The Evil Dead (1981)
The Evil Dead
(1981)
A
largish handful of the films on any “Best Horror” list will constitute
“Romero’s children,” films that have been directly inspired by George Romero’s
landmark “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) which created a whole new, and seemingly
endlessly adaptable, truly Apocalyptic, breed of Zombie.
Actually,
call this one a bastard child, because it clearly owes more to Director Lucio Fulci’s rip-off,
“Zombi” (1978), than Romero’s more seriously-minded Nightmare. Director Sam
Raimi clearly recognized that what made “Zombi” rise to the top of the
derivative pile was its willingness to go fearlessly OTT. And then Writer/Director
Sam Rami decided that OTT wasn’t reaching high enough.
And
maybe, the “Three Stooges” comedies (the trio formed in 1922 and first appeared
in film 1930) were more important than Romero or Fulci. This film has a pretend-straight-face,
but really, it’s a comedy.
The
Makeup Guy on this film, Tom Sullivan, offered some insight, “The theory was,
and I agree with him, is you can learn a lot from bad horror films because they
come up with [good] ideas, but they don’t execute them effectively. One of
Sam’s mantras was, ‘Steal from the best, just make it your own.’”
Film
is always a collaborative effort, but here I think the audience will recognize
that this time around it isn’t just a collaboration of professionals, this is a
bunch of buddies gone wild with the movie equipment and having the time of
their lives. The magic of “The Evil Dead” is its lunatic
every-thing-to-prove-and-nothing-to-lose enthusiasm. Later movies by the same filmmakers,
though they were increasingly more skilled and capable, couldn’t match this
baby’s breathless abandon. Actors often tell each other, “Break a leg,” meaning
“Good luck,” but here it’s more like “Break your neck,” as in break-neck for
the action both in front, and behind, the camera.
Anyway,
on to the plot...
Oh
hell, screw the plot, it doesn’t matter.
Never
before, and never since, has a film that exists for no purpose other than as a
catalogue of novelty gore been so cheerful, so friendly, so good-hearted, in
its over-abundant, yucky, sadism. Even the film’s most famous misstep, when it
extended the novelty-Gore to sexual violence in a scene where a woman is raped
by a demonically-possessed tree, didn’t spoil the fun:
Interviewer:
"Do you regret putting it in?"
Raimi:
"I do. I do."
Interviewer:
"On what grounds?"
Raimi:
"Well, I think it was unnecessarily gratuitous and a little too brutal.
And finally, because people were offended in a way that I didn't ... my goal is
not to offend people. It is to entertain, thrill, scare ... make them laugh but
not to offend them. But, you know, I know that a lot of nineteen-year-olds that
are stealing cars and murdering people.”
But
that scene has, in fact, became part of the film’s legend, and is repeated
(with far more restraint) in the first sequel, “Evil Dead II” (1987, which can
be more honestly described as a remake marketed as a sequel), and then included
in the two-decades-after-the-fact actual-remake which was far more conscious of
sexual politics (2013).
So,
other than the tree-rape, what have we got?
You’ve
got all your friends dying around you, then coming back as horrible, decaying
Zombies with thick face make-up like gobs of rotting oatmeal, and oozing blood,
and trying to kill you (make-up effects by Tom Sullivan). To survive you must
re-kill them, but Romero’s bullet-in-the-head trick isn’t good enough, you have
to completely dismember them with whatever tool happens to be lying around. And
watch out for the severed body parts, because they’re still moving, and still
pissed off. There a pencil-stabbing scene that actually made me cringe more
than the tree-rape. And the possessed girl who chewed off her own hand. And
eyeballs get be gouged out … that’s a Fulci-ism film couldn’t leave that out,
could it?
The
funniest dismemberment involves a Zombie stabbed multiple times, followed by a
chain-sawing, and then it jumps up again when the hero is trying to bury it.
That last bit is also the film’s most sentimental moment, as the Hero, Ash, initially
didn’t want to chop up his girlfriend, Linda, but when her corpse proved
insistent, he discovers it not actually that difficult to. He finally beheads
his one-true-love with a shovel which results in him getting a face-full of
blood spurted from the stump of her neck.
Ash
was played by Bruce Campbell, childhood friend of the Rami and only one of two Cast
members to go on to have major acting career. The 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 that
appeared in the first three films was co-owned by Rami and Campbell. Betsy Baker
played Linda. Campbell and Baker were the only cast members who had significant
acting careers post-“The Evil Dead.”
It's
also quite notable how Zombies are so full of body fluids, not only blood, but
vomit and puss (oatmeal, plus food coloring, plus ground coffee, plus some
other stuff).
Best
of all was a wildly elaborate, charmingly artificial-looking, stop-motion
sequence when the Zombies melt.
Rami’s childhood love of low-budget
Horror movies is evident throughout the film. Among his favorites was Wes
Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977) and the film featured poster a
ripped poster from “Jaws” (1975) in the background of once scene,
so Rami had “The Hills Have…” poster in the background in one scene.
Craven became a fan of this film and in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984)
playing on a TV. Later, referencing “A Nightmare on …” Rami hung the Villain’s,
Freddy Krueger’s (Robert Englund), famous glove above a toolshed door in this
film sequel, “The Evil Dead II.”
Made
on a less-than-shoestring budget of $85,000, and filmed on weekends in late
1979 & early 1980, this is a remarkably laden with special effects (OK,
cheesy effects, but there still was a lot of them). It is the most cheaply made
film on this list with the possible exception of “Blair Witch Project” (1999).
Compare that tiny amount to the legendarily cheap “Blood and Black Lace” (1964)
and “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) costing $150,000 & $115,000
respectively. Now remember, those films were also twenty years older, so adjust
for inflation. “Evil Dead’s” economics are as epic as the film itself.
