ABCs of Horror 3: “E” Is for The Evil Dead (1981)
Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
When you imagine the cultural outline of Sam Raimi’s original The Evil Dead in this day and age, it might not necessarily summon up the intensity that first made the film infamous, earning it the tagline of “the ultimate experience in grueling horror.” This is both a reflection of how our sensibilities as cinema consumers have evolved, inured as we are to ever more shocking sights and sounds, and the steady progression of Evil Dead as a franchise, from serious horror, to increasingly zany comedy … and then back again, at least somewhat. Along the way, though, some measure of The Evil Dead’s originally transgressive and shocking nature was lost, at least in terms of how many of us think of the film today. We’ve forgotten just how fucked up Raimi’s feature debut really was, and not just in terms of the content on screen.
It was hell on everyone making it, for one thing. The “grueling” tagline feels almost like a joke at the expense of The Evil Dead’s harried cast and miniscule crew, all of whom answered to Raimi’s impulsive filmmaking as the future auteur developed his personal style (and new filmmaking techniques) on the fly, following a mandate that made sense only to himself. One wonders why he felt such verisimilitude in the setting was necessary, filming entirely on-site at a small cabin in the woods that was many miles from any other structure. Regardless, it translates to a sense of isolation that is absolutely real–there, in an unfinished cabin with no heat and no plumbing, bleeding from very real cuts and scrapes sustained during frantic scrambles (and spills) through the woods, the cast of The Evil Dead endured the process of making what would become a cult classic. By the time they left, they had burned all the remaining furniture for warmth, according to Bruce Campbell’s autobiography If Chins Could Kill.
It wasn’t a fun camping trip, is what I’m saying here. But for Raimi, who had pleaded and cajoled every family member and friend around to come up with the film’s $375,000 budget, there was no going back. The Evil Dead needed to justify the sacrifices he had made in bringing it to life, and that meant it had to shock and titillate audiences enough to give it the infamous reputation that would drive genre obsessives to theaters to see it.
In that sense, the film was an unqualified success–an intensely gory, squelchy descent into hell as we follow five college students who meddle with a mysterious book in the woods and awake something beyond sanity’s capacity to endure. One by one, they fall prey to the denizens of the other side who infect and puppeteer their bodies, turning the former friends into slavering “Deadites” bent on destroying the living. Once turned, the former humans become nearly indestructible monsters, stoppable only by complete dismemberment. All of which is rendered in unblinking, over-the-top bloody spray by Raimi and FX artist Tom Sullivan.
Today, the memory of that brutal violence has been tempered to some degree by horror geek familiarity with the film’s first few follow-ups–the quasi-sequel/remake of Evil Dead II in 1987, and full-bore horror comedy Army of Darkness in 1992. Both of those films preserve the over-the-top gore, but recontextualize the impact of it, employing madcap physicality to transform the intended effect from “squeamish revulsion” to belly laughs at the absurdly hedonistic application of blood and violence. The quippy nature of those sequels subsequently transformed the identity of Evil Dead as a franchise, building in greater expectation of a degree of snarky humor, which not even Fede Álvarez’s genuinely unrelenting Evil Dead in 2013 could really reverse. This is not to say that Raimi’s 1981 original does not have any sense of humor, but it’s humor of a markedly more bleak and overtly misanthropic vein. There’s a gallows humor aspect to poor Ash being soaked by wave after wave of putrescence as the Deadites around him explode in the film’s closing moments, but there’s really not meant to be anything funny about Cheryl being raped by the vines of demonically possessed trees in what is likely the film’s most infamous moment. The defilement of that moment is every bit as “grueling” as the tagline suggests, and remains so today, more than 40 years later.
Similarly, the more serious, marginally more realistic nature of The Evil Dead in comparison with its follow-ups notably applies also to our beloved protagonist Ash Williams, a character who subsequently grew completely beyond the bounds of anything established here. In truth, it’s not even clear from the opening moments of this film that Ash is meant to BE the protagonist of it–Raimi employs something like Ridley Scott’s misdirection from Alien to frame another character, Scott, as something more like a de facto masculine “hero,” while Ash is decidedly more passive and unsure of himself. You will sometimes see the term “final boy” employed in reference to Ash, but it’s important to note that it really doesn’t fit him in any other installment of the series–by the time we get to Evil Dead II he’s already too confident and assured of his own Main Character status, having became every bit the ass-kicking, quip-making comic book hero. But here in 1981, the term does fit him: Ash is a relatively meek guy who doesn’t seem cut out to survive this kind of ordeal, until he unlocks the barbarous will to survive no matter the cost. His struggle to survive the incarnation of evil in that cabin isn’t treated as a joke. It’s a crucible.
Although it is impossible to fully remove the context of the sequels from this series after four decades, it’s a good exercise to try approaching The Evil Dead from the point of view of a drive-in movie patron of the early 1980s, someone whose idea of “extreme horror” or violence might have been the likes of John Carpenter’s relatively chaste Halloween, or the deeply influential Friday the 13th. For that viewer, The Evil Dead represented an entirely new level of squelchy cinematic delights, a DIY approach to bloodletting that signaled the arrival of a new generation of young, creative horror auteurs who would push the genre into uncomfortable territory, transforming it forever.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.