Messiah of Evil

Messiah of Evil (1975) is an American horror film directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — watch online on iFILM. A woman arrives at a seaside town looking for her missing father and finds a community in the middle of something that has no good name.

Arletty's father stopped writing months ago. His house is empty when she arrives, but his journals are still there — full of entries about a darkness coming to Point Dune and a figure the whole town seems to be waiting for. Marianna Hill plays Arletty as the film drains color from everything around her. Huyck and Katz build dread without rush: a scene in a grocery store at night, another in a movie theatre, both become set pieces that unsettle because of how ordinary the surroundings are.

Huyck and Katz wrote American Graffiti the same year they shot this. The film sat unreleased for two years, then disappeared into obscurity — only to be rediscovered decades later as a clear antecedent of George Romero's zombie work and the slow-burn horror of the 1980s. Stream Messiah of Evil (1975) online on iFILM.