MESSIAH OF EVIL

Arletty Lang drives to the small coastal town of Point Dume to visit her estranged father Joseph, an artist. She finds his beach house abandoned and discovers a diary in which he detailed his disturbing nightmares as well as strange occurrences in the town. The next day, an art dealer informs Arletty that three strangers staying at a local motel are looking for her father. In the strangers' motel room, Arletty finds a well-dressed couple, Thom and Laura, and their companion Toni interviewing Charlie, a homeless man who explains that 100 years earlier, the townspeople descended into cannibalism once the moon turned red.

Outside the motel, Charlie privately urges Arletty to kill her father, insisting that she must burn him instead of burying him. The next morning, Arletty awakens to find Thom, Laura, and Toni at Joseph's house. Thom explains that they were evicted from their motel after Charlie's body was found half-eaten in an alley, presumably by dogs. Arletty reluctantly lets them stay. Thom, a collector of old legends, thought Joseph might know something of the legend of Point Dume. Meanwhile, each night, a group of people gather on the beach around bonfires and stare up at the moon.

After witnessing Thom flirting with Arletty, Laura leaves the house late one evening and walks into a local grocery store, where she is cornered and devoured by townspeople who are feasting on raw meat. The following day, the police informs Arletty that Joseph's body has been found on the beach, crushed under a large metal sculpture he was building. On the beach, she sees only the hand of a corpse sticking out from under the collapsed sculpture. Later, Arletty reads in Joseph's diary that his body temperature had dropped to 85 degrees, and that he feared he was possessed. She tells Thom that the corpse on the beach is not her father.

That night, Toni goes to see a Western film and is devoured by the other theater patrons, who weep blood from their eyes. As Thom searches the town for Toni, he encounters a crowd of zombie-like townspeople. Two police officers arrive in a squad car and start shooting at the townspeople, but one officer notices his partner bleeding from his eye and shoots him. Undaunted, the undead officer rebounds to shoot his former partner dead, and he and the other townspeople feast on his flesh.

While alone in the house, Arletty finds a spider in her mouth and vomits a lizard, cockroaches, and maggots into the sink. She is later visited by Joseph, who begs her to leave and tell the world about Point Dune. He tells her about the "dark stranger", a survivor of the Donner Party who founded a cannibalistic cult 100 years earlier. He ultimately walked into the ocean, promising to return in a century. Joseph warns Arletty that the "dark stranger" must be destroyed before the moon turns red and he returns to lead his people up the coast and inland. Joseph then attacks Arletty, reluctantly succumbing to his cannibalistic urges, whereupon she stabs him with garden shears and burns him alive.

When Thom returns to the house in the morning, Arletty stabs him in the arm with the shears before realizing he is not a cannibal. As the two flee to the beach, the townspeople follow them. Arletty and Thom swim out into the waves, hoping to reach a small boat, but he drowns. The townspeople capture Arletty and place her on the beach as an offering to the "dark stranger", who emerges from the ocean and frees her, knowing that no one will believe her story. This causes her to be committed to an insane asylum. Each day, all day, Arletty sits in the sun painting, dreading the day the "dark stranger" and his followers come to take her away.

As the blood moon rises, the town’s residents become vampires under the returned 'Messiah of Evil,' and Arletty is left as a sole survivor, her fate sealed by the cult’s spread.

The climax sees the fulfillment of a century-old prophecy as the undead cult overtakes Point Dume, illustrating the inescapable pull of the supernatural over the individual. Arletty’s journey from searcher to prey mirrors the film’s themes of isolation and inherited doom, leaving her trapped by forces beyond her comprehension or control.