Messiah of Evil, or Dead People, is a 1974 supernatural horror film written, produced, and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. It stars Marianna Hill and Michael Greer, with Anitra Ford, Royal Dano, Elisha Cook Jr., and Joy Bang.
Though a lesser-known film, Messiah of Evil has been generally well-received. It’s wonderfully atmospheric, with beautiful, vividly colourful visuals. It’s been described as “unsettling” by Nick Spacek of Starburst Magazine, having given the film a score of ten out of ten. It was ranked #95 on IndieWire‘s 200 Best Horror Movies of All-Time; they said, “it’s full of iconic and memorable scenes that recall to mind some of George A. Romero’s best work.”
Here‘s a link to quotes from the film, and here‘s a link to the full movie.
As with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Messiah of Evil does a subtle critique of capitalism. We see a satirical commentary on consumerism in the supermarket scene, with the ghouls eating all the meat in the meat section, then feeding off of Laura (Ford). We’re reminded of a similar satire on consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, with the zombies haunting the shopping mall.
Recall that this film came out in 1974, when the same manifestations of political upheaval happened that inspired much of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which came out the same year and also dealt with cannibalism. Early on in Messiah of Evil, we see Arletty (Hill) drive her car to a Mobil gas station, giving us an association with oil in the early 70s, when the oil crisis happened, an issue I discussed in my analysis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Note the tension of the Mobil gas station attendant (played by Charles Dierkop), who is first seen shooting at someone (or some animal, as he seems to claim to have been shooting at). Then, when the creepy albino truck driver arrives (played by Bennie Robinson), the attendant, knowing how dangerous this albino is (with the dead victims in his truck, one of whom has a slit throat and was the chased victim seen at the beginning of the film), urgently presses Arletty to drive away without need of paying for her gas with her credit card. Finally, the attendant is killed by the ghouls of Point Dume (an obvious pun on doom), where she is headed to find her father.
My point is that the 1973 oil crisis marked the end of the post-war economic expansion era, which included welfare capitalism, strong unions, Keynesian government intervention to smooth over economic crises, and a strong push for progressive social reforms. The end of this era also meant the beginning of a reactionary, neoliberal push to the right; these trends have continued unswervingly over the past forty to fifty years, leading to the extreme income inequality and endless imperialist wars we’ve been suffering these years.
The evil spreading from Point Dume to the rest of the world, as is understood to be happening by the end of the film, can be seen to allegorize how neoliberalism has engulfed the world by now. The “messiah of evil,” that is, the antichrist, or as he’s called in the film, “the dark stranger,” appeared a hundred years before the events of this movie, when he returns; so he first appeared around 1873-1874, and has returned around 1973-1974. His first appearance would have been around the beginning of the Gilded Age, a time of terrible income inequality (the “gilding” being a gold covering of a far less valuable material, symbolizing wealth masking poverty); and his second appearance coincides with the beginnings of neoliberalism and our new Gilded Age.
Note how the gas station attendant tells Arletty that Point Dume is a “piss-poor” little town. Contrast this poverty with evidently rich Thom (Greer), in his nice suits and his hedonist mini-harem of women, Laura and Toni (Bang), soon to be replaced, it might seem, with Arletty.
One critic of the film, Glenn Kay, complained that the lead characters’ motivations are never explained in a satisfactory way, especially those of Thom; Kay also said that the titular Messiah is never properly identified. What Kay seems to have missed, though, is what is amply implied, but deliberately not explicitly revealed: Thom is the Messiah of Evil. In the flashback sequences, Greer plays the “dark stranger”; if one looks carefully at him in those shadowy scenes, one can recognize Greer’s tall, thin build, with the broad shoulders, in the black coat and hat. In an interview (<<bottom page), Greer even said he was soon to play “the devil’s son” in this movie.
So the hell that is brought to this town, and from thence to the rest of the world, is the evil of the rich, taking from the poor (Thom is wealthy, coming to the “piss-poor” town of Point Dume.). Recall 1 Timothy 6:10. Also note that the Beast came out of the sea (Revelation 13:1), just as the dark stranger comes out of the sea on a night with a blood-red moon.
