, and uses a line from the same poem for her analysis of the aimlessness and ennui of the hippie counterculture in contemporary California. In her introduction to the book of the same name, Didion describes writing “to come to terms with disorder,” in a world where she was seeing the foundations of society unravel, “proof that things fall apart.” This is very much the atmosphere of Messiah of Evil, although the film doesn’t treat it as something new, instead tying it back to the Donner party and the early history of the state.
In the film’s post-hippie twilight, people can drift through life expressing their individuality, leading hedonistic lifestyles, but, with that echo of Innsmouth, those without ties become victims of those who do, the drifters falling to those who have a history within a place. Individuality breeds isolation, and when people get in trouble, they’re on their own.
Within the dreamlike world of the film, with this Messiah figure, who exactly are the townspeople waiting for, and what do they want him to save them from? It raises the question of what cultists get out of their cult. In Lovecraftian terms, why worship the Old Ones? This question is never really answered here, but my instinct is to say that they’re being saved from their everyday sense of meaninglessness and ennui. I may be projecting onto what I know about the time period, but they all seem to live pretty easy-going lives, in a beautiful natural setting. Nonetheless, there’s a fog of listlessness over the town, a sense of dullness and stagnation, and the return of the Messiah brings meaning and excitement.
Is the town so listless because it’s caught up in a web of evil, or did its people get caught up in a web of evil because of the moody ennui that permeates the film? The hotel lobby is empty, the streets are dark, construction projects are eerily unfinished, and people stare soundlessly, unnervingly, at the sky. There’s a famous artist who disappears almost without anyone noticing. His daughter passively allows thing to happen, like when people start living in her house and she just lets them stay. A group of apparent drifters are well-dressed and apparently well-off but have nowhere to go. Even the local art gallery is run by a blind man who can’t see any of the art.
The horrific set-pieces, taking place at a gas station, a grocery store, a movie theater, and the isolated coast, all show an individual against a group of threatening locals, who are under the influence of the mysterious Messiah figure. From the 2020s, we can look back and see the downside of the loss of community, but here we’re reminded of the dark side of collective identity. Part of why the hippie era and the 1970s “Me Generation” happened was to escape the stultifying conformity of life where everyone knows you, in conformist small towns and suburbs. It also led to a new trend of communal living, faux “tribalism,” and pursuit of empty hedonism that could be equally alienating. The mood of the times meshes surprisingly well with the themes Lovecraft developed in New England in the 1920s and ‘30s, and maybe that association will bring a few more viewers to this under-seen film.
Note: the Code Red edition referred to here is out of print (argh!), but there is a new special edition due out from Radiance Films in October 2023. They're in the U.K., but it's an all-region blu-ray available through Diabolik DVD. It includes tons of special features, but doesn't seem to bring over the director's commentary, so I'm glad I got the Code Red version when I did. There is a new documentary on the film though, so I'm tempted to pick it up. That would be my third time buying this movie! Wow.
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