Psycho's Movie Reviews #334: Evil Dead (1981)

Evil Dead is a 1981 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Sam Raimi, produced by Robert Tapert and executive produced by Raimi, Tapert, and Bruce Campbell, who also starred alongside Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManicor, Betsy Baker and Theresa Tilly. The film focuses on five college students vacationing in an isolated cabin in a remote wooded area. After they find an audio tape that, when played, releases a legion of demons and spirits, four members of the group suffer from demonic possession, forcing the fifth member, Ash Williams (Campbell), to survive an onslaught of increasingly gory mayhem.

Raimi, Tapert, Campbell and their friends produced the short film Within the Woods as a proof of concept to build the interest of potential investors, which secured US$90,000 to begin work on The Evil Dead. Principal photography took place on location in a remote cabin located in Morristown, Tennessee, in a difficult filming process that proved extremely uncomfortable for the cast and crew; the film's extensive prosthetic makeup effects and stop-motion animations were created by artist Tom Sullivan. The completed film attracted the interest of producer Irvin Shapiro, who helped screen the film at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Horror author Stephen King gave a rave review of the film, which resulted in New Line Cinema acquiring its distribution rights.

The Evil Dead grossed $2.4 million in the US and between $2.7 and $29.4 million worldwide. Both early and later critical reception were universally positive; in the years since its release, the film has developed a reputation as one of the most significant cult films, cited among the greatest horror films of all time and one of the most successful independent films. It launched the careers of Raimi, Tapert, and Campbell, who have continued to collaborate on several films together, such as Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy.

The Evil Dead spawned a media franchise, beginning with two direct sequels written and directed by Raimi, Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992), a fourth film, Evil Dead (2013), which serves as a soft reboot and continuation, and a follow-up TV series, Ash vs Evil Dead, which aired from 2015 to 2018; the franchise also includes video games and comic books. The film's protagonist Ash Williams is also considered to be a cultural icon.

Plot

Five Michigan State University students – Ash Williams, his girlfriend Linda, his sister Cheryl, their friend Scott and Scott's girlfriend Shelly – vacation at an isolated cabin in rural Tennessee. Approaching the cabin, the group notices the porch swing move on its own but suddenly stop as Scott grabs the doorknob. While Cheryl draws a picture of a clock, the clock stops, and she hears a faint, demonic voice tell her to "join us". Her hand becomes possessed, turns pale and draws a picture of a book with a demonic face on its cover. Although shaken, she does not mention the incident.

When the cellar trapdoor flies open during dinner, Shelly, Linda, and Cheryl remain upstairs as Ash and Scott investigate the cellar. They find the Naturom Demonto, a Sumerian version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, along with an archaeologist's tape recorder, and they take the items upstairs. Scott plays a tape of incantations that resurrect a demonic entity. Cheryl yells for Scott to turn off the tape recorder, and a tree branch breaks one of the cabin's windows. Later that evening, an agitated Cheryl goes into the woods to investigate strange noises, where she is attacked and raped by demonically possessed trees. When she manages to escape and returns to the cabin bruised and anguished, Ash agrees to take her back into town, only to discover that the bridge to the cabin has been destroyed. Cheryl panics as she realizes that they are now trapped and the demonic entity will not let them leave. Back at the cabin, Ash listens to more of the tape, learning that the only way to kill the entity is to dismember a possessed host. As Linda and Shelly play spades, Cheryl correctly calls out the cards, succumbs to the entity, and levitates. In a raspy, demonic voice, she demands to know why they disturbed her sleep and threatens to kill everyone. She stabs Linda in the ankle with a pencil and throws Ash into a shelf. Scott knocks Cheryl into the cellar and locks her inside.

Everyone fights about what to do. Having become paranoid upon seeing Cheryl's demonic transformation, Shelly lies down in her room but is drawn to look out of her window, where a demon crashes through and attacks her, turning her into a Deadite. She attacks Scott before he manages to throw her into the fireplace and then stab her in the back with a Sumerian dagger, apparently killing her. When she reanimates, Scott dismembers her with an axe and buries the remains. Shaken by the experience, he leaves to find a way back to town. He shortly returns mortally wounded from the possessed trees, and dies while warning Ash that the trees will not let them escape alive. When Ash checks on Linda, he is horrified to find that she has become possessed. She attacks him, but he stabs her with the Sumerian dagger. Unwilling to dismember her, he buries her instead. She revives and attacks him, forcing him to decapitate her with a shovel and retreat to the cabin.

