Good old fashioned spooky cabin movie

Rating: 8/10 (5 April 2020)

There must be really something inherently creepy about cabins in the middle of the woods. Whether it's the isolation, vulnerability, the proximity to nature or the fact that it's pretty cheap to shoot a movie there (like this one), creepy cabins keep showing up in horror movies. It's basically a trope at this point.
While this film series is well-known for incorporating humor and action elements, those are lacking in this film.. In a way, it kind of feels like a band's first album where they are piecing the elements together but still haven't found their sound. Ash Williams (played by Bruce Campbell) in the later films would become more action hero like, but in this movie him and the rest of the characters that venture to the cabin are just regular people.
The story premise, which involves evil spirits being summoned through a book of the dead, is a bit silly (which is why Evil Dead 2 works so well as a kind of parody of the first movie), but The Evil Dead is so well made that this can be gladly ignored. Director Sam Raimi uses a lot of inventive camera work to make the horror feel real. Through POV shots, the invisible evil spirits in this film have a real physical presence, and there are plenty of great long takes that build up suspense perfectly. The effects are low-budget but work really well, and nothing is held back because there was no major studio they needed to deal with when making this movie.
This movie is kind of the black sheep in the franchise, but it is still a very effective horror movie.