MESSIAH OF EVIL 1973
Moonlit Hunger – Nocturne for the Lost: Cannibals, Murals, and Madness in Point Dune – The American Nightmare of Messiah of Evil 1973
There’s something in the marrow of Messiah of Evil that resists easy explanation—a narrative that doesn’t just unsettle, but rearranges your sense of what horror can be. This film isn’t content to merely frighten; it orchestrates a blood tide of slow, ritualistic unraveling, where reality itself feels subject to some ancient, unspoken ceremony. The uncanny logic of Point Dune, with its silent congregations and fever-bright murals, demands more than a cursory glance. That’s why I feel compelled to return later on to it—because Messiah of Evil invites a deeper excavation, a reckoning with its surreal, creeping dread that pulses beneath every frame. At The Last Drive-In, I want to give this film the obsessive attention it deserves, tracing its strange rites and dreamlike logic until the full weight of its unease is finally, thrillingly felt.
In the moonlit, half-forgotten coastal town of Point Dune, Messiah of Evil (also known as Dead People, 1973), the story unfurls like a mind-bending nightmare —a hallucinatory descent into American decay, where the boundaries between nightmare and reality dissolve in a haze of crimson and neon. Directed by the husband-and-wife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, whose later work co-writing on American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would cement their place in Hollywood, the film stands apart as a singular vision of 1970s art-horror: disorienting, painterly, and quietly apocalyptic.
From the opening frames, there’s a sense of unease that seeps into the bones. Cinematographer Stephen M. Katz (Switchblade Sisters 1975, The Blues Brothers, 1980, Gods and Monsters 1998) bathes the screen in sickly pastels and stark, sodium-lit shadows, capturing the town’s empty streets, garish gas stations, and the surreal, mural-lined interiors of the beach house that anchors the story. The art design is a feverish collage of Americana gone rotten—walls covered in expressionist paintings of faceless figures, interiors that feel both cavernous and claustrophobic, and public spaces (a supermarket, a movie theater) rendered alien by their emptiness and the lurking, silent crowds that gather at the edges of the frame, like quiet American monsters and night stirring ghouls.
At the heart of the story is Arletty, played with a haunted, inward intensity by Marianna Hill. She arrives in Point Dune searching for her estranged artist father, only to find his home abandoned and his journals filled with cryptic warnings about the town’s transformation. As Arletty drifts through this liminal world, she encounters a pair of eccentric outsiders—Thom (Michael Greer), a self-styled playboy, and his two companions, the ethereal Laura (Anitra Ford) and the childlike Toni (Joy Bang). Their presence is both a comfort and a curse, as together they begin to unravel the town’s secret: a creeping, centuries-old curse tied to a mysterious figure known only as the Messiah of Evil.
Marianna Hill possesses a kind of beauty that defies easy categorization—her features are striking, almost sculptural, with dark, expressive eyes that seem to flicker with secrets and a mouth quick to curve into either mischief or melancholy. There’s an exotic, chameleon quality to her look; over the years, she’s convincingly played everything, even a Greek goddess, a testament to her appearance and remarkable versatility as a performer. Hill’s acting style is equally mercurial—she brings a restless, electric energy to her roles, shifting effortlessly between vulnerability and steel, always imbuing her characters with a sense of inner life that feels both mysterious and deeply alive whether she’s the haunted Arletty in Messiah of Evil, the fiery Callie Travers in High Plains Drifter 1973, or the brittle Deanna Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Among her most fascinating roles, Marianna Hill brings a sly, unsettling allure to Germaine Wadsworth in The Baby (1973), her presence quivering between seductive menace and stinging unguardedness—an unforgettable turn right up to the disturbing film’s final, twisted reveal.
Hill’s performances are marked by a subtle intensity and emotional intelligence that set her apart from her contemporaries. In every frame, she seems to be both present and elusive, a woman whose allure lies as much in what she withholds as in what she reveals.
