New Evil for a New Generation

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2013)

Here's everything you need to know about this move. IMDb ratings to date are 9.8 for 18-and-under, 8.0 for aged 18-29, 7.1 for 30-44 and 7.5 for 45-older.
You don't have to be a mathematician to figure out what's going on with this reboot: The people who loved the original refuse to like this one, and those who either haven't seen or don't care about the original love the reboot on its own terms, and for the same reasons. Like it or not, the flavor of movies and genres change just like everything else, and the bloody/campy horror of the 1980s just isn't the horror of today. Kids (and kids ARE the target audience for this reboot, aging hipsters) relate to the world differently than we do. They have a whole different catalog of experiences and expectations for horror, and they're scared of different things.
I'm 32, so I'm right on the line of Gen X and the Millennials, and I didn't see the original until 15 years after it came out. I liked it, and I knew it was a great horror movie, but I didn't worship it like my older sister and her friends did. But, bear in mind that by the time I saw it, the first Scream movie was only a year away. Standards change, and so do people. And the simple fact is that this movie's target audience (teenagers and early-20s) love it on its own terms. That's the same thing people would have been forced to say about now-crotchety hipsters back in the 1980s.
The fact is, this is a great horror movie for our times, and for the audience it was meant for. Yes, if you're over 26, Evil Dead is ridiculously gory, seems soulless, contains gratuitous tree-torture-porn, and the actors are neither recognizable, interesting nor original. The thrills seem cheap, the action cynical and the dialog is a bit too self-consciously witty. But that's what this audience grew up with, and its what draws them in. To them, Scream is "classic horror."
So, as a wise man once said: If the music's too loud, you're too old.