Messiah of Evil

Written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who went on to write American Graffiti and the second Indiana Jones, which is not what you would guess from this fever dream. A young woman arrives in the coastal town of Point Dune looking for her painter father and finds the locals slowly turning into something moon-driven and hungry. There is barely a plot, only atmosphere: a supermarket at night, a cinema that fills up behind an oblivious woman, red light where there should not be any. The distributor hacked it to pieces and slapped a dozen titles on it, so every surviving print is compromised, and it is still one of the great American mood-horrors. See it for the two or three set-pieces that people have been quietly stealing for fifty years.