Joy Bang radiates a quirky, offbeat charm that feels utterly of her era—a pixieish presence with wide, searching eyes and a sly, irreverent smile that suggests both innocence and rebellion. Her look is instantly memorable: tousled hair, expressive features, and a style that captures the restless energy of early 1970s counterculture. On screen, Bang brings a breezy naturalism and unguarded honesty to her roles, often playing outsiders or dreamers who move through the world with a mix of curiosity and quiet defiance. Whether she’s the endearing Toni in Messiah of Evil, the enigmatic hippie in Cisco Pike, or Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), Joy Bang brings her signature mix of innocence and mischief to the role of Rita, one of the high school’s alluring students—her presence both playful and poignant in a film where every smile hides a secret and danger lurks just beneath the sunlit surface Joy Bang’s performances pulse with a sense of openness and unpredictability, she embodies a kind of delicate boldness—at once approachable and enigmatic, her characters linger in the mind like the afterglow of a strange, beautiful dream.
The film’s narrative is less a straight line than a spiral, circling ever closer to the heart of darkness. Through Arletty’s eyes, we witness the town’s slow, uncanny transformation: the locals, once merely odd, become pallid, bloodthirsty ghouls, drawn in thrall to the coming of their messianic leader. The horror is never bombastic; instead, it blooms in the margins—in the way strangers stare too long, in the sudden, collective silence of a crowd, in the sense that the ordinary has turned quietly, irrevocably wrong. The art direction amplifies this unease: the beach house is a gallery of grotesqueries, its walls crawling with mural figures that seem to watch and wait, while the town’s public spaces become stages for ritual and consumption, their fluorescent lighting as cold and unforgiving as Point Dune’s moon.
Several scenes stand out as masterpieces of atmospheric horror. Laura’s fate in the supermarket is a ballet of dread: she wanders the aisles, pursued by silent, slack-jawed townsfolk who emerge, one by one, from the shadows until she is surrounded and consumed in a tableau of suburban cannibalism. Equally striking is the movie theater sequence, where Toni, seeking refuge, finds herself the only living soul in a vast, empty auditorium—until, one by one, the townsfolk file in behind her, their eyes fixed not on the screen but on her, the flickering light painting their faces with ghostly pallor. These moments are wordless, ritualistic, and deeply unsettling, capturing the film’s unique ability to turn mundane American spaces into sites of primal terror.
The chilling theater scene in Messiah of Evil, where the vacant-souled townsfolk silently and methodically fill the seats behind Toni, echoes the unnerving suspense of Hitchcock’s The Birds 1963—most notably the iconic moment when crows gather, one by one, behind Tippi Hedren on the playground. In both films, the slow, deliberate accumulation of threat transforms ordinary public spaces into arenas of unhallowed doom-laden gathering menace — we are forced to watch as Toni’s isolation is quietly erased by an encroaching, unnatural presence. The effect is ceremonially strange and profoundly eerie, choreographed with unsettling precision and unearthly in atmosphere, staged with a cultic precision and steeped in dreamlike weirdness. A tableau where menace multiplies not with sudden violence, but with the inexorable certainty of something ancient and communal closing in. It’s one of those rare sequences in classic cult horror that persistently unsettles, its uncanny force as potent now as ever, it never fails to unnerve me.
As the story spirals toward its climax, Arletty’s grip on reality slips. Her father’s journals reveal the town’s history: a 19th-century preacher, exiled for cannibalism, returns from the desert as the Messiah of Evil, bringing with him a curse that transforms the townsfolk into nocturnal, blood-hungry followers. Arletty’s own body betrays her—she begins to crave blood, her reflection vanishes from mirrors, and her isolation becomes complete. In the film’s final, dreamlike passages, she is driven into the sea by the townsfolk, only to awaken in an asylum, condemned to relive her story for a world that will never believe her.
