Messiah of Evil (1973) is set in a Northern Californian community named Point Dune. The main character is a young woman named Arletty (Marianna Hill), who has travelled there in search of her father, artist Joseph Lang (Royal Dano). Arletty relates her story in flashback from the confines of an asylum:

Point Dune's profound wrongness becomes obvious to Arletty when she makes her first stop in town. She pulls up at an empty, neon-lit gas station, only to find the attendant firing a gun into the darkness to scare off ‘stray dogs’. Within moments of her departure, the clerk is murdered. It soon becomes clear that many of the town's residents are flesh-eating zombies (of a sort) in thrall to a powerful supernatural figure known as the ‘Dark Stranger’.

Jamie Russell situates Messiah alongside other minor-but-worthy post- Night of the Living Dead efforts, such as Jeff Lieberman's LSD flashback nightmare, Blue Sunshine (1977), David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) and John D. Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971), suggesting that these movies insist upon overthrowing the ideals of the ‘Flower Power’ generation: ‘Forming a backlash against the utopian hippie dream, these films all toy with fears about the dangers of mind-alerting drugs and rampant sexuality, while also displaying a stark mistrust of the strangeness of other people.’ Kim Newman, who ranks the film highly amongst the narrow but significant pantheon of ‘post-hippie horror films of note’, observes that it clearly draws from H. P. Lovecraft and George A. Romero.

However, whilst Romero generally structured his zombie films as siege narratives, Messiah of Evil's creative team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (they co-wrote the screenplay, which Huyck directed and Katz produced) keep their coastal Californian dead folks out and about on the streets and in the supermarkets and movie theatres of this otherwise deserted beachside locale.