About twenty minutes into Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’ much underappreciated weirdo horror masterpiece “Messiah of Evil”, we have a scene which finds our protagonist Arletty Lang knocking on the door of a room in a dilapidated beach-front motel. She is following up a tip off from a blind gallery owner (hang on – blind gallery owner?!?), who told her that some strangers in town have been asking questions about her missing father.
As in just about every scene in this movie, seagulls call in the distance, and the waves of the Pacific crash hypnotically on the soundtrack.
Receiving no answer to her knocking, Arletty pushes the door, which creaks slowly open, revealing the frightened face of Charlie (played by the wonderful character actor Elisha Cook Jr), who is seated inside.
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CHARLIE: I’m as old as the hills… mama delivered me herself…. She took me from between her legs… bloody little mess, just about to feed me to the chickens, and Daddy said, ‘maybe we could use a boy, Lottie’, and that’s how I came into the world.
[Arletty’s gaze moves across to the bed, where Tom (tall, dandyish young man with long-ish hair and a white suit) and Laura (bored looking hippy chick) lie. Tom is pointing a microphone at Charlie.]
ARLETTY: Excuse me – they said at the gallery you were looking for Joseph Lang, I’m his daughter and…
TOM: Just come in and close the door.
ARLETTY: All I want to know is if…
TOM: Close the door.
[She closes the door.]
TOM: Go ahead Charlie.
CHARLIE: I can’t always remember back on things, but I remember the red moon my daddy told me about… he only told me once… mamma gave him a bad look when he talked about it… he was only a boy himself then… he called it the ‘blood moon’… he said that was the night when he lost religion…
[A toilet flushes and Toni (a teenage groupie type in a halter-top) emerges from the bathroom and begins applying suntan lotion.]
CHARLIE: He… he learned that men could do horrible things… like animals…
TONI: I’m really hungry - I’ve got the munchies.
TOM: Shut up! Go ahead Charlie. What about the moon?
CHARLIE: One hundred years ago, the moon started turning red up in the sky, and things began to happen. He said it was like… the redder of the moon got up there, the closer the people were being jerked, toward hell… people started bleedin’ out of control… they found children eating raw meat… it was like the town was festering with an open sore, until the night that they… until the night they came down out of the canyon…
TOM: Who came down, Charlie?
[Charlie stands up suddenly.]
CHARLIE: I gotta go!
TOM: Charlie…
[Charlie moves toward the door]
TOM: Take the wine Charlie.
CHARLIE: Thanks for your… kindly hospitality.
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When I first watched ‘Messiah of Evil’ last year, having heard its praises sung by assorted writers and bloggers whose views I trust, I was pretty blown away. My first thought was that I should write about it for this site *straight away*, but… I just couldn’t. Like many of my favourite things, I found it very difficult to write about, even to think about what I would say. The strange appeal of the film, and the overwhelming effect in has on me, are impossible to put into words without resorting to cliché.
Like several films in this top ten, “Messiah of Evil” adopts a structure and atmosphere which I can only descibe as ‘Lovecraftian’, despite taking no direct inspiration from the works of Lovecraft. Or is there some conscious influence there I wonder? The idea of a stranger investigating family ties in an isolated seaport town whose populance have their own strange rituals and dark secrets is certainly reminiscent of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, and the character of Charlie is a dead ringer for that story’s Zadok Allen.
Pure conjecture of course, but the film’s convoluted story-telling structure, in which multiple voice-overs (Arletti’s sanitorium ravings in the prologue and epilogue, her sane description of events during the film, her father’s increasingly disturbing letters, and Charlie’s fragmentary narrative as quoted above) weave in and out of each other, perhaps also owes something to HPL’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” and his other ‘pieced together’ narratives. I know some people have criticised this reliance on voice-overs in “Messiah of Evil”, but as a Lovecraft freak, I love it, and appreciate the way that rather than simply providing tedious exposition, these assorted monologues continually offer dark hints, fragments of unguessable truths and the like, in the classic weird tale tradition.
In fact, whilst trying to figure out how to write a review of this film last year, I found myself instead sampling vast quantities of the movie’s audio. Assembling an ‘album’ of sorts from the resulting recordings, I was amazed at how well they functioned without the accompanying visuals – kind of like a really disturbing avant garde radio play or something. I was going to share that ‘album’ here, but sadly I lost the whole thing in a hard drive crash and haven’t had a chance to go through the laborious process of putting it all together again.