Messiah of Evil is a film that lingers in the mind like a half-remembered nightmare. Its performances are quietly compelling—Marianna Hill’s Arletty is all haunted eyes and brittle resolve, while Michael Greer, Anitra Ford, and Joy Bang bring a strange, outsider energy that heightens the film’s sense of unreality. The supporting cast, including Royal Dano as Arletty’s ill-fated father, Elisha Cook Jr. as the wine-sloshed neurotic town drunk, with Cook’s signature vibe in this film is that of a haunted, rambling prophet, whose anxious, jittery presence and cryptic warnings add a note of uneasy authenticity to the town’s atmosphere and a texture to the film’s tapestry of decay. But it is the film’s visual and sonic atmosphere—its painterly compositions, its eerie sound design, its sense of creeping, communal doom—that set it apart. Here, the American dream curdles into something mythic and monstrous, and the ordinary is forever haunted by the specter of the uncanny.
DREAM NO EVIL 1970
The film opens with an efficient, quietly ominous establishing shot: a simple wooden sign reads DAVIS COUNTY ORPHANAGE. “We are all haunted by things other than the dead… As Grace McDonald was haunted by a dream. An innocent dream, which became a bridge to horror.”
This measured introduction sets the stage for a story where innocence is quickly eclipsed by something far more disturbing, and the boundaries between longing and terror begin to blur.
Few films from the American horror underground of the early 1970s are as beguilingly off-kilter as John Hayes’s (known for his contributions to low-budget exploitation cinema) Dream No Evil 1970, a bizarre and feverish psychodrama that drifts between reality and delusion with the logic of a half-remembered nightmare. Directed and written by Hayes, and shot by cinematographer Paul Hipp (Grave of the Vampire 1972), the film is anchored by Brooke Mills’s haunted, fragile performance as Grace MacDonald—a woman whose life, shaped by abandonment and religious spectacle, unravels in a surreal spiral of longing and violence.
Brooke Mills possessed a distinctive on-screen presence, her striking red hair and expressive features lending her an immediate, almost ethereal allure.
There was a delicacy to her look—wide, searching eyes and a subtle, melancholic beauty—that made her both vulnerable and enigmatic, perfectly suited to the haunted heroines and troubled outsiders she so often portrayed. Mills’s acting style was animated and emotionally raw; she brought a restless intensity to her roles, whether channeling innocence, fragility, or sudden bursts of desperation. In Dream No Evil, she embodied Grace MacDonald with a trembling sensitivity, capturing the character’s descent into delusion with both pathos and conviction. As Harrad, the tragic addict in the cult exploitation favorite directed by Jack Hill – The Big Doll House (1971), Mills delivered a performance that was both inspired and deeply affecting, while her turn as the unhinged Leslie Dean in Will to Die (1971) aka Legacy of Blood revealed her capacity for wild, unpredictable energy. In The Student Teachers (1973), she shifted gears, portraying liberated photography teacher Tracy Davis with a breezy confidence. Though her film career was brief, Mills left a lingering impression—her performances marked by a blend of emotional openness and enigmatic reserve that made even her smallest roles memorable.
Dream No Evil’s narrative unfolds in a present-day American setting, featuring elements like traveling revivalist shows and small-town California life, all of which are depicted with the fashions, cars, and social attitudes of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The story follows Grace from her childhood in an orphanage through her adult years with a touring evangelical troupe and into the deserts and rural outskirts of California, all depicted with a distinctly 1970s sensibility—both visually and thematically.
Grace’s journey begins with childhood trauma: orphaned and left to dream of a father who never comes, she is adopted by a traveling revivalist troupe. Her adult life is a strange circus of faith-healing tent shows, high-dives into foam rubber, and sexual repression, all under the watchful gaze of her adoptive brother, the preacher Jessie (Michael Pataki), and her fiancé, Patrick (Paul Prokop), a medical student.
