So, I’m going to do a number of different things on this blog. Sometimes I’ll want to expand on some bit of theory. Sometimes I’ll give a quick response to a film I’ve just seen or a book I’ve just read, and sometimes I’ll pop in a longer film review to dig into something I think is worth spending more time with. So to kick things off, let’s have a look at a real gem.
Messiah of Evil (1973)
Willard Huyck’s and Gloria Katz’s film (which they both co-wrote and co-directed) is a confounding masterpiece of style. Tightly composed, rich in color and contrast, and at once hypnotic and jarring, characters are silhouetted against deeply saturated colors, odd groups of locals wait by bonfires, looking out to sea and snacking on rodents, painted faces watch characters from all sides as they attempt to sleep, and the hands of the dying fill the frame for one last moment before being pulled down into a mass of hungry bodies. The fact that the central story is perhaps the least consequential aspect of the piece may be due to its creators’ avowed lack of interest in the genre. The plot may not be a significant expression of their artistic talents, but the strength of the rest of the film certainly showcases them.
As for the plot, I am not the first to describe it as seemingly influenced by H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The protagonist comes to a small seaside town, filled with strange inhabitants worshipping and awaiting the return of something ancient and evil which will come from the sea. Here, we follow Arletty (Marianna Hill) as she enters Point Dune (though it sure sounded like ‘doom’ the first time it’s mentioned), looking for her artist father, who no longer answers her letters. The people of the town are odd and standoffish, until she meets Thom (Michael Greer), a playboy folk legend enthusiast and the two women traveling with him, Laura (Anitra Ford) and Toni (Joy Bang).
The trio invite themselves to stay with Arletty at her father’s abandoned and highly stylish beach house/home gallery and Thom shares some of what he has gathered about the legends of this town where once the moon turned blood red and a mysterious, sinister stranger walked into the sea to return a hundred years later when the world would be ripe and ready for his wickedness. Some light is also shed on this from Arletty’s father’s diary. It seems that the town somehow infects its inhabitants, causing a variety of physical symptoms (bleeding from the eyes or ears, loss of sensation) and apparently a hunger for human flesh and the tendency to dress rather conservatively.
Also, possibly the inability to be killed—or are they all already dead—it’s never really explained. First Laura and then Toni grow jealous of the attention Thom is paying to Arletty and go off on their own to inevitably be killed by the townspeople in rather striking sequences (Laura in a supermarket after coming across the townspeople dining in the meat aisle, and then Toni in a cinema which first seems empty, but which slowly fills in behind her until it is far too late).
Eventually, Arletty starts to show the telltale signs of Point Dune’s contagion and after a conflagratory confrontation with her father (she burns him to death), who had been hoping to keep/drive her away from this horrible town, already damned himself, she and Thom attempt to escape. Ultimately Thom is lost, but she is permitted to leave, carrying with her the warning of the doom that is coming from the sea.
It’s a little hard to follow and this synopsis is neither entirely accurate nor complete, leaving so many questions to investigate which I won’t be delving into here, but these are the broad strokes.
And again, the story is really not at the heart of this little gem of a picture. While the narrative may somewhat bewilder, the atmosphere, the mood, the sense of unease, of the uncanny, of creeping doom suffuses practically every frame. This is, in no way, a direct Lovecraft adaptation, but it really captures so much of what worked in his writing—that growing sense that something, some place, some people, just feel wrong somehow, off.
Point Dune feels empty and threatening. The people, when they can be communicated with at all, have odd tics. The stores look, on the surface, totally normal—no strange lighting or colors or shadows, but in their clean emptiness and apparent normalcy, there is an eeriness. Arletty’s father’s house is gorgeous to look at, but does not look comfortable to inhabit. It doesn’t look designed for living in. The bedroom (where the bed hangs from chains) is filled with giant murals featuring figures (the dead? the townspeople?) watching from every angle. The town itself feels barren, though there are people; it is devoid of life, of the normal noise and bustle of living.
And I feel that it is somewhere in this that a visual theme of the film comes to life. Point Dune is at the seaside, somewhere on the California coast. It’s at the edge of the continent, of the country; from a certain (Western/American) perspective, it is at the edge of civilization, of the inhabited world. Along the coast, lies nature. The sea, the crashing waves, the unknowable depths, where the horizon disappears and the blood moon is reflected upon the black water.
And at the border of all that, Arletty finds herself living in an art gallery—surrounded by the artificial, by 2 dimensional paintings, and in a town filled with buildings, filled with the relics of society, but no people, no life, no nature. She also finds herself at the center of a film which is, itself, quite consciously artistic. Every shot is arresting and the colors are intensely vibrant—and I find it striking that in such a colorful film, little of this effect comes from lighting as it might in a Bava or Argento inflected piece. Rather, the color comes from physical objects—paintings, wallpaper, carpeting, bed sheets, costumes. Everywhere you look, there is some actual, physical, produced art-object. On the other side, the waves are breaking.
It is in this meeting of the dangerous, unknowable wild of the sea and the dead, arid town, filled with relics of life and art and artifice, that this dread filled picture is most effective. What is living and what is dead? What is authentic? In a late scene, Arletty’s father first throws bright red paint across the walls of his home murals before falling among his paints, where his own unrealistically red and viscous blood mixes with the vivid pigments.
This is before the silhouettes of the townspeople, mirroring the people of the murals, begin to fill the windows and finally attack—as if the figures on the walls are coming to life.
In the end, Arletty is in an asylum, mad and broken, knowing that she will never be believed and that what is coming cannot be stopped. This juxtaposition of real and unreal, of human-product and the natural world, of what we can understand and what is beyond us is sustained throughout and offers a delectable ambience for viewers who take pleasures in such things.
Huyck and Katz, who went on to write American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Howard the Duck, both apparently disparaged this early film and never again worked in the genre, but even if accidentally, they managed to produce a beautiful and ominous treasure.