The Evil Dead / Sam Raimi (1981)
The most ferociously original horror film of the year. That's what Stephen King said when he saw The Evil Dead in 1981. For context, The Shining was being shot by Stanley Kubrick at nearly the same time. Sitting down to watch this film now, it's almost quaint.
In Act I, we drive up to the cabin with our pals. We get to know them (barely). We arrive at the cabin. Soon the kids find a book full of foreign markings and grotesque illustrations along with a tape player belonging to the archaeologist who last occupied the cabin. They decide to play back the tape, which gives some exposition about the demonic entities the kids will soon face down, and shortly after, recites the passages from the evil Book of the Dead (Necronomicon), awakening the ancient evil.
Five kids. Remote cabin. Isolation. Bad decisions. Ancient evil. The story of The Evil Dead is hardly original, as King described it. Halloween had set a new template in 1978, followed quickly by Friday the 13th; the slasher. A group of kids, hunted by a faceless evil, until only one survives, usually The Final Girl. They hadn't exactly invented the slasher, but made the recipe undeniably recognizable. Before that came Tobe Hooper's stunning The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), which is remembered as a shockingly violent film. Each of these films presents a more restrained, suspense-first approach with gore as a payoff.
With The Evil Dead, young writer and director Sam Raimi executed the template and at 2x speed, and 50x the gore. The film is 85 minutes that feel both like it goes by in a flash while also feeling like it's taking for. Ev. Er. to end. He took the rules of safety and fair play and tenderized them. The films promotional tagline, "the ultimate experience in grueling horror," remains well earned, four decades later.
The cabin-in-the-woods as horror architecture–isolated, claustrophobic, no escape–is largely Raimi's invention as a genre staple. But, what makes The Evil Dead work the best is the way Raimi blends influences and familiar tropes into something altogether novel. He borrowed the archetype of European gothic storytelling–the isolated house, the cursed artifact–and dropped it into the American backwoods. He took the siege archtype from George Romero's The Night of the Living Dead. He added hyper-kinetic set pieces and removed the safety rails.
>I know now that my wife has become host to a Kandarian demon. I fear that the only way to stop those possessed by the spirits of the book is through the act of... bodily dismemberment.
The Evil Dead features a famously awful scene in which Ellen Sandweiss's Cheryl is bound and raped by possessed trees and vines. It's horrible and one of the ways the film fails in some of today's standards. Raimi has said he regrets including it. Cheryl, the camper most reluctant to play the tape, is punished the most violently. It's interesting that the newer adaptations have hinted at the scene but not replicated it, and the films leads have moved from 'Ash' to 'Mia' and 'Teresa.'
Like The Night of the Living Dead and even Halloween, Bruce Campbell's main character is not a hero. He's a normal guy, thrust into an unimaginable scenario that he has no choice but to face down. Unlike those two, the film instructs early on that the only way to solve the problem is to completely dismember his friends and family members. Raimi doesn't spare viewers the agony. The camera observes.
And in this case, Ash is under siege, not by strange monsters, but by his own friends. The very people he spent Act I goofing off with on a road trip. And now, he's got to dismember each of them. His girlfriend, his sister, his friends. These are genuinely transgressive concepts to commit to film, raising the stakes previously set by John Carpenter.
The Evil Dead ends where most horror films begin; with the suggestion that survival is provisional, that the rules don't include a final act of safety. There is no denouement. No reassurance. Raimi made a film that looked its audience in the eye and didn't look away first. That's rarer than it sounds.
Stephen King was right. It just took the rest of horror about a decade to catch up.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
The burning of The Book of the Dead.After Ash has been forced to dismember or incapacitate the possessed versions of his friends throughout the night, dawn approaches. He throws the Necronomicon—the Book of the Dead—into the fireplace. As it burns, the remaining Deadites begin to decompose and disintegrate. The decomposition is extended, practical, and extreme—stop-motion animation combined with latex effects showing bodies melting, collapsing, and rotting in accelerated time. It was technically innovative for its budget and genuinely revolting by 1981 standards.
Own it