Raimi had no formal training in filmmaking and
had to figure things out as he went along. The filming has been referred to as
a "comedy of errors." The first day of shooting, the crew and cast
got lost in the woods. There were a number of injuries, but because of the cabin's
remoteness, securing medical assistance was difficult. Rami, and the
low-budget, was responsible for those injuries. The Zombies had white-eyes, but
this was before the days of soft-contact lenses, so (quoting Sullivan) “it was like putting a
silver dollar under your eyelids. All the sterile solution went quickly, and
since they didn’t have clean water on the set, they used coffee instead. The
girls were blind when they wore their blank white contacts. But they were all
troopers. Everyone played along like it was nothing.”
At one-point,
poor Actor Baker had her eye lashes ripped out during removal of her face-mask.
Towards the end of the filming (which took weeks longer than predicted so it
brought them deeper and deeper into the winter months) the cast and crew began
burning the cabin’s furniture to stay warm and went days without showering
because of risks that would involve in the freezing conditions.
Raimi’s
directorial style was maniacal, with vertigo-inducing camera work followed by
long, taunt pauses. As he could not afford a camera dolly so they jury-rigged
new film technology, like the "vas-o-cam," a camera on a board slid
down a long wooden platform to create a more fluid sense of motion. But the
greatest innovation was the "Shaki-Cam" also known as the “Unsteadicam”
in which the camera was secured to a 2X4 with two crew members holding either
end and running as fast as they could; this was used in POV shots of the
invisible demon rushing through the woods and was a way around the fact that
renting “Steadicam,” a then five-year-old technology, was more expensive than
the film’s entire budget.
Maybe
there’s more to this story. According to FX-Make-up Guy Sullivan Raimi “told us to
lie about how it was shot. He wanted us to tell a story that we created the
Shaki-Cam footage with a motorcycle, Sam was on the handlebars, that we smashed
through the doors, ran into Bruce and broke his arm, a leg, and one of his
ribs! That was Sam. Even on the set he was trying to help build the myth of the
making of the film.”
Given what
it was, “Evil Dead” received shockingly good reviews, even from Critics who had
a reputation for being Horror-adverse. The most important review to got came
from Novelist Stephen King, who saw the movie at a festival and raved, "The
most ferociously original horror film of the year." That review earned the
marginal film by an unknown film maker a distributor.
The
irrepressible humor gained much, but not most, of the praise, it was the
amazing camera work that really wowed people. The “unsteadicam,” specifically,
made this film a landmark, and was borrowed by Raimi’s long-time friend and collaborator,
Joel Coen who was an assistant film editor on this movie. Soon, Joel Cohen and his
brother Ethan applied it to the even-more-honored “Blood Simple” (1984). Rami
and Joel Cohen remain close, though when this film was made, Rami’s impression
of Joel Cohen was "weird ... long-, greasy-haired guy that I thought was going
to rip [me] off or something."
As
happens too often, a boldly inventive film generates a franchise of diminishing
returns. Here, at least, what followed kept it sense of fun, remaining
tolerable even though, eventually, that fun was strained just a little bit more:
“The Evil Dead II” (1987) a remake disguised as a sequel
written by Rami’s College friend Scott
Spiegel. It was very funny,
and had stopped pretending it wasn’t a comedy, adding a number of memorable
one-liners to the already ridiculous enterprise. A bit of celebrity gossip, the
Character of Linda needed a new Actress because
Ms. Baker got pregnant. That child probably changed Bakers whole life (sarcasm)
because she missed-out on a hit, and though her post-“Evil Dead” resume has
been significant, she sadly, mostly, plays in far more respectable stuff now (again,
sarcasm). Her replacement, Denise Bixler, enjoyed
her debut role in the hit sequel, but then quit acting to marry another Actor, Steve
Guttenberg in 1988 (they divorced in 1992, but I’ll not be sarcastic about that).
So, the third film required a third actress, Bridget Fonda, in the third film.
With the reboot, Character Linda is replaced with Natalie, played by Elizabeth
Blackmore.
The third film, “Army of Darkness” (1992) easily could’ve been a wholly unrelated film, being set mostly in 14th c. England with the most bizarre take on Arthurian Mythos I’ve ever seen, and only Campbell being the only carried-over character of the two prior films (well, virtually the only surviving character as well) and he's still driving the same car, a Oldsmobile Delta 88 (that must be Rami's favority make and model as it appears in virtually all his films). I’ve read that this installment was supposed to be the first film but there was no money to make a period piece.
“My
Name Is Bruce” (2008) is a spoof-of-a-spoof and a gimmick movie. Campbell plays
a fictional version of himself, a coward and a cad, is mistaken by a bunch of
dumb hicks for his character Ashe. He gets pressured into a battle with a
Supernatural Evil.
Like
“Night of the Living Dead” spawned “Zombi,” a so-called “sequel” wholly
unrelated to the creative team and franchise of the original film, “Evil Dead” has
had no less than five Italian pseudo-sequels. I haven’t seen any of these.
There
was an officially-licensed remake in 2013 which I haven’t seen, and am
suspicious of, because the new creative team chose to ditch the original’s
silliness, but I must admit received surprisingly good reviews.
And
a TV series on Cable “Ash vs Evil” (first aired 2015) which I also haven’t seen.
BUT
THAT’S NOT ALL!!!!!
The
most important entry into the franchise was “Evil Dead: The Musical” (2003)
performed live in Toronto, New York and Las Vegas with a 100 seat “spatter
zone” wherein the audience is advised to wear rain coats.
Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXpjFAisVvY
And
because I know you can’t live without it, music from the live stage play:
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