In my write-up of The Fog last month, I dropped some hints about the uncanny similarities I find between it and “Messiah..” – the isolated, inward-looking harbour community, the cliffs, the beach houses, weird small businesses and the disused lighthouse. The relentless crashing of the waves. Watching either film, you can almost feel the ocean breeze rolling in off the sea at night. The difference is though, “The Fog” is a straight-up, logical horror movie of the ‘80s (which is awesome, don’t get me wrong), whereas “Messiah..” is something far deeper, darker, stranger – a potent and disorientating cocktail of low budget ’70s USA grindhouse churn and ‘60s-hangover European counter-culture/arthouse decadence, contrasting aesthetics oozing over each other, rich with film school stylistic zaniness and brooding poverty row brutality.
All this of course is one one or two of the hundreds of things you could say abut Huyck & Katz film. If you were so inclined, you could say it was pretentious, slow moving, confusing… well so are a lot of my favourite movies, get used to it.
Horror at it’s best should invoke mysticism. It should defy explanation. As soon as a supposedly far-out story is streamlined to extent that X can be seen to represent Y, and Z stands for X and so on, all in a neat package, well... that’s cool, that’s one kind of story. But the stories that really stick with me are ones like these.
Maybe one day I’ll be able to knuckle down and say all the things that need to be said about “Messiah of Evil”, but for the moment hopefully I may have at least succeeded in sufficiently intriguing a passing reader or two to the extent that they give it a go.
The way that this film has apparently been mistreated in the VHS/bootleg/public domain wilderness over the years could fill an article in itself, but let’s just conclude by saying that Code:Red’s current DVD edition finally does it justice. If you’re not familiar with the film and you’ve put up with my blather thus far, well – you know what to do.
7 comments:
'Maybe one day I’ll be able to knuckle down and say all the things that need to be said about “Messiah of Evil”, but for the moment hopefully I may have at least succeeded in sufficiently intriguing a passing reader or two to the extent that they give it a go.'
You succeeded in the second account. I watched it on youtube and don't know what to think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJTaHlx1AVQ
I don't know if the youtube one was badly edited, or if the film was incoherent or if it had plot gaps. Of course, some of it probably worked best with an air of mystery. But, for example, at one stage two police officers suddenly appear out of nowhere, then start shooting at a crowd. One of them just seems to turn into a zombie without being bitten or scratched, and then he shoots his partner. I thought this didn't work so well. It begins with a bloke getting his throat cut by a girl who never appears again.
Anyway, it would be cool if you wrote a more in-depth account of this film.
Oddly enough, the night before watching it, I stayed up late reading The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen which also has a fragmented structure. Like a lot of Machen, it had moments of clumsiness, but it was also pretty scary.
Hello Gregor - thanks as ever for the comment.
Yeah... I guess "Messiah.." is pretty disjointed, but stuff like that has never really bothered me. Sorry if you hated the whole thing.
I guess because the film's supernatural threat is never really defined or given any 'rules', the zombie/horror scenes are a bit sorta 'anything goes', but again, I quite like that.
I can't speak for how complete the youtube version is, but there are definitely a lot of compromised/bootlegged version of this movie any there, and because the cinematography is quite dark and fuzzy it's the kind of film that really suffers from a poor print.
It seems that for years the film was pretty much dismissed by most horror fans/critics - it's only in recent years that it's started to be reassessed and reassembled/cleaned up.
"The Great God Pan" makes for a pretty good comparison actually I think - both are perfect examples of how a rambling, poorly constructed narrative and a certain authorial 'craziness' can perhaps render a horror story more fascinating and disturbing than it would have been if it was assembled in a more sensible fashion...
@Ben
I am really grateful for the recommendation and thought there were some excellent scenes in this film that really stuck in my mind and I intend to rewatch it sometime. I just wasn’t certain if the version I saw was totally butchered or if the plot gaps were entirely intentional.
Also like quite a few guys of my generation (born early 80s) I have a real thing about 70s culture and especially 70s horror films. Curious to see that your list didn’t have any 90s fillums. I get the impression that the 90s was where the notion of the film as a dialogue between auteur and audience really broke down. In fact I think ‘highlight’ of 90s horror, The Silence of the Lambs is actually one of the all time worst films ever made for its relentless attack on the viewer’s intelligence and a ‘subtext’ that’s about as subtle as Anthony Hopkins’ performance.
No need to apologise, I sure ain’t going to apologise to those people I’ve implored to watch ‘The Room’ a film that anyone with interest in cinema has to see.