Michael Pataki’s Reverend Paul Jessie Bundy in Dream No Evil is a study in contradictions—a charismatic revivalist preacher whose veneer of piety barely conceals a simmering undercurrent of desire and manipulation. Pataki imbues Jessie with a slippery charm, his Southern-tinged sermons delivered with theatrical fervor as he presides over the church’s carnival-like tent shows, healing the faithful and orchestrating Grace’s high dives with an unsettling mix of spiritual authority and personal fixation. Beneath his religious zeal lies a lecherous, possessive streak; his affection for Grace crosses boundaries, shifting from brotherly concern to overt longing, and his insincere piety is matched only by his opportunistic self-interest. Pataki’s performance nails the character’s snake-like duplicity, making Jessie both a figure of guidance and a source of unease—his presence lingering like a bad dream at the heart of Grace’s unraveling world.
The film’s art design is a patchwork of Americana gone sour—dusty Southern California, east of Los Angeles, Inland Empire, that encompasses cities like San Bernardino, known for its sprawl of suburbs, sun-bleached desert and arid, warehouse-studded landscapes, ramshackle farmhouses, and the garish, makeshift glamour of revivalist stages. Hipp’s camera lingers on the emptiness of these spaces, evoking a sense of spiritual and emotional desolation that seeps into every frame.
The narrative’s uncanny power lies in its refusal to draw clear lines between fantasy and reality. When Grace’s obsessive search for her birth father leads her to a desert funeral parlor run by a ghoulish undertaker (Marc Lawrence), she discovers her father (Edmond O’Brien) has just died. Alone with his corpse, Grace’s mind fractures: her father rises from the dead, setting off a chain of hallucinatory encounters in which violence and desire blur. O’Brien’s performance as the spectral father is both lamentable and menacing, veering from stern affection to sudden outbursts of hostility, while Mills’s Grace is a study in unraveling innocence, her vulnerability weaponized by the film’s dream logic.
The film’s most striking scenes are steeped in surrealism and ritualistic dread: Grace’s encounter with the undertaker and his circus-like parade of elderly prostitutes; the grotesque resurrection of her father in the embalming room; the farmhouse jig, where Grace dances for her dead father as he plays a squeezebox, the moment teetering between familial love and something far more disturbing.
These sequences are rendered with a queasy, theatrical intensity—Hayes’s direction and Hipp’s lens turning the mundane into the grotesque, the familiar into the uncanny.
As Grace’s delusions deepen, the film’s structure becomes increasingly fragmented. She murders those who threaten her fantasy—her lover Patrick, the sheriff investigating the violence—believing she is protecting her father, only for reality to intrude in the form of a psychiatrist’s clinical diagnosis. The coda, with Grace sedated and institutionalized, is pure 1970s horror: a woman lost in her own mind, her trauma pathologized and contained, but never truly resolved.
The film’s subtle nods to both Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Hitchcock’s Psycho 1960 enrich Grace’s poignant and ultimately devastating journey, layering her unraveling with echoes of classic psychological horror. Meanwhile, the intermittent presence of the narrator acts as a guide through the film’s blurred boundaries, which tries to ground us whenever reality and hallucination threaten to merge—a challenge that so often defines the most intriguing cinema of the 1970s.
Dream No Evil is not a film that shocks with gore or overt terror; its horror is quieter, more insidious—a slow, ritualistic descent into madness, where the boundaries of self and family, faith and fantasy, are hopelessly entangled. The supporting cast—Pataki’s oily preacher, Lawrence’s ghoulish undertaker, O’Brien’s spectral patriarch—add layers of menace and pathos, while Jaime Mendoza-Nava’s score weaves a mournful, off-kilter spell. What lingers is the film’s atmosphere of creeping dread and its commitment to the surreal, a Lynchian vision before Lynch, where the American dream is refracted through the prism of trauma and longing.
In the end, Dream No Evil stands as a minor but fascinating oddity in the landscape of American psychological horror—a film whose strangeness is its greatest strength, and whose haunted heroine lingers in the mind long after the final, ambiguous fade to black.
