Something I’m beginning to notice is that once you start getting into older horror films (like, say, from the late 1960s onward) that aren’t the touchstone classics of their time, shit starts getting really weird. This isn’t just true for horror films - I can remember seeing a revival of a 1965 mystery called Who Killed Teddy Bear? that was easily one of the strangest, campiest things I’d ever witnessed on the big screen - but I’m starting to really notice it in horror films. Go back to the 1950s and mostly it’s stuff that has become quaint, go forward into the mid 1980s and, with some exceptions, things get formulaic for awhile. But it sort of feels to me like there’s a sweet spot from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s where the rules hadn’t really codified yet, and all kinds of oddities got made.
And Messiah Of Evil is absolutely an example of exactly that. It’s a strange little fever dream of a film that, despite obvious shortcomings, manages to be surprisingly compelling.
It doesn’t waste any time, opening without any context at all on a man running through what appears to be suburban backyards, terribly bothered by something. He acts almost like he’s overheated, pausing to let a sprinkler douse him. He’s lying down on someone’s lawn, and a young girl comes out of the house, looks at him curiously…and slashes his throat with a straight razor out of nowhere. Smash cut to the title card. Does this man have anything to do with what follows? Kind of? Does the girl ever appear again? Nope. Does it matter? Nope. It’s played with such wild-eyed earnestness that you can tell all bets are going to be off. This cuts to the blurry, washed-out, backlit figure of a woman wandering down a hallway and a shrill, panicky monologue about how "they" are coming and how no one will hear you scream. So that's...no, that's still pretty fucking weird.
From that, we cut to a young woman named Arletty. She’s driving into the Southern California town of Point Dume, looking for her father, an artist named Joseph Lang. There’s a voiceover from her as she drives, about how she and her father grew apart over time, until their only communication was the occasional exchange of letters, and how she hasn’t heard from him for months. She’s concerned, and wants to know what’s wrong. When she arrives in Point Dume, she finds her father’s beachfront combination home and studio abandoned. He left his diary behind, however, and in it he writes of being plagued by nightmares, of the town and all its residents being gripped by a horrible darkness.
In the diary, he begs Arletty not to come looking for him.
There isn’t a single conversation or interaction in this film that feels normal or natural (there’s a sequence in an art gallery - run by a blind woman - that’s especially bizarre for no apparent reason), whether it’s how people talk, how they hold themselves, the way they look at each other, everything’s just flat out weird. There’s no solid ground for the viewer, so there’s a low-level discomfort even in the moments where nothing’s actually happening. So it’s got Italian horror’s tendency to go pedal-to-the-metal strange, and it’s also got Italian horror’s use of vivid color down pat - there’s a sequence in a movie theater that’s especially striking in this regard, and a moment toward the end that uses the paint in Joseph’s studio to create something that feels really unnerving without relying on gore. It’s not afraid of using light and color and garishly cheap-looking blood, it’s not afraid to hold a shot a little longer than you’d expect or to cut away at an odd moment, and like those classic Italian horror films, it’s all played so straight that it blows right past campiness into something almost operatic. I’m usually partial to more naturalistic films, but this one’s so relentlessly weird that it works. It just absolutely full-tilt commits to the strangeness, which is what you need for a film like this.
All of this is contrasted with settings that are - with one important exception - mundanely suburban, which just further contributes to the whole thing feeling like a nightmare, where people don’t talk like people, where the surroundings are familiar but somehow off, where everyone carries themselves as if they are harbingers of some underlying dread, not obviously stated but palpable nonetheless. Joseph’s combination house and studio is located in what might be a former church, and mostly consists of a single large, open space dominated by huge canvases of somber crowds of people and commercial interiors. At times it feels much larger than it actually is because it’s hard to tell where the actual space ends and the spaces depicted on some of the canvases begin, and the result is often disorienting on top of whatever else is happening in the scene, not to mention all of the silent, impassive faces staring back at you. Work areas and living areas are scattered throughout as well, so the whole environment feels itself like something from a dream, in the strange logic of a place that is both your bedroom but also a studio but also somehow dropped smack dab in the middle of a public area.
And then in contrast to this, you have everywhere else in town. Point Dume is a small town on the coast in Southern California, near Malibu, and it’s as everyday as that would suggest - there are grocery stores, movie theaters, motels, the whole lot, and by itself it’s not especially spooky, but it’s also largely deserted. It’s likely that the filmmakers got permission to shoot where they did in the middle of the night, which would explain the strange empty feeling, but it’s really effective. You’ve got this small suburban town in sunny California, right on the beach, and though nothing seems shuttered or abandoned, there’s nobody around. The lights are on, but nobody’s home, and this adds to the feeling of being stuck in a strange dream. At least, until there are people there, and then terrible things happen. That they’re happening in spaces like movie theaters and grocery stores just adds to the strangeness of it all.
The plot itself is pretty bare-bones - woman comes to a small town looking for her father, discovers the town has some strange, terrible secret, and the residents start bumping people off in ways that are presumably gruesome, given that most of the violence occurs off-camera or through clever editing. But somehow that’s worse, because either we don’t see what happens and people just vanish, or we see the aftermath, awful and sudden It’s an interesting counterpoint to Dead & Buried, a film that would come along about ten years later, assaying similar Lovecraftian subject matter (town with a dark, occult secret) in a similar location (a small coastal town), but where Dead & Buried was more gothic in its approach - a fogbound fishing village in New England - this is sunny everyday California, and though Dead & Buried had its strange (and to its credit, very strange) moments, it was a much more grounded affair than this. It felt sinister, where this film feels almost hallucinatory. The result is a film that doesn’t always (or even usually) cohere, but is very rarely dull.
IMDB entry
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