Messiah of Evil (1973)

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 This film answers the all important question that I know has been keeping many of us awake at night: what would have happened if Jean Luc Godard had decided to make horror films?

That might sound frivolous but I can't think of any other way to characterize this remarkable film.  It might be the greatest Nouvelle Vague film made outside of France.  It feels like some strange piece of Euro art-horror, only it (thankfully) eschews the 'artistic' nudity and 'daring' sexual transgressions that that pretty much goes hand-in-hand with the territory.

A woman arrives in a small town and immediately hooks up with some dissolute bohemian types.  It turns out the locals are all vampires, or zombies, or something like that.  There is a lot of nothing happening for ages, and then scenes where things happen but don't really seem to make sense.  It feels like key moments or important dialogue has been carelessly left on the cutting room floor ... And if that sounds like a criticism, it isn't.  It's magnificent.

The directors, husband and wife team  Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, have clearly adapted the visual aesthetic and narrative conventions of the French Nouvelle Vague, creating something that still feels - fifty years after it was released - timeless and modern (in both the common and slightly pejorative, literary sense of the word.)

If you want a reference point, the nearest recent-ish film I can think of is Neil Jordan's Byzantium, his endearing tale of two vampire chicks hanging out in a very, very bleak seaside town.  It's got the same strange combination of ennui and doom, the sense of there being no point trying to fight against whatever is going to happen - despondent nihilism at the edge of the world and the end of time.

Visually, the film is compelling, with wonderfully off-kilter, Godardian framing.  The colour is wonderfully impressionistic, giving the film a surreal veneer.  It's just lovely to look at.  And while for the main part the film proceeds at a leisurely pace, unruffled by concerns such as narrative or viewer expectation, Huyck and Katz know what they are up to, staging a couple of legendary scenes which may render both visiting the supermarket and going to the cinema problematic for some time after viewing.

It's a superb, artful piece of work, almost unique in American horror - a louche, sophisticated charmer that is both stylish, satisfying and scary.

STAR RATING: ****


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