Day 25: The Evil Dead

Day 25: The Evil Dead (1981)
Dir: Sam Raimi
Cast: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Hal Delrich, Teresa Tilly

Initially turned down by just about every U.S. film distributor until signing with a European company, Sam Raimi's debut film The Evil Dead was filmed for less than $120,000. A low budget, off-the-wall horror romp filled to the brim with guts, goo and all kinds of gore, it's amazing what this indie crew managed to accomplish in this infamous cult classic.

Set in the mountains of Tennessee, five college students venture to an isolated cabin for the weekend. While there thy find the book of the dead and a tape recorder, both belonging to the cabin's previous inhabitant an archeologist. So the gang decides the play the tape containing the voice of a man reciting words from the book and soon enough, all hell breaks loose. Demons (or as their later known in the series "Deadites") start possessing the living, a woman gets raped by tree and blood goes a flying as a young Bruce Campbell takes control of the madness wielding a chainsaw and getting pissed.

Aside from the hip persona of Bruce Campbell's most notable character Ashley "Ash" Williams, later ripped off with the creation of Duke Nukem, I can't say much for the rest of the cast or even the story for that matter. I guess people kept quitting the film leading to Sam killing off most of the characters and replacing them with extras, or "Fake Shemps" as he calls them. The set up is interesting enough but it doesn't take long for this movie to turn into a splatter fest and you know what? I'm okay with that.



The visuals and effects are impressive to this day and are truly what makes this film worth remembering. One of the film's most notable techniques is the use of the "ram cam" to represent the point of view of the evil unseen force. Simply attaching a camera to a board and then running through the foggy woods makes for some highly effective filmmaking. So much that the Coen brothers would even employ this technique, Joel Coen being an assistant editor on The Evil Dead. The gore utilizes stop motion and claymation effects to create it's grotesque transformations and decompositions and it's just out of this world. I mean this movie is more or less like 70 minutes of just straight gore and it's pretty fun.

The film initially got mixed reviews but now it would appear that's not the case anymore. With a surprising 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, a hard core fan base and legions of folks still catching on to Raimi's vomit inducing debut, this film's popularity gives hope to all low budget filmmakers. Spawning a more comedic sequel (Which I actually prefer) in 1987 and an even goofier installment in 1993, Raimi and Bruce made quite a mark both leading on to successful careers. Bruce would become a popular B-movie icon while Sam would go on to make one of the most popular Superhero franchises with Spider-Man. These days Bruce is working on the show Burn Notice while Sam's working on his return to horror with Drag Me To Hell starring Alison Lohman and Justin Long. As for the Evil Dead series Sam has said as recently as this month regarding an Evil Dead 4 that "I'm honored some people want to see it, and I'd like to do it, and one day I will. I just don't know when." and that sounds groovy to me.

Fright Fact: Bruce Campbell twisted his ankle on a root while running down a steep hill, and Sam Raimi and Robert G. Tapert decided to tease him by poking his injury with sticks, thus causing Campbell to have an obvious limp in some scene

Horror Highlight: Here's a great example of some of the film's gore effects in the end of the film.