October 08th, 2025

                                      Death as ASMR: Or, Sleeping Through Mournful Horror
The other day I saw a weird as shit horror movie called “Messiah of Evil,” made in the early seventies. It was released multiple times, under multiple different titles, one of which was “Return of the Living Dead.” This of course caused the Godfather of the Zombie genre George A. Romero to initiate a lawsuit against the movie as released under that title.
Sidenote: Did you know that Romero and cowriter of the “Night of the Living Dead” screenplay John Russo fought over ownership of the property? This resulted in the weird decision to let Russo keep the “living” portion while Romero was left only to work with the “dead” in his movies. This is why the sequel to “Night of the Living Dead” is called “Dawn of the Dead,” rather than “Dawn of the Living Dead.” It’s also why Russo, when he made his own solo contribution, got to call it “Return of the Living Dead.”
There’s some irony there for you: Romero defended his work’s name only to lose it to his friend and cowriter.
That’s all inside baseball, though.
The movie “Messiah of Evil” deserves to be considered on its own terms, and under its own title. It begins with a young woman coming to Southern California to visit her father, a famous artist. He is something of a recluse, who lives in a large seaside mansion in a town called Point Dune. The fictional town is obviously a stand-in for the very real “Point Dume,” famed as the place where author John Fante resided and wasted his talent writing screen treatments that rarely got produced.
The lady’s father has apparently gone missing from his mansion, leaving behind only a journal in which he records the slow dissipation of his mind, body, and soul. Meanwhile, strange things are going on in-town, some of them cliché horror tropes, some of them less-so. In the cliché column, we have a drunken bum who warns all and sundry that evil is afoot.
In the not-very-clichéd column, there is a strange cross-eyed albino who drives his truck through town, ferrying around dead bodies in the flatbed. He also likes to eat rats and has taken an interest in the bizarre rituals some of the moon worshippers perform at the oceanside. Supposedly the people gathered by the sea at night to pray by torchlight are wedding celebrants, but it is clear that this is no ordinary exchange of nuptials. I figured they were trying to dredge the dread tentacled Yoth-Sothoth or maybe eldritch Cthulhu himself from the depths, but apparently not. Instead, they are trying to bring back the ghost of a cowpoke who, during his own stab westward, suffered hunger pangs until forced to engage in cannibalism. After first eating human flesh merely to survive, he began to acquire a taste for it, and the locals became disgusted by his taboo-breaking behavior and burnt him as a warlock.
Oh, and there are also a bunch of well-dressed, pallid zombified folk who hang around the local grocery store afterhours. What are they doing at Ralph’s past midnight, you ask? Why, they’re simply there to eat raw meat directly from the freezer case. Unless of course, some nosy interloper shows up, in which case they’ll leave the cold flesh in pursuit of warm meat…
It isn’t just the strangeness of this film that stuck with me, though it obviously made an impression. How, after all, could it not? Instead it was something about its melancholy tone, the mournful undercurrent running through the thing. There’s not much suspense, since it’s pretty clear the curse is well-advanced even at film’s beginning. And, as to the mystery, it’s also evident early in the first act that the things that don’t make much sense then are going to make less rather than more sense as things go on. Like in a bad dream where every attempt to find logic on the part of the dreamer causes the thing to change shape and grow more amorphous, less readable.
That’s okay, though, as sometimes I prefer the mystery to abide rather than getting neatly wrapped up. And the sense of doom and inevitability of death—threaded through the warp and weft of the work’s cloth—eventually becomes weirdly comforting, almost like a much-needed sleep…
“Messiah of Evil” belongs to a subgenre of horror film that, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the melancholy macabre. Other entries I’d add to the list would be “I Bury the Living,” the original “I Am Legend,” and “Carnival of Souls.” These are movies that deal with solitary people suffering through strange and probably hopeless circumstances, trying to reckon with forces too powerful to defeat. Sometimes these forces are too powerful to even understand, incorporeal and thus impossible to even fight.
And yet, despite how these films might sound when given in thumbnail synopses, there is something comforting about them. Something about the disjunction between what they seem to offer and the feelings they actually induce. At least for me.
And yes, I enjoy falling asleep to all of them.
I keep asking myself why that might be, and the best I can come up with is this: Sleep might not be Shakespeare’s “petit mort,” (that’s something else.) But for me, the end of the day (or sometimes the middle of the day if I suffered insomnia the previous night) is a time to succumb. Embrace rather than run from that inevitable defeat that’s awaiting us all, and even to find it exquisite rather than agonizing. “Sleep,” as the rapper Nas observed, “is the cousin of death.”
Granted there might be something on the other side of this defeat and death, a spiritual victory occluded by the seeming failure as viewed from this side of things. It’s also possible something even worse than this life is awaiting us on the other side, punishment at the hands of some Lovecraftian or Ligottian (sic?) god who rules the netherworld and has contempt for all us soft bundles of nerves and neurotic consciousness.
I get the feeling, though, that like most of us grasping toward meaning—religion, transcendence, transhumanism—that there’s probably just nothing. A void beyond all blackness…
Consciousness itself torments the characters in these movies, not just its imminence via zombies or vampires or curses. It’s something more inescapable than that, immanent in the fabric of the worlds they inhabit.
As far as we know we’re the only creatures cursed to be conscious, every moment knowing at some level that we are going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it. At best we can delay it.
That’s sad and eerie, but in the same way that moonlight hitting a moss-covered grave can be sad and eerie. There’s an undercurrent of the exquisitely gothic tied up in the reality of the human condition and this handful of low budget weird movies reflects that feeling. A mournful pull toward sleep (both temporal and eternal). A fate usually worth fighting and railing against (even though it does no good), but sometimes also one worth feting, falling into like a much-needed sleep.