Hi Gregor - thanks again for a really thoughtful comment!
For the record, I date from the early '80s too, although I've always been drawn pretty strongly to culture from before I was born.
Yes, I’m always thought ‘Silence of the Lambs’ sucks too – good to know I’m not alone Gimme ‘Manhunter’ anyday – now that’s a movie.
And yes, I am on a real downer re: the '90s at the moment, as I think are a lot of people. I don't think it's anything to do with the decade being inherently shitty, but all comes back to a quote I read somewhere the other day (from Walter Benjamin) - “each generation experiences the fashions of the one immediately preceding it as the most radical anti-aphrodisiac imaginable”.
These things change as time goes on – in ten years we’ll be all about the ‘90s I’m sure. There are some horror movies I really like from that era (‘From Dusk Til Dawn’, ‘Ginger Snaps’, ‘In The Mouth Of Madness’, ‘Ring’, ‘Dagon’…? uh, must be others I’m sure), and plenty of non-horror films of course, but at present it’s still an easy winner for my ‘least favourite decade’ award.
‘ I don't think it's anything to do with the decade being inherently shitty’
Fraid I have to disagree there Ben. After The Spice Girls and Robbie Williams had several consecutive no 1s I gave up on contemporary pop/rock. Some people whose taste I trust tell me things are looking a bit better now, but a decade or so after ‘Millenium’ I’m not taking any chances.
And then there’s the fashions. The 60s generation might chortle at themselves in bellbottoms, the 70s generation might snigger over their Ron Jeremy ‘taches and sideburns, the 80s generation sigh over their mullets/ peroxide perms. But plaid shirts, undercuts, steps, centre partings, denim jackets and stubble goaties are just things no-one talks about. Ever. Ditto music: Village People, Rod Stewart, Europe, Black Lace, ABBA, Cat Stevens. Great for a laugh. But who will ever admit that they bought Robbie Williams or Baby Bird or Celine Dion or Terrorvision? And people did. Impossible as it might seem, there are thousands of people walking around who propelled this stuff to the charts. Don’t think that we need Frankfurt school intellectuals to look for reasons it was a turn off.
Re: Silence of the Lambs, I’m not a great fan of films with so much expositional dialogue. Unless it’s delivered by a demented Nietzschian undertaker from Sao Paolo who dresses like Mandrake the Magician. Speaking of whom, have you progressed with your Coffin Joe Boxset? Got to Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures yet?
Ha ha - well I appreciate your strength of feeling on the '90s debate, but as stated, I definitely think people's views of these things change over time.
I think if there was anything inherently dubious about culture in the '90s, it was the growth of self-consciousness and contrived 'smartness' - arguably something we've only started to make the most of during the '00s, but, er... that's not a theory I've thought about very hard, so maybe best leave it there for now.
Re: 'Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures', I started watching that a few months back, but chickened out because it was freaking me out too much. All those naked hippies crammed in that sweaty room. Brr. I should go back and give it another go i think...
I finally watched this a couple of days ago - I don't recall hearing about this film until this year, so maybe it's reaching some sort of critical mass among the, uh, critical mass. My first response was that I had to write down something, because the movie felt a little like a dream that might start evaporating in the morning light. My second thought was to come over here and see what you'd written about it, because of course you had.
It struck me as being very much a 1970s film, concerned with cults and consumerism. Then, after I read about the filmmakers' other work - they'd written the famous HOWARD THE DUCK flop - it really struck me that this movie was a *lot* like a Steve Gerber comic. It was "very 70s" in the same way, with bold bohemian counterculture types being abused by the mainstream society's ancient id. It surprised me that this film came out years before Jonestown, and had to have been produced either during or weeks after Patty Hearst was kidnapped or converted by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Somehow, MESSIAH OF EVIL plugged into the same cultural current.
It seems kind of similar to THE VOID in some ways, actually. The cult that really does harness supernatural powers at significant spiritual cost.
Anyway, I was pleased to find what you'd written here, and sort of tickled at reading comments that got into the spirit or aesthetic of various decades... more than a decade ago. During the 90s, that decade seemed to me like a patchwork of previous decades; self-consciously "meta" in appropriating styles from everything that came before. Only later did it start to look or feel like its own thing.
I don't think a 90s MESSIAH OF EVIL could have happened, but I wonder what it would look like now. Probably something to do with blockchains and AI, replacing the blood moon with a random number generator.
Hope you're doing well.
- g
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