Messiah of Evil 1974

Arletty Lang, Marianna Hill travels to the beach town of Point Dume to visit her estranged father, an artist, only to find his beachfront house abandoned. The silence is heavy, the air tastes of salt and secrets, and a diary left behind addresses Arletty directly, detailing a creeping darkness that has begun to consume the town and the nightmares the writer has been living with. The letter implores Arletty never to come looking for him, and hints at a link between his disappearances, the town’s strange mood, and a shadow that stalks the coastline. The diary’s pages also direct Arletty to talk to the owner of a local art gallery, a man who claims to have no of the father’s paintings and no knowledge of where he went. He insists Point Dume isn’t “an artist colony,” even as the painter’s work—eerily organized, grayscale portraits of groups of people dressed in funeral-black attire—hangs around in the margins of the town’s memory. Do these portraits reflect the townspeople, or the visions in the artist’s mind, or perhaps both?

Arletty’s days grow stranger when she encounters Thom, a visiting aristocrat, Michael Greer and his two provocative companions, Toni and Laura, who move through the motel and the local scene with a magnetic, dangerous energy. Thom interviews a local eccentric named Charlie, Elisha Cook Jr, who speaks at length about a looming event tied to “the blood moon” and the appearance of a “dark stranger.” Charlie insists that the hundred-year anniversary of the stranger’s first appearance is near, and that when the Moon becomes red again, evil will overrun the town. He warns Arletty that her father may have become one of “them,” a warning that ends with Charlie’s sudden, brutal murder, as if the town itself has decided to erase his warnings.

After the raucous interview, Thom, Toni, and Laura are ejected from their hotel and take refuge at Arletty’s father’s house. Arletty begins poring over her father’s journals, drawn into a obsessive record of oddities: a body temperature that runs unusually low, notes about a condition he cannot control, and an unsettling tone that blurs the line between science and superstition. Nightly, pale figures gather on the beach, forming silent bonfires and staring up at the Moon as if waiting for something—or someone—to emerge. The locals call this eerie gathering The Waiting, a ritual that feels both ancient and ominous.

The town’s calm rapidly dissolves into horror. Laura wanders into a supermarket and is torn apart by a crowd that feasts on raw meat, a graphic launch into the town’s transformation. The next day, Toni goes to a movie and becomes the target of a massacre inside the theater, where patrons bleed from one eye and tear the place apart with feral hunger. As the blood moon finally rises, the town erupts into a ritual of conversion and cannibalistic frenzy, and the figure known as the Messiah of Evil returns. Through the taped interviews Charlie left behind, we learn that this Messiah was a former minister and a survivor of the Donner Party, a primal zealot who once walked into the ocean and promised to return to lead his people along the coast and inland as a new religion spreads.

The scene grows chaotic as law enforcement arrives in riot gear, only to be overwhelmed by the tide of the undead. A ranger-style cop bleeds from the eye, turning on his partner; the two officers are consumed by the mob, and the chaos escalates into bloody anarchy. Thom hides, while Arletty confronts a more personal horror: her father appears in a final, desperate visitation, pleading with her to leave and spread the truth about Point Dune to the world. He fights against the pull of his cannibalistic urges, and Arletty—who sees him as both artist and menace—stabs him with garden shears and burns the house to the ground.

Thom returns to find Arletty in a half-crazed state, cold and numb to pain, as if she has crossed a threshold between life and something else. She discovers a spider nesting in her mouth and vomits beetles, mealworms, and even an tiny anole, a visceral reminder of the grotesque transformations sweeping the town. The two lovers flee to the beach, hoping to reach a small boat, but the townsfolk pursue them with inexorable hunger. Thom is believed drowned in the surf, while Arletty survives, though she is captured by the villagers. In a grim twist, she is set free not to return to ordinary life but to become a herald of the movement: she must spread the new religion across California and beyond, a fate that lands her in an insane asylum. There, she spends her days under the sun, painting and dreading the day the Messiah and his followers will come for her again.

The story lingers in a cloudy, atmospheric space where dream and nightmare blur, and loyalty, fear, and survival collide in a seaside town that seems to exist in a perpetual dusk. The performances—touched by the film’s surreal, pop-art sensibility—trace a path from curiosity to dread, from eccentric charm to brutal hunger, and finally to a quiet, haunting endurance. The camera lingers on empty beaches and the silhouettes of silent houses, while the diary’s pages and the gallery’s enigmatic owner fill in the gaps about what Point Dume hides beneath its sunlit surface. The result is a slow-burning, unsettling meditation on faith, cannibalism, and the cost of believing in an order that commands obedience through fear.