The Directors of This Wild ’70s Horror Film Became Lucasfilm Heavyweights

The Big Picture

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• Messiah of Evil is a daring and unconventional American horror film that embodies the creative spirit of New Hollywood.
• The film reflects the disillusionment of the post-’60s era, presenting a bleak and hopeless portrayal of counterculture’s struggle against conservatism.
• Its directors, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, would later work for George Lucas on American Graffiti, Indiana Jones, and Howard the Duck.

The year is 1974. Francis Ford Coppola would go on to make history with two films from this year nominated for Best Picture. George Lucas just finished American Graffiti and is deep in pre-production for Star Wars. Chinatown is this year as well. Most film historians mark 1974-75 as the peak and perhaps also the end of a period known as “New Hollywood”, when young directors broke away from the studio system and rose to prominence with independent film. At the heart of this phenomenon were two filmmakers closely affiliated with both Lucas and Coppola, but have unfortunately faded away from the public consciousness. Their names are Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, and in 1974, before they went on to join Coppola’s American Zoetrope and the eponymous Lucasfilm, they made their directorial debut with a little horror film called Messiah of Evil.

Made under a budget of $1 million, Messiah of Evil tells the story of a young woman, Arletty, who travels to an artists’ colony called Point Dume in search of her missing father but finds the town deserted and infested with zombie-like cannibals. Messiah of Evil is flashy, gory, but somehow also poetic and meditative at the same time. Money was hard to come by, and the crew comprises an all-star lineup of creatives who would go on to make some of the most esteemed films of all time. Its experimental tone, piecemeal origins, and unlikely production background make it a surprising emblem of everything New Hollywood, from the era’s explosion of foreign-influenced creativity to the “Movie Brats” system of production.

‘Messiah of Evil’ Is One of the Most Daring American Horror Films of All Time

Messiah of Evil begins with a string of cold opens that encapsulate its strange and almost undefinable style. Starting the film before any opening credits, which is a now-commonplace method popularized by New Hollywood films, is a scene of a little girl slashing a man’s throat, lit in saturated swaths of red and blue. The scene is never revisited again. Then in the middle of the opening credits is a random cut to a two-minute long take of a woman’s silhouette, backlit by a white glow, approaching the camera. The shot is ethereal, daring, and certainly unconventional by Hollywood standards, but it is backed by a monologue that is as nonsensical as it is poetically haunting. These two scenes show all of Huyck and Katz’s strong, contradictory creative impulses: an almost arbitrary editing logic, a mood-driven not plot-driven pace and structure, a schlock factor that can easily be read as B-movie-like camp today, and pure images that are so stark and intense that they feel as if they come from someone’s deepest nightmares. The sparse horror scenes are all the more terrifying for how methodically and patiently Huyck and Katz build them up. They are messy, but they have so much vision and individuality that they could not have come from studio products. The colorful lighting is one of several aspects in conversation with the giallo genre of horror popular in Italy at the time, and one of the defining features of New Hollywood is that the filmmakers were the first generation influenced by European and foreign arthouse cinema. Huyck and Katz themselves credit Antonioni and Godard.

The movie brats generation of filmmakers experienced young adulthood during the ’60s, and as such, many of the films they made were disillusioned or vehement responses to the events of the time. Star Wars was about Vietnam, and Coppola explicitly made Vietnam a hellish road to darkness in Apocalypse Now. Messiah of Evil may not be about Vietnam, but it very much alludes to the societal changes throughout the ’60s and the ’70s. The horde of flesh-eating zombies in the film do not walk in any peculiar gait — their most notable feature is the suits they wear. Thom (Michael Greer), the womanizer love interest disdained by Arletty (Marianna Hill), is also decked in businesswear, while Arletty and her father come from a contemporary art background. This sets up a life-and-death contest between conservatism and counterculture, but what makes this film truly New Hollywood is its disillusionment. This is very much a post-’60s text in the sense that counterculture is not at its vibrant peak, but rather is deserted, literally eaten and consumed, and helpless in its fight against the enemy. The bleak ending offers no hope for the future. While not politically explicit, Messiah of Evil reflects the sentiments and attitudes of the time and that generation.

The Unlikely, Piecemeal Origins of ‘Messiah of Evil’

So who are the masterminds behind this highly idiosyncratic, gory film? That would be Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, a husband-and-wife duo behind some of the most iconic audience-friendly or even family-friendly films of all time. The beleaguered production for Messiah of Evil took so long that it came out after American Graffiti, the first of many collaborations between Huyck, Katz, and George Lucas. Huyck and Katz, now Oscar nominees for Graffiti, did some uncredited work on the first Star Wars film before writing the script for Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom. At this point fully entrenched in the Lucasfilm family, they wrote and/or directed two more films for Lucas’s famed company; unfortunately, they were notorious flops Howard the Duck and Radioland Murders. However, they remain prime examples of the indie-to-studio pipeline, which revolutionized and continues to define Hollywood to this day. True independent film as we know it today was born in the New Hollywood era, and the most notable filmmakers of the era all got their start with micro-budget features, such as Lucas with THX 1138, Coppola with Dementia 13, and Steven Spielberg with Duel. Messiah of Evil would prove to be Huyck and Katz’s start on this journey, before they went on to write or direct films distributed by Paramount and Universal. This model pioneered during New Hollywood still dominates today, especially in the horror genre, in the recent examples of Robert Eggers with The Witch and Ari Aster with Hereditary, just to name two.

What beleaguered the production of Messiah of Evil were the piecemeal financial origins of the film, giving it its true indie nature. An agent-turned-producer friend gave Huyck and Katz $100,000 to make a horror film, but in 1971, funds ran dry before two final scenes could be shot. Seeing their surreal vision was unlikely to be bought by traditional, domestic studios, Huyck and Katz shopped their raw footage everywhere before selling it to a Frenchman, who put the film together. As such, this is the one aspect that separates Messiah of Evil from New Hollywood, an era with supreme emphasis on auteurship: Huyck and Katz did not get final cut privileges or even participate in post-production beyond the rough cut. Yet ironically, the illogical, haphazard quality of the editing remains one of its most treasured aspects. Other behind-the-scenes origins of the film are less sketchy: A name that jumps out in the opening credits is co-production designer Jack Fisk, who went on to have one of the most illustrious careers in his field, working to this day on classics such as Terrence Malick and David Lynch‘s films, There Will Be Blood, and most recently, Killers of the Flower Moon. Editor Scott Conrad later won an Oscar for cutting Rocky, and associate editor Billy Weber also joined the Malick camp and cut masterpieces from Days of Heaven to The Tree of Life. These are just a few of the dozens of veterans who worked on or made cameos in Messiah of Evil. It reflects the band-like nature of many New Hollywood productions that were just groups of friends getting together to shoot a movie.

‘Messiah of Evil’ Remains One-of-A-Kind

Given its troubled production history, Messiah of Evil is far from perfect. Mood can only get you so far when not much happens for a good hour of the film. But it flows with the blood of New Hollywood in its veins, defining the wave as more than just gritty dramas and excessive blockbusters. Receiving a 4K restoration this year just in time for its 50th anniversary, Messiah of Evil presents a vision of horror so extreme and esoteric that it seems inconceivable both before and after its era in American cinema. Even today’s A24 at its most challenging has not come close to presenting something as far-flung. This shows Messiah of Evil as an icon of an era when American cinema reached an unprecedented, unbridled creative peak, never to be matched again.

Messiah of Evil is available to stream in the U.S. on Amazon Prime Video.

Watch It on Prime Video