Bringing the artistic credibility of gore back.

Rating: 9/10 (5 March 2019)

Once upon a time there was the idea that horror movies were just festivals of gore and shock with no actual frights.
Then came some horror movies that didn't have any gore in them at all. But they didn't think to replace it with anything so they didn't even have the one redeeming character of the other type.
This is why The Evil Dead is so refreshing. It's not another generic gorefest but neither does it have a phobic attitude to a little blood and viscera.
The texture of this movie...it's almost cartoonish in it's camp usage of the macabre, with its cackling demons rapacious flora. It's pretty terrifying being confronted with this hellish little world that went from just another camping trip to worse than a nightmare. There is a...rawness about this movie. Maybe it owes something to its troubled production somehow, but you can feel the pain the characters are going through in an unpretentious meditation on reality as you know it going completely insane.
A welcome antidote to that breed of horror that thinks we won't notice its cliches just because it does them without splatter.