A modern horror milestone.

Rating: 9/10 (5 May 2008)

We have a tendency to look back and glorify the old, great horror films, like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead, etc, automatically hailing them and lamenting the depressing thought that films like that will probably never be made again. Rob Zombie recently eased that fear a little bit, but in Sam Raimi's early career, he was making gritty, grimy horror films that reminded us that the old days of horror can still be brought back to life. For every I Know What You Did Last Summer or Hostel or other idiot teen slasher I think back to the days of Raimi's early horror films and just wonder what happened.
Here's something interesting, in modern times, there are more and more high budget horror movies coming out, with a noticeable decline in quality as the money gets bigger. I wish someone would notice that one of the best things about The Evil Dead is that it was made on a shoe-string budget. Like Chaplin's favorite part of his career, the early years when he would just go to the park with a bench and a girl and a big oafish guy and just bang out a film, Evil Dead gives the feeling of being just a bunch of friends who went out to the woods and cut themselves off from society for a while to see what they could come up with. And they came out with a classic!
The plot, of course, focuses on (you guessed it) a group of friends who go out to the woods to camp. The opening of the movie, the drive through the creepy woods, is one of the best examples of mood-setting that I can think of. You can almost feel the trees closing in around you as the hapless friends drive through the woods, teasing each other about the scary woods.
There are several scenes in the movie that will immediately put off a lot of viewers, such as the infamous tree love scene (not my favorite either), but the fact that the movie doesn't try to please anyone is what allows it to cut loose and just be a real horror movie. Trying to please a wide audience is the worst thing that any horror film can do, because that's what gives you those stupid sophomoric teen thrillers.
Bruce Campbell, in the first performance of his best role, Ash, is surprisingly geeky in the first Evil Dead movie, at least compared to the hardened badass that he was to become in the two sequels, and considering the fact that he is generally remembered as being the coolest horror hero imaginable. But I think that may be what makes the trilogy work so well. A good story should show character change, and through the course of the trilogy Ash becomes something completely different from what he was when we met him in 1981, and Campbell fits the geek and the hero exceptionally well.
Raimi understands the cartoonishly excessive blood and gore will reduce the real scariness of the movie and make it almost into a bloody comedy, so he uses that idea to its maximum potential, causing us to laugh and squirm all throughout the movie, although the real scares are few and far between. The sound effects, camera work, costumes, and vile liquids spraying forth across the screen, however, are horrible enough, and it's clear that Raimi and the cast and crew are having a lot of fun with the material, which is one of the many reasons that it's so easy for the audience to have fun with it, too.
It should be noted that, because of the shoestring budget, they had to be truly creative in their effects and filming. Much of the camera work is done using very crude techniques, and the creativity involved creates a feel that the biggest budget could never approach. There are dollies and slides and other devices that are handmade from things like pieces of wood and duct tape in order to get the necessary shots, and the effect is brilliant. Can you imagine? They actually used duct tape to film this movie! Outstanding!
Strangely, Raimi took a four year break from directing after the Evil Dead, before finally following the movie up with the astonishingly bad Crimewave, the badness of which just strikes me as a real mystery, given the talent involved in making it. Luckily, he almost immediately followed this disaster up with the first sequel to Evil Dead, which plays like a sequel and a remake at the same time. It serves as a testament to the success of this early effort that it was basically remade Evil Dead II, and now is set to be remade again in 2009. Let's just hope that, now that he's a Hollywood director, Raimi can still capture the same attitude and gritty goriness of his early career!