01
Carnival of Souls
Why this pick
Its dislocated heroine, vacant small-town spaces, and increasingly unreal encounters create the same dream-logic dread and lonely, low-budget nightmare atmosphere.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1973 1h 30m USA
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Messiah of Evil
Horror
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Messiah of Evil, try these.
01
02
Let's Scare Jessica to Death
Why this pick
A fragile woman arrives in an isolated community where welcoming surfaces conceal menace; it shares Messiah of Evil’s hazy uncertainty, feminine paranoia, and mournful rural eeriness.
03
The Night of the Hunted
Why this pick
Jean Rollin’s nocturnal urban nightmare has the same entranced pacing, pale pop-surreal imagery, and sense that identity is dissolving inside an indifferent, predatory world.
04
Symptoms
Why this pick
This elegant, underseen psychological horror favors uncanny repetition, ambiguous perception, and isolated female subjectivity over explanation, matching the film’s languid, poisoned mood.
05
Daughters of Darkness
Why this pick
Its stylized hotel interiors, decadent color, and languorous vampire menace offer a similarly art-directed, off-kilter seventies horror experience where atmosphere outweighs certainty.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
A young woman named Arletty (Marianna Hill) drives to the beach town of Point Dume, to visit her estranged father, an artist. She finds his beachfront house, abandoned. He left a diary in which he addresses her specifically. In it he complains about darkness consuming the town, and horrible nightmares he is having, and implores Arletty to never, ever look for him. His letter tells her to talk to the owner of the art gallery, who sells his paintings. The gallery owner says he has none of her father's paintings, does not sell them, no one ever comes in looking to buy his works, and says he doesn't know where he went. He says Point Dune is "an artist colony" and he only vaguely remembers her father (his paintings are eerie pop art portraits of groups of people in black, white, and gray, standing; the men are always dressed in black suits, white shirts, and black ties, like dead men at a funeral). It is never clear if these are townspeople, or figures from his visions, or both.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Michael Greer
Thom
Marianna Hill
Arletty
Joy Bang
Toni
Anitra Ford
Laura
Bill L. Norton
(as B.W.L. Norton)
Royal Dano
Joseph Long
Elisha Cook Jr.
Charlie
Charles Dierkop
Gas Attendant