Back inside, Ash discovers that Cheryl has escaped the cellar. Cheryl manages to elude Ash for a while, culminating in her attempting to choke Ash. Ash manages to escape her grasp, and then shoots Cheryl in the jaw. As Ash is barricading the door, Scott reanimates into a Deadite. Scott attacks Ash, and inadvertently knocks the Naturom Demonto close to the fireplace. Ash gouges Scott's eyes out and pulls a tree branch from Scott's stomach, causing him to bleed out and fall to the ground. Cheryl breaks through the barricade and knocks Ash to the floor. As Scott and Cheryl continue to attack Ash on the ground, Ash manages to grab the Naturom Demonto and throws it into the fireplace. While the book burns, the Deadites freeze in place, then begin to rapidly decompose. Large appendages burst from both corpses, covering Ash in blood. Dawn breaks, and Ash stumbles outside.

As Ash walks away from the cabin, an unseen entity moves rapidly through the forest, rushes through the cabin, and attacks him from behind.

Production

Background and Writing

Raimi and Campbell grew up together, and have been friends from an early age. The duo made several low-budget Super 8 mm film projects together. Several were comedies, including Clockwork and It's Murder! Shooting a suspense scene in It's Murder! inspired them to approach careers in the horror genre; after researching horror cinema at drive-in theatres, Raimi was set on directing a horror film, opting to shoot a proof of concept short film - described by the director as a "prototype" - that would attract the interest of financiers, and use the funds raised to shoot a full-length project. The short film that Raimi created was called Within the Woods, which was produced for $1,600. For The Evil Dead Raimi required over $100,000.

To generate funds to produce the film, Raimi approached Phil Gillis, a lawyer to one of his friends. Raimi showed him Within the Woods, and although Gillis was not impressed by the short film, he offered Raimi legal advice on how to produce The Evil Dead. With his advice in mind, Raimi asked a variety of people for donations, and even eventually "begged" some. Campbell had to ask several of his own family members, and Raimi asked every individual he thought might be interested. He eventually raised enough money to produce a full-length film, though not the full amount he originally wanted. Raimi said the film cost $375,000.

With enough money to produce the film, Raimi and Campbell set out to make what was then titled Book of the Dead, a name inspired by Raimi's interest in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The film was supposed to be a remake of Within the Woods, with higher production values and a full-length running time. Raimi turned 20 just before shooting began, and he considered the project his "rite of passage".

Pre-Production and Casting

Raimi asked for help and assistance from several of his friends and past collaborators to make The Evil Dead. Campbell offered to produce the film alongside Tapert, and was subsequently cast as Ash Williams, the main character, since his producing responsibilities made him the only actor willing to stay during the production's entirety. To acquire more actors for the project, Raimi put an ad in The Detroit News. Betsy Baker was one of the actresses who responded, and Ellen Sandweiss, who appeared in Within the Woods, was also cast. The crew consisted almost entirely of Raimi and Campbell's friends and family. The special make-up effects artist for Within the Woods, Tom Sullivan, was brought on to compose the effects after expressing a positive reaction to working with Raimi. He helped create many of the film's foam latex and fake blood effects, and added coffee as an extra ingredient to the traditional fake blood formula of corn syrup and food colouring.

Without any formal assistance from location scouts, the cast had to find filming locations on their own. The crew initially attempted to shoot the film in Raimi's hometown of Royal Oak, Michigan, but instead chose Morristown, Tennessee, as it was the only state that expressed enthusiasm for the project. The crew quickly found a remote cabin located several miles away from any other buildings. During pre-production, the 13 crew members had to stay at the cabin, leading to several people sleeping in the same room. The living conditions were notoriously difficult, with several arguments breaking out between crew members.

Steve Frankel was the only carpenter on set, which made him the art direction's sole contributor. For exterior shots, Frankel had to produce several elaborate props with a circular saw. Otherwise, the cabin mostly remained the way it was found during production. The cabin had no plumbing, but phone lines were connected to it.

Principal Photography

The film was made on Kodak 16mm film stock with a rented camera. The inexperienced crew made filming a "comedy of errors". The first day of filming led to them getting lost in the woods during a scene shot on a bridge. Several crew members were injured during the shoot, and because of the cabin's remoteness, securing medical assistance was difficult. One notably gruesome moment on set involved ripping off Baker's eyelashes during removal of her face-mask. Because of the low budget, contact lenses as thick as glass had to be applied to the actors to achieve the "demonic eyes" effect. The lenses took 10 minutes to apply, and could only be left on for about 15 minutes because eyes could not "breathe" with them applied. Campbell later commented that to get the effect of wearing these lenses, they had to put "Tupperware" over their eyes.

Raimi developed a sense of mise en scène, coming up with ideas for scenes at a fast rate. He had drawn several crude illustrations to help him break down the flow of scenes. The crew was surprised when Raimi began using Dutch angles during shots to build atmosphere during scenes. To accommodate Raimi's style of direction, several elaborate, low-budget rigs had to be built, since the crew could not afford a camera dolly. One involved the "vas-o-cam", which relied on a mounted camera that was slid down long wooden platforms to create a more fluid sense of motion.

