After receiving a series of strange and mysterious letters from her reclusive father, Arletty decides to head to his current locale, Pointe Dune, a small seaside town, in an attempt to understand her father's seemingly increasing madness. Upon arrival, Arletty finds her father's home empty with no clues to his whereabouts. While finding her bearings, she meets a trio of individuals who are investigating the local legend known as 'The Blood Moon' - an ancient curse that is believed to transform the local inhabitants into zombie-type creatures. Arltetty is reluctant to accept that anything supernatural is going on, but as she begins to read through more of her father's old journals, Arletty begins to suspect that something supernatural may be responsible for her father's disappearance. To classify Willard Huyck's Messiah of Evil as simply a zombie film is a gross understatement, as the film uses the tropes of the Zombie genre to create a unique and compelling horror film that relies heavily on atmosphere to create an overwhelming sense of dread. The film wastes no time injecting itself with atmospheric weirdness, introducing a off-kilter, ominous energy from the very start that is at first off-putting, due to its stilted-ness, but eventually intoxicating. Reminiscent of another highly underrated horror/thriller, Jeff Lieberman's Blue Sunshine, Messiah of Evil has a voyeuristic quality to its horror, giving off this ominous feeling that Arletty and her new-found group of friends are always being watched. The problem with so many zombie films these days is they simply don't understand the true terror this voyeuristic quality can have, the slow tension it creates and the power in the inevitability. In fact, that is what makes Messiah of Evil so engaging, this sense of inevitability, where it becomes increasingly clear that it's only a matter of time until Arletty suffers a similar fate to her father. This quality is groomed beautifully throughout Messiah of Evil through juxtaposition, as the film uses Arletta's father's voiceover to create a nice dichotomy between father and daughter, showing how she is experiencing the same slow descent as her father did before her. I really liked how in Messiah of Evil the transition to blood-sucker is gradual, with Arletta slowly beginning to realize she is losing sensory functions. This slow loss of sense and any ability to feel pain that Arletta experiences is just another great example of how the film slowly and methodically creeps towards its inevitably horrifying conclusion. Valuing a genuine atmosphere and tension over cheap thrills or graphic violence, Willard Huyck is a one-of-a-kind horror film that taps into the primal sense of unstoppable doom that made the zombie genre so beloved in the first place.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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