Messiah of Evil

A woman goes looking for her missing artist father in the seaside town of Point Dune and finds the residents changing: they gather on the beach at night, they crave raw meat, and they are waiting for something to return.

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who wrote American Graffiti and later Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, made this in between, and it is a genuine outsider work: a dreamlike, plotless, gorgeously designed film about a town becoming something else.

The supermarket sequence, in which a woman realises everyone around her at the meat counter is eating it raw, and the cinema sequence, where the seats fill silently behind a victim, are two of the best set pieces of the decade.

It was barely released and fell into public domain, so most prints are terrible. Find a restored one.

Nothing about it is conventional and all of it works.