Mabe Fratti x 'Messiah of Evil'

A young woman travels to a remote Californian coastal town in search of her missing father. What begins as a personal quest gradually unravels into a nightmare. Beneath the town’s seemingly mundane surface, a gruesome reality is simmering. (Think: obscure cults, an impending apocalypse, and hordes of the undead.)

Messiah of Evil is a sorely underrated, surreal horror film from 1974. Drenched in an eerie atmosphere and laced with psychedelic post-hippie vibes, it sketches a zombified America — not jolted awake after the death of the sixties, but instead drifting into a lethargic nightmare.

Zombies roam through supermarkets and cinemas that slowly morph into claustrophobic traps. Full of Lovecraftian overtones and strange dream logic, the film is a perfect cross between cult classics like Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead.