Radiance Films, with domestic sales and distribution
expertise provided by MVD Entertainment Group, has its own entry in the forthcoming
Halloween promotional season … a season that genre fans look forward to each
year with keen anticipation.
This one is a keeper! This would be a new 4K film restoration of the
best-surviving film elements (Academy Film Archive) of the husband and wife
writing and directing team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s 1973 horror classic,
The Messiah of Evil.
Sometime in the summer of 1971, Willard Huyck hooked
up with some business associates down in Texas and they came up with the
financing for a film that Huyck and Katz would write and direct. Sometime in the early fall of that same year
production began in California and at some point it wrapped, but nothing came
of the film — perhaps funding dried up.
Skip ahead to 1973 and the surprise summer hit, American
Graffiti (connecting the dots yet?),
which was written by Huyck and Katz … directed by George Lucas, who was Huyck’s
classmate at USC. How American
Graffiti got made is another story, but
let’s just say that when you make a film for something like a million dollars
and it grosses in the neighborhood of $140 million, lots and lots and lots of
doors suddenly open up.
The Messiah of Evil
resurfaces and gets a limited theatrical release in 1975 … and then resurfaces
again and again under different name — Return of
the Living Dead, Revenge of the Screaming Dead, Night of the Damned and Dead People.
With that sort of track record, you might suspect
that it would just quietly disappear.
Instead, over the years the film has developed a following … cult status,
if you will.
So, what does Radiance Films have lined up for the Oct.
24 limited edition Blu-ray release of The
Messiah of Evil?
We begin with commentary by critics and horror
experts Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower, a vintage interview with Huyck by Mike
White (“Projection Booth Podcast”) a “visual essay” by Kat Ellinger and a newly-prepared
documentary on the film (details to follow).
