There are movies that claim to be horror, and then movies that
simply are horror. Evil Dead falls assertively in the
latter camp.
After decades of wandering through supernatural gimmicks, increasingly
trivial remixes of urban legends, Freddy and Jason ’80s nostalgia, a stream of
mediocre remakes from Japan, the found-footage fad and a torturous haul through
all those icky torture-porn movies, the horror genre might have just re-discovered its footing and orientation with a remake of a 32-year-old classic that will blow your socks off, fold them up into nice little cotton bundles and then murder them with glee. So what does a back-to-the-basics horror overhaul look like? Gore.
Mostly just raw, unfiltered gore broadcast at a startling volume and frequency.
Oh, and it’s also kinda funny. More on that later.
The setup doesn’t veer too far from Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead from 1981: five friends meet at a remote cabin in the woods for a weekend vacation. Underneath the
floorboards they discover a book bound in human flesh — a Necronomicon-like graphic novel called the Book of the Dead — that unleashes a demonic
spirit that terrorizes the cabin and its inhabitants. The book is found wrapped in plastic and barbed wire, and underneath several litters of strangled and mummified cats. The whole time the book is being unwrapped, with rusty wire cutters no less, I kept thinking, "Shoulda brought a Kindle." The updated movie
involves characters David, Eric, Mia, Olivia and Natalie. The first letters of
their names spell “DEMON,” which is, all by itself, a big woven basket full of “nope.” The only more appropriate character names for a horror movie this legit would be Franky, Ursula, Uma, Ulrich, Ulysses, Ulla, Upton, Umberto, Charlie and Karen.
The earlier version of this film was mostly an experiment in horror
filmmaking, with Raimi (Spider-Man)
and star/legend Bruce Campbell improvising their way through effects shots and
home-made gore machines. If I remember the lore correctly, they even hammered two-by-fours together to create a Steadicam system; it was very much a low-budget, guerrilla-style movie. This new one — produced by Raimi and Campbell, but
directed by Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez — has some spit and polish and
generally looks terrific, especially those dreadful shots of low-lying mist
flooding over the cabin as the DEMON collective gets settled in for a long,
violent night of face scraping, knife licking and OSHA-not-approved carpentry.
Evil Dead is the best
horror movie I’ve seen since the marvelous claustrophobic nightmare The Descent from 2005. It’s certainly
the goriest since Peter Jackson’s comically gruesome Dead Alive from 1992. As soon as that barbed-wire wrapped book is
opened and read aloud — in creepy Latin — the gloves come off and Evil Dead promptly bombards the screen
with one horrifying stunt after another, each more wince-worthy than the one
before it. By the end, it is raining blood. Literally. Before that, needles are
jammed into faces, nails into kneecaps, broken mirrors into cheekbones and
electric meat carvers into forearms. It’s a relentlessly visceral stream of
blood, guts and gore that is not for the faint, squeamish or queasy.
Though the spectacular violence and carnage will certainly
appease the gorehounds and horror fans, the real terror of Evil Dead is in its main villain, a demonic spirit that can inhabit
any infected body, living or dead, in the rustic weapon-filled cabin. The
always-on threat of Exorcist-style
possession creates an undulating schism of terror quivering beneath the shock
and awe of Evil Dead’s most chilling
moments: at any second a friend, sibling or significant other can be lunging at
your face for a deadly nibble. Or maybe just carving some extra weight off their
side with a kitchen utensil — these demons, such creatures of habit. Most of the characters aren't just killed off either; they often have several stages of injury, mutilation and then finally death, only to pop back up and inflict more damage on the remaining cast. Poor Eric, the school teacher who reads the book's blood-scrawled pages aloud, has so many injuries that he starts laughing when new ones are inflicted.
All of this is appropriately scary and terrifying, but like the
first Evil Dead — and its sequels Evil Dead II and the slapsticky Army
of Darkness, or even Raimi’s super-hilarious Drag Me To Hell — this movie has a sense of humor as dark as the
thrills. Some of the humor resides in the matter-of-fact staging of the
violence, which is so over the top that you have to marvel (and recoil) at its
unblinkingly ironic presentation. For instance, the repeated shots of
characters using duct tape to bandage up deep lacerations or on a stump where
an arm once was. Mostly, though, I laughed at the imagery, especially of the
possessed woman — the M in DEMON — who cackles and gloats from beneath a trap door, her blistery smile beaming from behind a curtain of chains keeping her locked in the cabin's depths. She’s
the film’s mad court jester and when she wasn’t puking demon spore into the
other characters I found her to be a jolly little imp. And proving at how adept
the movie is at humor, and plot twists, this vile witch eventually becomes the
ultimate heroine. Now there’s a laugh.
Evil Dead couldn’t have
come at a better time for the horror genre, which has been quietly dissolving
from the screen for a number of years. Most studios have stopped even trying to
make decent frightening movies because horror fans will pay to see bad ones
just as much as good ones; “Why bother put any effort in?” a producer said
after each new Saw film. Last year’s
meta-horror Cabin in the Woods — a
movie that didn't entirely win me over, but I applauded for its efforts — certainly
set the tone for a renewed interest in the genre, so I hope Evil Dead continues the trend of
inventive horror offerings. Though I kind of hope that the next movie, like the original series, gets sillier as it progresses.
Evil Dead enters the world already a step ahead of other horror movies
simply because of its story of demonic possession, a theme that rings with
clarity in some of cinema’s scariest pictures: The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby,
The Omen and even in a more modern
movie such as Lars von Trier’s Antichrist,
about another doomed cabin in the woods. This new Evil Dead works on the same levels as those films because it
involves characters confronting these demons even as they reside in the bodies
of loved ones. It’s a terrifying idea, and that’s probably why zombies are all
the rage right now; the zombie apocalypse also deals with the terror of a loved one trying to use
your skull as a cereal bowl. It’s a glorious departure from all the
run-and-hide movies such as Friday the 13th
and all those Texas Chainsaw Massacre
remakes that were so ill conceived that most people were cheering on
Leatherface and not his innocent victims.
Evil Dead is not the
end-all/be-all of the horror genre, though I certainly enjoyed its
vaudeville-like performance of gooey thrills and jump-worthy effects. I do
think Evil Dead does represent a new
age of horror, but now it’s up to the films that come after to continue to
frighten us in clever new ways.
And one more thing: stay for the end credits. You won’t want to
miss the last bit at all.
