Messiah of Evil is a 1973 American supernatural horror film co-written, co-produced, and co-directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, and starring Marianna Hill, Michael Greer, Anitra Ford, Royal Dano, and Elisha Cook Jr. Its plot follows a woman who travels to a remote coastal town in California to find her missing artist father; upon arrival, she finds herself in the midst of a series of bizarre incidents.

[3][4] A young woman named Arletty drives to the beach town of Point Dume to visit her estranged father, an artist.

He left a diary in which he addresses her specifically, complaining about darkness consuming the town and horrible nightmares he is having and imploring Arletty to never look for him.

Arletty meets a visiting Portuguese-American aristocrat Thom and his two extremely provocative, groupie-like female companions, Toni and Laura.

Arletty reads through her father's bizarre journal entries, in which he reveals his body temperature is 85 degrees and mentions fighting his "condition."

That evening, the "blood moon" rises, the town's residents transform, and the titular "Messiah of Evil" returns.

Through a voice-over of Charlie's taped interviews, we learn that this "Messiah" was a former minister and a Donner Party survivor from the late 19th century.

While Thom hides, two policemen in riot gear drive up and fire their guns into a swarm of townsfolk; however, one of the cops suddenly begins to bleed from his eye, causing his now-former partner to shoot him and flee.

Thom returns to the house, where he finds Arletty half-crazed; she is cold, cannot feel pain, and thinks she may be dead or undead.

He draws attention to details such as the vanished father being a death-obsessed painter, the daughter falling in with a group of hedonists, the town people turning into ghouls.

[7] According to author Glenn Kay, one of the key weaknesses of the film is that "important plot points are never clarified" and that the motivations of the lead characters are insufficiently explained.

[8] Newman points out that the strange behavior of the seemingly normal characters adds to the surreal feeling of the film.

[8] Kay finds it problematic that no character reads the father's diary to the end until it is too late to prevent their fate.

They all eagerly await the return of the so-called "dark stranger", passing the time by lighting bonfires on the beach and gathering round them.

[12] Newman believes the era properly ended in the early 1980s, when formula-driven franchises such as Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street started dominating the genre.

[13] Principal photography of Messiah of Evil began on September 1, 1971 in southern California -- including Malibu, Venice and Hollywood -- on a budget of under $1 million.

Eventually the Motion Picture Association of America decided that Romero did not hold exclusive rights to the terms Living Dead, but ruled against the use of the misleading title for Messiah.

[19] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times dismissed the film as a "thoroughly dismal horror picture that is sleep-inducing rather than hair-raising".