Messiah of Evil: The Dreamlike Lost Horror of the 70s

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Messiah of Evil is the kind of film that convinces you, watching it at two in the morning, that you have wandered into someone else’s dream and cannot find the door out. It was made in 1973 by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — a married writing team who, the very next year, would help George Lucas write American Graffiti, and who would later take the blame for scripting Howard the Duck. That biography tells you nothing about the film they made here, which is one of the strangest, most beautiful, and most thoroughly mishandled horror pictures of its decade. It was chopped up, retitled, dumped into grindhouses as Dead People and Revenge of the Screaming Dead, and left to rot in ugly prints for thirty years. Restored and seen clearly, it turns out to be a small, haunted marvel.

Surreal Horror - vo.rs

Messiah of Evil: The Dreamlike Lost Horror of the 70s