A scene from the film, Messiah of Evil (1973)
Directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz
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I first saw Messiah of Evil over a year ago, but it
slipped my grasp. As with William Peter
Blatty's similarly surreal and brilliant The Ninth Configuration (1980), also
viewed in 2013, I was simply unable to write anything substantial about it, at
the time. This scene - which
significantly presents a murder in a cinema (very self-referential) and riffs
on a more famous sequence from Hitchcock's colossal The Birds (1963) - really does deserve to be thought of as one of the greatest of horror set-pieces.
The film, a precursor in its ornate and often fantastical
look to the Technicolor terrors of Dario Argento movies, such as Suspiria
(1977) and Inferno (1980), as well as the nocturnal suburban nightmares of David
Lynch, post Dune (1984), is, for me, one of the strangest and most
compelling America horror movies of the "grindhouse" era. That it isn't ranked alongside films by
Romero, Carpenter, Corman and Craven remains a mystery of epic proportions.
