30 in 30: A MONTH OF HORROR. THE EVIL DEAD
DAY 26
THE EVIL DEAD (1981)
The film every aspiring director should see.
I’ve always found it strange that most critics seem to shun horror movies, they regard the genre as a lower art form, brainless entertainment. But it’s in horror where the cinematic medium can be fully explored, the extreme nature of the stories being told pushes cinema into everything it can produce. Sound, camerawork, editing and acting are all driven into the limits of their capabilities to create something really explosive and entertaining.
A lot of great visual storytellers cut their teeth with horror, and Sam Raimi is one of them.
THE EVIL DEAD is technically the second feature film of director and writer Sam Raimi, but it’s the first one outside film school. This movie follows the misadventures of a group of young men and women who travel to a cabin deep in the woods, where they find a book capable of summoning evil spirits. Then things go wrong… very wrong.
This film is the consequence of the maxim Sam Raimi follows while filmmaking:
“The worst thing a filmmaker can do is make a boring picture. If you make a boring picture, you’ve not only failed, you’ve committed a crime”
THE EVIL DEAD is insanely entertaining. The harsh lighting inside the cabin, the excessive amount of blood, the over the top acting and extreme camera work, all come together to create a film that’s fun, but at the same time unnerving.
The indie-style of production grants the beginning of the movie a sense of reality. Little to no lighting, shooting on location, it feels like an indie flick. But then the haunting use of the camera reminds you that you’re about to see something different. It’s reminiscent of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, with hints of the camera work at the beginning of HALLOWEEN.
The technical aspects of THE EVIL DEAD are outstanding, but let’s not forget the story, or more important to me, the character dynamics. In this film, we don’t have a clear protagonist or hero for most of it. The classic horror film “hero” who tries to fight whatever is coming for them doesn’t show up. Ever. The eventual “hero” is cowardly Ash, who only steps up after everyone else is dead. He needs to fend for himself if he wants to survive. This makes the film unpredictable; we don’t know what’s going to happen. Causing the audience to engage a lot more with the story. It’s fun, it’s creepy, it’s crazy, it’s Sam Raimi.
Raimi creates in THE EVIL DEAD a sense of deranged madness few films have done ever since. If you need to take anything away from it, is this: COURAGE.
When he shot this film, he was a young filmmaker straight out of school, but he had the guts to try to do something genuinely extreme and out there. Nothing like that had ever been done before.
Push your film to the limit. Let’s see what happens.
Tomorrow: The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015)
Yesterday: SCREAM (1996)
