A man collapses in exhaustion in a stranger’s backyard, believing himself saved until a smiling adolescent girl affectionately dries the sweat from his forehead before slitting his throat. A young woman catches a ride with an imposing albino man who eats a live rat in front of her, and offers to share the next one if she’s hungry. A painter of psychotronic murals goes missing after sending his daughter a series of paranoid letters. When she goes looking for him, all she finds in his place is a thick haze of dread and madness rolling over the Pacific Coast. Among the writers and directors to forge industry careers in the New Hollywood of the 1970s, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz accumulated perhaps the most fascinating and inscrutable filmography of all of their peers. The pair served as script doctors on Star Wars, wrote Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and split directing and producing duties for a number of their own screenplays, a practice which ended with the release of Howard the Duck in 1986. Concurrent with Huyck and Katz’s first major screen credit (writing the treatment for George Lucas’s American Graffiti), the two made a film for the regional horror market worlds away from the smooth-finish film cultural behemoths that bear their names. Featuring contributions from art director Jack Fisk (best known for his work with Terrence Malick and David Lynch) and experimental filmmaker Morgan Fischer, Messiah of Evil has remained a pedigreed singularity in American cinema, drifting between unaccountably menacing encounters and episodes of present, incomprehensible horror with its own somnambulist logic, and leaving significant mysteries unresolved by its end. Half a century from its genesis, it remains unshakeable, a vision of hell forming in one of the dim sprawls of asphalt that stretches between destinations in America. 

35mm from American Genre Film Archive

Preceded by: “Outer Space” (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999) – 10 min – 35mm from Canyon Cinema