Messiah Of Evil

A woman drives to a fogbound California coastal town to find her missing painter father and discovers the locals waiting for a blood moon and a messiah who comes out of the sea. Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck wrote, produced, and directed this 1974 nightmare — their only horror film — before becoming studio heavyweights: Oscar-nominated screenwriters of George Lucas’s American Graffiti, later writers of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Howard the Duck (which Huyck also directed). Shot like a fever and released under a pile of alternate titles, it is less a conventional zombie picture than a New Hollywood hallucination: supermarket aisles, a packed movie house, an albino trucker eating animals in the dark. Marianna Hill searches; Elisha Cook Jr. and Royal Dano warn too late. Cult, painterly, and quietly famous among people who hunt strange American horror.