A camera trick used to emulate a Steadicam inexpensively was the "shaky cam", which involved mounting the camera to a piece of wood and having two camera operators sprint around the swamp. During scenes involving the unseen force in the woods watching the characters, Raimi had to run through the woods with the makeshift rig, jumping over logs and stones. This often proved difficult due to mist in the swamp. The film's final scene was shot with the camera mounted to a bike, while it was quickly driven through the cabin to create a seamless long take.

Raimi had been a big fan of The Three Stooges during his youth, which inspired him to use "Fake Shemps" during production. In any scene that required a background shot of a character, he used another actor as a substitute if the original actor was preoccupied. During a close-up involving Richard DeManicor's hand opening a curtain, Raimi used his own hand in the scene since it was more convenient. His brother Ted Raimi was used as a "Fake Shemp" in many scenes when the original actor was either busy or preoccupied.

Raimi enjoyed "torturing" his actors. Raimi believed that to capture pain and anger in his actors, he had to abuse them a little at times, saying, "if everyone was in extreme pain and misery, that would translate into a horror". Producer Robert Tapert agreed with Raimi, commenting that he "enjoyed when an actor bleeds." While shooting a scene with Campbell running down a hill, Campbell tripped and injured his leg. Raimi enjoyed poking Campbell's injury with a stick he found in the woods. Because of the copious amounts of blood in the film, the crew produced gallons of fake blood with Karo corn syrup. It took Campbell hours to remove the sticky substance from himself. Several actors had inadvertently been stabbed or thrown into objects during production. During the last few days on set, the conditions had become so extreme the crew began burning furniture to stay warm. Since at that point only exterior shots needed to be filmed, they burned nearly every piece of furniture left. Several actors went days without showering, and because of the freezing conditions, several caught colds and other illnesses. Campbell later described the filming process as nearly "twelve weeks of mirthless exercise in agony", though he allowed that he did manage to have fun while on set. On January 23, 1980, filming was finished and almost every crew member left the set to return home, with Campbell staying with Raimi. While looking over the footage that had been shot, Raimi discovered that a few pick-ups were required to fill in missing shots. Four days of re-shoots were then done to complete the film. The final moment involved Campbell having "monster-guts" splattered on him in the basement.

Summing up the production decades later, Campbell remarked, "It's low-budget, it's got rough edges," but even so, "there are parts of that movie that are visually stunning."

Editing

After the extensive filming process, Raimi had a "mountain of footage" that he had to put together. He chose a Detroit editing association, where he met Edna Paul, to cut the film. Paul's assistant was Joel Coen of the Coen brothers, who helped with the film's editing. Paul edited a majority of the film, although Coen edited the shed sequence. Coen had been inspired by Raimi's Within the Woods and liked the idea of producing a prototype film to help build the interest of investors. Joel used the concept to help make Blood Simple with his brother Ethan, and he and Raimi became friends following the editing process.

The film's first cut ran at around 117 minutes, which Campbell called an impressive achievement in light of the 65-minute length of the screenplay. The cut scenes were to focus on the main character's lamentation of not being able to save the victims from their deaths, but was edited down to make the film less "grim and depressing" and to be a more marketable 85 minutes. Raimi was inspired by the fact that Brian De Palma was editing his own film Blow Out with John Travolta at the same sound facility. One of the most intricate moments during editing was the stop-motion animation sequence where the corpses "melted", which took hours to cut properly. The film had unique sounds that required extensive recording from the crew. Several sounds were not recorded properly during shooting, which meant the effects had to be redone in the editing rooms. Dead chickens were stabbed to replicate the sounds of mutilated flesh, and Campbell had to scream into a microphone for several hours.

Much like Within the Woods, The Evil Dead needed to be blown up to 35mm, then the industry standard, to be played at movie theatres. The relatively large budget made this a much simpler process with The Evil Dead than it had been with the short film.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Because of its large promotional campaign, the film performed above expectations at the box office. However, the initial domestic gross was described as "disappointing." The movie opened in 15 theatres and grossed $108,000 in its opening weekend. Word of mouth later spread, and the film became a "sleeper hit". It grossed $2,400,000 domestically, nearly eight times its production budget. Sources differ as to whether it grossed $261,944 overseas, for a worldwide gross of $2,661,944, or $27 million overseas, for a worldwide gross of $29.4 million. Raimi said in 1990 that the film "did very well overseas and did very poorly domestically" and that its investors earned a return of "about five times their initial investment."

