we sit in the sun and wait. we sleep. and we dream. each of us dying slowly in the prison of our minds (11. 181)

Via a recent post on Dangerous Minds, we received a recommendation to pass along of an under-rated, under-seen vintage surreal and creepy supernatural horror movie with Lovecraftian elements to pass along, which premiered in limited-release on this day in 1974 in Paris, Texas. In the film by Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck—having recently finished the treatment for American Graffiti and would go on to Howard the Duck—a young woman journeys to a seaside artist colony to visit her estranged father but only finds his beach house abandoned with only a journal addressed to his daughter, urging her not to search for him with ominous warnings about a darkness consuming the community and to only seek out the local gallery owner. Denying having any commission from her father and hardly knowing him, the young woman encounters a trio of other visitors, collectors with some additional insights, speaking of a “messiah of evil” to return after a century, with locals gathering on the beach to ritually stare at the Moon in a preparation that the is referred to as “The Waiting.” The town subsequently begins to be populated (in spaces that should be considered epitomes of domesticity and safe havens) and shortly overrun by the cannibalistic undead as evangelicals of a fringe religious movement.