The Evil Dead (1983)
The appeal of The Evil Dead, I guess, is that it throws together every conceivable splatter film cliché without letting anything like plot or character development stand in the way. Perhaps this approach could have worked in the hands of someone more experienced and with a much better understanding of parody. Unfortunately, it was in the hands of writer/director Sam Raimi, who truly didn’t seem to know what he was doing or even what he had to start with. This is a shoddy construct – a badly written, badly shot, badly acted film overburdened with makeup and gore effects that are just plain disgusting. Yes, these are the reliable hallmarks of camp, but camp is typically fun, and fun is something this movie lacks. Is it possible the filmmakers were actually taking this seriously?
It tells the story of five college-age kids who drive to a remote, fog-shrouded part of the woods and spend the night in an abandoned cabin. Details such as where they came from, where they’re going, why they’re going to the cabin, and whose cabin it is are either vague or completely glossed over, but that isn’t the point; once they arrive at the cabin, sinister forces are unleashed, and one by one, the kids are possessed by the souls of demonic entities. This was made possible by the discovery of an occult book in the cellar and a playback machine with a reel-to-reel recording of an unknown professor reciting incantations in a bizarre language. Raimi obviously drew inspiration from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and indeed, the recording makes mention of a “book of the dead.”
I immediately noticed that the kids were made up of three girls and two guys. I believe it was an intentional move to have the women outnumber the men; it gave the filmmakers license to include more victims, given the unwritten rule that female characters in horror movies must be victimized. Long before either of the two guys face any kind of danger, all the girls endure demonic possession, which in turn leads to a number of brutal, bloody physical beatings. In one case, dismemberment with an axe is required. One especially reprehensible sequence shows a girl exiting the cabin and wandering into the woods, only for vines and twigs to come to life, bind her wrists and ankles, tear off her clothing, and rape her. This plays into the convention that kids in movies like this have to be stupid. When you hear a disembodied voice saying, “Join us… Join us…” would your first impulse be to step outside and call, “Who’s out there?” into the darkness?
There is some truly atrocious acting in this movie, made worse by a screenplay containing some of the silliest dialogue I’ve ever heard. Only in something like this could someone say “It’s going to be okay,” while a demon is locked in the cellar and an unseen evil entity howls at a moon that turns inky black not once, but twice. The worst offender is Hal Delrich, whose character, Scotty, is not only unconvincing as a plausible human being but should also be punched in the face on general principles. The only scene that even hints at character development has the other male lead, Bruce Campbell, giving his character’s girlfriend, played by Betsy Baker, a necklace with a miniature magnifying glass as a charm. It doesn’t amount to much, but in the moment, it was a welcome diversion from all the unpleasantness.
Most films are shot out of sequence, but the filmmakers typically go to great lengths to give the final edit the illusion of seamless chronology. That’s not the case here. You’d think Raimi had never heard of continuity. Consider a scene in which Campbell’s character, Ash, digs an entire grave in what appears to be five or six shovelfuls of dirt. Not long after, he fights off a demon by decapitating it, dousing his face in a steady stream of blood. As soon as that moment is over, he reenters the cabin, and although his shirt has a couple of stains on it, not a drop of blood is seen on his face. That actually happens to many of the characters; they somehow get blood spilled on them, and then the blood disappears when the camera cuts to a different angle. And then there’s the scene where dawn has arrived, even though the clock on the wall says it’s around 3:15.
Raimi’s fixation on the sounds made by the demons is not only unhealthy, it’s also grating to the ears. Far too many scenes feature extended bouts of infernal wailing and high-pitched cackling, which gets repetitive and tiresome very quickly. It’s as if Raimi had finally discovered a machine that could electronically alter voices, and he had so much fun with it that he couldn’t stop using it. If the intention is for audiences to marvel at the film’s technical aspects and not at anything else, shouldn’t they at least be done well? I can’t pretend that I knew what to expect from The Evil Dead, but I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a technically incompetent, misogynistic, visually repugnant piece of trash. On the basis of this film, I’m not confident that anyone involved has ever been happy, or even knows what happiness is.