In her search for her father, Arletty comes to a motel room and meets Thom, Laura, and Toni. Thom is listening to a dirty, poor old drunk named Charlie (Cook Jr.) tell the history of his birth, and of Point Dume. A hint as to Thom’s unsavoury character is how, instead of answering Arletty’s questions about her father, he rudely tells her to close the door, so he can continue to listen to Charlie’s story without any interrupting noise. Thom is fascinated to learn about Point Dume’s legendary history of the “blood moon” and “dark stranger” because he is intimately connected to them.
Arletty discovers a diary her father has written about his disturbing experiences in the town. His art, often black and white images of men in suits (suggestive of businessmen, or capitalists), reflects the change in his mental state, and like the diary, seems to be an attempt, ultimately failing, at therapy through expressing his pain. There seems to be estrangement between him and his daughter; he’s warned her never to come to Point Dume.
Thom, Laura, and Toni come to stay in her father’s home, where she is, for the three have not only been kicked out of their original motel for their questionable behaviour (we learn that Charlie has been killed), but no other hotel or motel will take them in. Since Thom is the antichrist, the refusal to him and his ‘groupie’ friends of accommodations seems like a Satanic version of the Christmas story, when pregnant Mary and Joseph couldn’t find an inn to stay in for the night, and had to make do in a manger.
Since I am linking Thomas with not only the devil, but also class conflict (he’s a Portuguese-American aristocrat), it might seem odd that he would have difficulty finding accommodations. Similarly, towards the end of the movie, he is fending off the ghouls with Arletty. I think the point is that Thom is hiding his true identity from her, because he has special uses for her…so they don’t kill her in the end. Part of the power of evil is how we have difficulty identifying it.
To give explanatory context to the seeming contradictions discussed in the previous paragraph, consider a few quotes by Baudelaire and Ken Ammi about the Devil either supposedly not existing or being the good guy. Similarly, 2 Corinthians 11:14 says that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” Indeed, in dialectical contrast to the black clothes of the dark stranger, Thom is always wearing light-coloured suits.
Furthermore, while wealthy Thom is largely presented as if he were one of the sympathetic protagonists of the film, many billionaires in today’s world have postured as if they’re friends of the common people: Trump, Soros, Musk, etc., and many of the common people are fooled by this charade. Just as we shouldn’t be fooled by these narcissists in real life, though, neither should we be taken in by Thom, as the mindless ghouls are. Arletty is right, towards the climax of the film, to trust her initial instincts and stab Thom in the arm.
Another example of Thom’s unsavoury character comes out when it’s obvious to Toni and especially Laura that he aims to seduce Arletty. One of the key problems plaguing all human relationships is the jealous competition over who one loves the most…me, or my rival(s)? The prototype of this problem is discovered in the Oedipal conflict over whether the desired parent loves the child, his or her other parent, or his or her siblings. Laura is so disgusted with Thom that she leaves…for this, there will be fatal consequences.
She foolishly chooses to go to town that night by foot. On the way, the albino truck driver drives by and offers her a ride, which she foolishly accepts. He’s playing the music of Wagner (specifically, the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin), whose name he incorrectly pronounces the English way (actually, an innocent goof made by actor Robinson, but one allowed by Huyck, who found it amusing), instead of the proper German way. Allowing the error in turn allows me to indulge in an interpretation of it: I see in the albino’s mispronunciation his limited, working-class education.
Some interesting associations can be made about the driver and his odd choice to play Wagner’s music in his truck (as opposed to listening to, say, pop music, or R and B). He’s an albino African-American, playing the music of a composer who was an old Nazi favourite. The linking of a ‘white’ black man with music associated with Nazism might make one think of Dr. Josef Mengele, who did such things as alter his patients’ eye colour to make them ‘more acceptable Aryans.’ Recall also that fascism exists to protect the interests of the capitalist class against socialism in part by turning the working class (people like the albino trucker) against the left and towards the right, as Trump did with his followers.
Beyond these political implications are other creepy things about the truck driver. His albino whiteness reminds us of that of Moby-Dick, especially in the chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in which it’s discussed how frighteningly unnatural the colour white can be. Finally, the disgusting fellow likes to eat living rats!
Laura naturally doesn’t want to stay in the truck of this freak, so she gets out and continues on foot to the town. She ends up in a Ralph’s supermarket, where she sees ghouls in the meat section eating all the meat like a bunch of gluttons. A number of the men among them, in suits and ties, remind us of the black-and-white men in the paintings of Arletty’s father, which gives us a clue as to what he, in his physically and mentally deteriorating condition, has been obsessed with.