Upon its release, contemporary critical opinion was largely positive. Bob Martin, editor of Fangoria, reviewed the film before its formal premiere and proclaimed that it "might be the exception to the usual run of low-budget horror films". He followed up on this praise after the film's premiere, stating: "Since I started editing this magazine, I have not seen any new film that I could recommend to our readers with more confidence that it would be loved, embraced and hailed as a new milestone in graphic horror". The Los Angeles Times called the film an "instant classic", proclaiming it as "probably the grisliest well-made movie ever." In a 1982 review, staff from the trade magazine Variety wrote that the film "emerges as the ne plus ultra of low-budget gore and shock effect", commenting that the "powerful" and inventive camerawork was key to creating a sense of dread.

British press for the film was positive; Kim Newman of Monthly Film Bulletin, Richard Cook of NME, and Julian Petley of Film and Filming all gave the film good reviews during its early release. Petley and Cook compared the film to other contemporary horror films, writing that the film expressed more imagination and "youthful enthusiasm" than an average horror film. Cook described the camera work by Raimi as "audacious", stating that the film's visceral nature was greatly helped by the style of direction. Woolley, Newman, and several critics complimented the film for its unexpected use of black comedy, which elevated the film above its genre's potential trappings. All three critics compared the film to the surrealistic work of Georges Franju and Jean Cocteau, noting the cinephilic references to Cocteau's film Orpheus. Writer Lynn Schofield Clark in his novel From Angels to Aliens compared the film to better-known horror films such as The Exorcist and The Omen, citing it as a key supernatural thriller.

Budget $375,000

Box office $2.7 million (or) $29.4 million

My Review

Sam Raimi's acclaimed horror debut is certainly not for the faint of heart. As the advertising slogan goes, what many consider to be "the ultimate experience in gruelling terror" is a gripping, frightening, gory roller-coaster ride through all manner of unbelievable and scary happenings. I actually think the first half hour of this film is the best, just before all hell breaks loose and the special effects guys have a field day. The first half hour is the set up, an atmospheric sequence full of dark shadows, spooky cellars and the eerie isolation of a remote cabin in the woods - the film manages to tap into the same fears that THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT later exploited.

The amateur nature of the film means that the acting can hardly be called "refined", although most of the youngsters manage to make their characters likable and convincingly portray terrified people. Favourites include Cheryl, who is the first to get spooked out and who draws a picture of the book of the dead; Scotty, the joker and natural leader of the group; and Ash, who overcomes being a wimp in the first half to become a shotgun-wielding executioner in the second. The amateurish aspect does have its strong points however, as the film exudes a kind of "raw terror" in which the viewer can really relate to the characters and their situation.

The graphic gore content certainly earned the film a notoriety - it was very nearly classified as a "video nasty" - and of course it got heavily cut by the BBFC. Seen uncut, it's a surprisingly nasty and gruesome little film where the gore may not be convincing but is certainly disturbing. Watching a zombie biting off its own hand from which a white liquid then sprays is one of the most horrible things I've watched. Other "highlights" include a scene where a zombie is dismembered with an axe and the body parts continue to wriggle like jelly, a woman getting stabbed in the ankle with a pencil, an eye-gouging, a zombie getting its face burnt off in a fire, and the celebrated ending in which the final zombies suffer total meltdown - achieved via some natty stop motion animation for total disgustingness.

It's rare when a film manages to combine both old-fashioned atmosphere and new-fangled gore so successfully, but this is a milestone in that aspect. Black comedy is also thrown into the brew to lighten up some heavier moments, such as when Ash tries to give the mortally wounded Scotty a drink - but the poor man is unable to swallow. The demon/zombie creatures themselves are covered in a crude blue makeup but achieve their desired scariness by having some horrible looking blank yellow eyes which really makes them look sick. Their mocking of Ash also provides some chills as they sing "we're gonna get you, we're gonna get you!" and laugh at his situation. Two scenes involving the zombies stick in my mind; the first "shock" moment where a card game is interrupted by a girl suddenly possessed, and the scene where a zombie smashes up from the basement taunting Ash with the words "It's your sister Cheryl!". These guttural demon voices have to be heard, but they're just another highlight in a film full of great, memorable scenes.

In the film's most notorious scene, we see an innocent girl run out into the woods - to promptly get tied up by a number of branches and shoots and then suffer a supernatural sexual assault. In a startling display of bad taste and misogyny, we watch as the possessed tree first strips the heroine of her clothes and then attacks her with a branch. Apparently, in a later interview Sam Raimi admitted that he'd remove that scene now if he could, he regretted it.

Followed by a brilliant sequel and a not-so-brilliant second sequel, THE EVIL DEAD really is a sick modern classic and a must for all gore fans. And on top of that it's darned scary with it. A true horror film then. 8.4/10