GOLDEN GRAHAMS

See this if you liked…

Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham unearths underrated classics…

THIS MONTH Lemora and Messiah of Evil

The 1970s were full of micro-budget, one-off, oddity horror movies that looked to play the drive-in circuit and enjoy the kind of success that came to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Bob Kelljan’s Count Yorga, Vampire. In the 90s and noughties, as my love of genre movies took me ever deeper on a labyrinthine quest for obscure titles, many of these films were not available on DVD in the UK, and so I’d have Amazon packages arriving almost daily.

Two of the greatest treasures I’ve ever stumbled upon are Messiah of Evil and Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural. Oddly, both movies were shot by Californian grad students, both are influenced by H.P. Lovecraft tales (especially The Shadow over Innsmouth), and both concern daughters entering dangerous twilight worlds as they search for missing fathers.

Messiah of Evil was directed by husband-andwife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, buddies of George Lucas who wrote the screenplays for American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and directed infamous comic-book dud Howard the Duck. The film favours mood over plot, as Arletty (Marianna Hill) travels to the coastal town of Point Dume in response to her father’s increasingly doom-laden letters. She arrives to find his house empty and the town all but deserted. Waves roll, winds whistle, and when any locals do shuffle into sight, they have the discombobulated air of ghouls or zombies.

Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural is Richard Blackburn’s only film as director, though he would go on to co-write cannibalcom Eating Raoul. Set in the American South (but shot in California) in the 20s, it sees teenager Lila (Cheryl Smith) head into the woods when summoned by her dying father, a gangster. What she finds is a land decimated by plague and, like a spider at the centre of its web, Lemora (Lesley Taplin), a feminist libertine who presides over a fairy-tale world of warring vampires and werewolves (yes, decades before the Underworld and Twilight franchises pitched fangs v claws). Or perhaps it’s all in Lil’s fevered imagination? Our heroine was raised by a baptist preacher (played by Blackburn himself) and now discovers sexual promise and threat in her every interaction.

Both films are clunky and amateurish and harbour pretensions, but both are also gorgeously atmospheric. ‘Nightmares are like dreams perverted,’ intones Arletty’s voiceover at the start of Messiah of Evil, and the somnambulant paranoia that shrouds the (in)action recalls Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr. Meanwhile, two sudden assaults – one in a starkly lit supermarket, one in a spacious beachside home – are the illogical, frenzied stuff of giallo movies, and a scene in a deserted cinema that slowly fills up with ghouls is a masterclass of suffocating tension. Similarly, Lemora narcotises viewers with its soft blue-grey night-time photography, and a tone that conjures up Val Lewton’s RKO pictures (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie) or Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter.

‘People were jeering!’ said Blackburn, years later, of Lemora’s preview screening, and Messiah of Evil likewise met with contempt and indifference. Both are genre masterpieces. I’m so glad I found them. You will be, too.