The feasting ghouls all look over at Laura, and deciding that her flesh must be much tastier than what they’re currently eating, get up and run after her. Terrified, she runs, but can’t get out in time to save herself.
A key to understanding how this film is a critique, however subtle, of capitalism is seeing how the ghouls eating the meat in the supermarket, then eating Laura, is symbolic of consumerism. Note that in this feeding, we have a pun on consumer, as both eater and as excessive buyer of goods and services.
One way the capitalist class retains its power over us is by keeping us mindlessly buying things–rather like zombies–so we fill their wallets with money, instead of thinking about how to change the system. Volume One of Das Kapital begins with a discussion of the commodity, the basic unit of our economic system, seen as either a use-value or an exchange value, traded in for money. When our buying and selling focuses on only the things involved in the transactions (money and commodities), rather than the people involved, what results is what Marx called the fetishism of the commodity, which exacerbates alienation.
We get a sense, during the supermarket scene, of this excessive preoccupation with things, with products, over people when we see the greedy eating of not only the meat in the meat section, but of Laura, too, who is thus reduced to meat, a commodification of her body, as will later happen to Toni in the movie theatre scene.
Feminists have often written and spoken of how women’s bodies are commodified and exploited through such things as prostitution, stripping, and pornography. The cannibalistic eating of Laura, whom Thom has described as a model (Ford herself was a model), and later of Toni, can thus be seen as symbolic rapes.
Violence against women, as seen in the cannibalistic eating of Laura and Toni, as well as violence against the poor, as with the killing of Charlie, is an example of what I’ve described elsewhere as “punching down.” The capitalist class wouldn’t be able to keep its power over us if we “punched up” instead. We buy the capitalists’ products (we consume them), and we hurt each other (consuming each other, metaphorically speaking), instead of rising up in revolution.
This punching down connects the black albino listening to Wagner with the zombie-like ghouls eating meat, then eating Laura. Fascism is about punching down–that is, attacking foreigners, people of colour, leftists, homosexuals, etc.–to ingratiate oneself with the ruling class, or in a symbolic sense, making oneself ‘whiter,’ more class collaborationist, more pro-capitalist.
Another example of this film pushing the marginalized into the mainstream, that is, making them conform, is the choice of Greer to play Thom. Greer was known not only as one of the first openly gay actors to appear in major Hollywood movies, but also to act in early films that dealt with gay themes, like The Gay Deceivers and Fortune and Men’s Eyes. So in Messiah of Evil, we have in Greer a publicly-known gay actor not only playing a straight man in Thom, but also playing a womanizer.
On a comparable note, Thom as the antichrist is portrayed throughout the film as a normal man–that is, his evil is normalized. We wouldn’t know he was the dark stranger, a descendant of him, or his reincarnation–whichever–if we weren’t paying close attention. The same can be said about how neoliberalism has been insinuated into our lives over the past forty years without most of us even noticing this insidious evil–it has also been normalized for us. The bogus promise of economic prosperity that the “free market” is supposed to provide is an evil that’s been presented as a messianic cure to the ills of “big government” by such demagogic economists has Milton Friedman.
As for Toni, we can sense that her days, if not her hours, are numbered when she sings the famous first verse of “Amazing Grace,” but stops singing conspicuously at “I once was lost, but now…” once Thom enters the area. Like Laura, Toni is getting sick of Point Dume and wants to leave. She can’t even get entertainment from the radio, since it isn’t receiving any stations. Thom suggests that the bored girl go see a movie (he’ll have Arletty to himself that way).
Her in the movie theatre is yet another example of the film doing a social commentary on consumerism, our tendency to pay for pleasure instead of dealing with our relationship problems, such as her jealousy over his preference of beautiful Arletty. Thus we see in both Toni’s jealousy and her retreat to the movies a reinforcement of social alienation.
She watches a Western called Gone With the West, an indulgently violent parody of the genre. The zombie-like ghouls enter later in a large group; their mindless watching of the film is a social commentary on how so many of us do the same thing–pay to be dazzled by the media, which is part of the superstructure influenced by (and influencing) the base of society, or its means and relations of production.
It doesn’t take long for her to realize she has unwelcome company in the theatre, right from the sight of a ghoul staring at her just before the lights go out and the cowboy film starts. She snaps out of the lull the movie experience has put her in, and the ghouls notice her awakening. Then they, including the albino, go after her and indulge in more cannibalism. It’s as though they were punishing her for having woken up and begun thinking for herself.
Another way the capitalist class keeps us under their control is through that superstructure described above–in this particular instance, the media (movies, TV, the radio, the news,…and in today’s world, social media). The superstructure’s media wasn’t nearly as bad back in the early 70s as it is now–with 90% of American media controlled by only six corporations, who thus have control over most of our access to information (which is now extended to a global network)–but it was bad enough back then to deserve a social critique in Messiah of Evil.
I consider this film to be quite prophetic–whether intentionally so or not–through its symbolism and allegory, it being a film that came out during the huge political upheavals of the early 1970s (the Watergate cover-up, defeat in Vietnam, racial conflict, and economic convulsions), these being upheavals some of whose repercussions are being felt in full flower today; I discussed such prophetic, if you will, filmmaking in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (link above).
The sickness that takes over the people of Point Dume, each with a bleeding eye, can be seen in the context of my capitalist allegory to symbolize how the mindset needed to keep us all subjugated to the new neoliberal order has negatively affected our mental health. We see the world in pain, for we ourselves are in pain–we weep blood instead of tears.
Along with this growing sickness, the ghouls all act as an undifferentiated group, with no sense of individuality. They go to the beach at night, looking up at the moon (waiting for it to turn blood-red) in collective expectation of the return of the dark stranger, an act called “The Waiting.” Similarly, working class people today, far from experiencing the liberation promised after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, find themselves passively accepting worse and worse jobs, with low pay, reduced benefits, etc. They feel like mere cogs in a machine, pressured to work harder and harder, alienated from their work. The limited range of opinions allowed in the media result in conformist thinking among the masses, just like those ghouls watching the cowboy movie with blank faces.
There are moments when the film is outright surreal, such as when insects come out of Arletty’s mouth. This sense of the surreal adds to the disturbing atmosphere of the movie, and it can explain certain aspects of the plot that don’t seem to be properly developed or explained.
An example of such an unexplained moment, one that seems contradictory to my presentation of Thom as the real villain of the film, is when he, walking the streets of downtown Point Dume alone at night, is briefly chased and attacked by ghouls. The shots of the chase and attack are presented in a choppy way, as jump cuts, suggesting a dream-like quality, as if Thom has merely imagined the attack.
No bad person believes he’s evil; the villains of history have always imagined that their atrocities were meant ultimately for the greater good. These bad people also narcissistically imagine themselves to be the victim, rather than the victimizer…so why would Thom be any different, in wanting to associate himself with the real victims of the story? Recall in this connection what I said above about how the powerful and wealthy like to be associated with the common people, sympathizing with their interests. Thom’s imagining of himself being attacked can be understood in this light.
After Thom gets away from his attackers (imagined, as I see them, for surely they’d still be giving him chase if they were real), he stops to catch his breath, and a poor woman appears, begging him for help from the ghouls. He turns away, especially when he sees her eye bleeding. Of course he won’t help her: he’s the messiah of evil who is bringing on these evils, and he wants her to complete her transformation into another ghoul.
Arletty’s eye is bleeding, too, and like her father in his deteriorating condition, she’s beginning to cut herself. It’s around this time that she sees herself in the mirror, with a bug on her tongue, and she vomits out a host of insects.
Two police arrive on the streets, where Thom is wandering, to deal with the ghouls. One of the cops is bleeding from an eye, and the other shoots him in the neck and tries to run away. The ghoul cop then shoots him dead. In the context of my capitalist allegory, it’s easy to see how a cop could be spontaneously bleeding from an eye and becoming a ghoul: cops have historically existed to serve the ruling class; even if a small minority of cops, like the non-ghoul cop, are good people at heart, it’s the whole system of law enforcement that they work for that is the problem.
Something needs to be said about the origin of the “dark stranger.” He was a former minister (hence, his status as “messiah”) and a member of the Donner Party, who were a group of American pioneers migrating to California in a wagon train from the Midwest. During the winter of 1846-1847, they were snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains; some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, and two Native American guides were deliberately killed to eat the bodies. Our dark stranger seems to have derived his taste for human flesh from this grisly episode, and in Point Dume, he’s been spreading his “religion” with cannibalism as, if you will, a new form of the Eucharist.
