Wow. Good horror is alive and well.

Rating: 8/10 (21 July 2013)

They say it's a good thing to know thyself, and if I'm brutally honest with myself, I can admit I'm a jaded, pessimistic, old man when it comes to horror. I've watched it for four decades and seen the best and the worst. I've read it since a child - first the Witching Hour comics and then every novel I could find. For the past decade I've written it and published it. Horror has woven its way through my entire life and it's hard to put something in front of me that makes me sit up and take notice. It's even more difficult when that thing is a "reboot" of one my childhood favorites.
So when I heard of the remake of Evil Dead I face-palmed and went on a ten minute rant about how awful it would be, how disrespectful to the source material, how mainstream, how dumbed-down, and so on and so forth. When I saw the trailer a few months later I was equally cynical - it just looked like a gorefest, a well done one perhaps, but just a gorefest nonetheless.
Well, I eat my words.
What I just saw was, I think, possibly as good a movie as a reboot could possibly be. Evil Dead managed to create its own original tone and atmosphere while still paying respectful nods to the original. The tree rape is still there, and so is the Raimi-esque montage directing style that made The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II so much fun. There's a smart and particularly gruesome homage to the chainsaw arm. The soundtrack is old-school enough to evoke nostalgia but the sound effects are contemporary and brilliantly done (even the slightly ripped off siren sound from Silent Hill is well used). Best of all the sweeping camera movements through the woods are retained, along with the original sound effect (or a very worthy duplicate) and I think most horror fans would agree that iconic image of the camera roaring through the forest was one of the things that made the early films special.
So in terms of paying homage to the original, I'd say this won on every level. Any more homage and it would have been an unnecessary remake, any less and there wouldn't have been a reason to call it "Evil Dead" at all. It hit an optimum balance in my opinion.
But how about as an original film in its own right?
Well, yes it's strong there too - very strong in fact.
Over the years I had a sort of working theory that gore and fear were mutually exclusive. It seemed that the more grue you splashed onto the screen, the further any atmosphere, tension or scare factor receded. This is why many of the films that have terrified me most through the years (The Exorcist, Session 9, The Changeling, Lake Mungo etc.) have all been practically bloodless. But Evil Dead 2013 broke new ground for me. The gore level was off the scale, and tremendously realistic, yet director Fede Alvarez managed, somehow, to maintain a level of creepiness and dread throughout. The film is actually scary. Not off-the-charts scary perhaps, but scary enough to get under your skin a little, and considering the amount of blood in this movie (literally buckets of it) that was a big surprise to me and a humbling reminder to not try to make generalizing theories about movies.
Horror aside, the underlying story impressed me too. It was shallow, as is to be expected from a movie that is principally about demons slaughtering young people in the woods, but there was enough common sense and humanity there to elevate it above the usual drivel. These teens have a valid and serious reason for isolating themselves in the woods - an attempt to get one of them off drugs for good - which lent a much more interesting perspective than the usual "yo let's go to our aunts cabin and get drunk and have sex y'all" cliché. The brother and sister relationship between David and Mia is believable and in places quite poignant. Even the throwaway friends were given enough personality and backstory to legitimately feel like they belonged in the peer group. In short, it was well thought out enough that I didn't have to spend the buildup of the movie rolling my eyes at the ill-fitting jock/slut/nerd/token minority/junkie/quiet girl mixture that most movies of this ilk seem to phone in.
This review is getting much longer than my usual quick takes, which I suppose says something about how much the film impressed me. There's one more thing I want to mention before I sign off and it's the most surprising thing of all: somehow - amidst all the doom and gloom and blood and guts and dead-pan playing - the movie turned out to be FUN. I don't quite know how Alvarez pulled that off but I'm sure gonna be on the lookout for his future work.
Evil Dead is a respectful, gruesome, scary and fun reboot. Easily one of the best horrors of recent times and as soon as I get $20 spare, it will be right there on my DVD shelf alongside the originals.