It’s interesting to consider the murder and cannibalistic eating of the Native Americans in the light of not only the film but also of the migration of the pioneers out west. The migration is an example of settler-colonialism, associated with the genocide of the natives. It’s also related to imperialism, the theft of others’ land to exploit it and thus enrich oneself with it. Settler-colonialism and imperialism in the modern world are also manifestations of capitalism, which further solidifies the connection of Messiah of Evil with capitalism.
Arletty has been told that her father’s body was found on the beach, him having been building a huge sculpture there, but the tide, it seems, collapsed it on top of him. She doesn’t believe it was really his body on the beach, though, because the coarse hands of the body weren’t the same as those of her father’s. It’s later confirmed that her father is still alive, for he returns to his home to face Arletty. His transformation into ghoul is also just about complete.
He tells her the history of the dark stranger, of how he attacked and ate some of the flesh of a hunter who, as he lay dying, tried to warn others of his killer. They thought him delirious, just as many are thought crazy who try to warn people today of the evils of neoliberalism, which has come “to a world tired and disillusioned, a world looking back to old gods and old dark ways, our world.”
Remembering Charlie’s warning, she has to set her ghoul father on fire to destroy him. In his wild mania, he spreads blue paint all over his face and hands; it’s as if he’s making a desperate attempt to be at one with his art to treat his growing mental illness. Her being forced to commit such a violent, fiery patricide can be seen, in the context of my capitalist allegory, to represent how neoliberalism has exacerbated modern alienation, in this case, alienation in the family.
Thom returns to the house the next morning. His frown at seeing her father’s charred corpse can easily be seen as his sadness at the sight of one of his ghouls–his children–killed. Other ghouls are waiting on the glass roof to attack; for all we know, he’s summoned them there. She, screaming in her traumatized state, attacks him with the shears she used on her father before burning him, cutting a big gash in Thom’s arm.
After he lies in bed, resting a while and recovering from his wound, the ghouls on the glass roof break in, fall into the room, and attack him and Arletty. He helps her fight them off, though in a minimal way, and they run out to the beach. Again, all of this would seem to make him look like a sympathetic character, but I suspect his intention is really just to lure her out to the beach, and his disappearance in the water is to lead to an at least implied plot twist, in which he later reappears from the water as the dark stranger with the appearance of the blood red moon.
As he and Arletty are running together along the shore, we hear Phillan Bishop’s eerie synthesizer ostinato in 17/8 time (subdivided 4+4+4+5). The two briefly embrace like lovers: after all, this is part of Thom’s attempt at a physical and spiritual seduction of her.
The ghouls start to congregate at the beach, staring out into the ocean as they’ve done every night, waiting for the blood moon and the dark stranger. Thom and Arletty go out into the water in an attempt to escape the ghouls by boat. He seems weakened from his arm wound, making it hard for him to swim.
According to the Wikipedia article on the film, Thom drowns; but I don’t think that’s what’s really happened to him, though Arletty seems led to believe this was his fate. As I said above, he merely disappears to get ready for his return as the dark stranger, the Beast, the antichrist (Revelation 13:3-4).
The ghouls get her out of the water at night, but they don’t kill her. They dress her in a pretty gown to offer her to the returning dark stranger at night, under the blood moon and among the ghouls’ bonfires. She’s too horrified, I’d say, to say Thom’s name upon recognizing him. Instead, we get a loud, hysterical scream from her.
She’s taken to an insane asylum, and like her father, she takes up painting, presumably as a kind of art therapy to soothe her madness. Trying to warn the world about the coming evil causes one to think she’s insane. Indeed, this evil is so traumatizing, so crazy-making, that all she can do is scream…yet no one will listen.
The film ends as it began, with a return to a shot in a hall in the insane asylum, with light in the middle, where Arletty can be seen wandering, and dark shadows around the edges of the shot. Just as the dark stranger has returned, so has this shot from the beginning returned, a coming full circle…just as the Gilded Age has returned to us today.
We hear her distraught narration, her trying to warn people of the spreading sickness that makes one a ghoul. Similarly today, some of us try to warn people of the growing sickness caused by neoliberalism and imperialism–the alienation and its attendant mental illness, its pressure to conform to today’s ways, as the ghouls all conform to the grisly ways of the messiah of evil. Yet, just as no one will hear Arletty’s screams, no one will listen to our cries of help.
“No one will hear you SCREAM!!!”
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