THE EVIL DEAD And the Absolute Audacity

Sam Raimi did what seems impossible this year.

He managed to make an MCU movie that seemed to take a chance on a choice.

I should tell you up top that I say this from a place of love. I’m certainly no Marvel hater; I’ve been there from the beginning! But even I have to acknowledge that so often, Marvel Studios is more comfortable hitting doubles or bunts every at-bat, rather than risking the chance of a strike-out on a home run swing. Call it the curse of the “formula”, which necessitates a “not great, not terrible, just enjoyable” feel to many of their offerings in order to move the overarching story along.

But, with DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS? The MCU made a choice, one that seemed to make some of their biggest fans genuinely upset.

The reason for this is that they went for the Scarlet Witch heel-turn and didn’t actively try to buy it back the way they’re often tempted to in order to keep their heroes….well, heroic. Wanda’s hands don’t remain clean; she literally murders people. Critically, she makes these choices of her own volition as opposed to being manipulated by an outside force; even if you could argue she’s influenced by dastardly tome the Darkhold, she seeks this book out herself. Even when she “comes to her senses”, it’s basically too late. Her current status is unknown.

This all admittedly sounds fairly toothless compared to stand-alone adult features, but kicking the stan culture hornet’s nest the way DOCTOR STRANGE 2 does constitutes genuine creative courage for this type of fare. There are countless people online who have made Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch character a part of their personality, a core piece of their identity. And now she’s a murderer. And best of all, assuming you have a Disney Plus subscription, it’s a heel turn perfectly justified by the storyline that came before it. It was kind of thrilling! (I’m sort of pro-anything that shakes people’s weird melding of their actual selves into fictional characters, but I will quickly digress.)

I’m largely tempted to lay much of DOCTOR STRANGE 2’s successes on Sam Raimi being at the helm for this one. Although nobody would ever confuse it for an independent feature, there are enough of his unique flourishes that it seemed like Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel Studios creative staff were comfortable letting his personality shine through.

As we know, it didn’t necessarily have to turn out this way. Many directors with a certain aesthetic and vision have entered the Marvel machine only to get chewed up and spit back out. Edgar Wright never did get to make his ANT-MAN movie. Chloe Zhao’s ETERNALS definitely has its fans and defenders, but landed with a wet thump for most people. Who the hell knows what happened with Alan Taylor’s THOR: THE DARK WORLD. Heck, Raimi only got the DOCTOR STRANGE gig due to a falling out between Marvel and the original returning director Scott Derrickson.

Happily, though, Raimi managed to make the dang thing a Raimi film! Stuff like Wanda killing beloved Marvel characters making cameos (which felt like meta-commentary to me), and a finale involving a walking Strange zombie corpse just feels like something a director-for-hire wouldn’t have thought to put in their superhero sequel. Seeing him manage to thread the needle between corporate demand and artistic demand was strangely nostalgic to me.

This is because, of course, my introduction to Raimi was his previous superhero productions, the original SPIDER-MAN trilogy.

Admittedly, those movies have some tangible details that haven’t aged super well; the special effects actually get worse as the series went on, SPIDER-MAN 3 just doesn’t really work at its core, some of the pop music that got attached to the series are more hilarious post-9/11 artifacts than lasting treasures.

But, dammit, the movies at their core work. Yes, they were primarily an enormous success financially; I still remember the movie making $100 million on its opening weekend back in May of 2002, which felt like a phenomenal amount of money at the time (not that box office money means anything anymore in the age of streaming). But they were also successful creatively, at least most of the time. The movies understood that the key to a great Spider-Man story is to put his alter ego Peter Parker through the ringer at every and any opportunity; even when he wins, he loses. The stories don’t need to be Batman-style dark, they just need to be enacted with a certain sense of irony.

Superpowers have to be a burden for Peter, never more so than when he tries to lift it from his shoulders.

This principle, by the way, is one that the MCU Spider-Man films, as charming and whiz-bang as they generally are, have by and large shied away from. Tom Holland is great, and I’ve enjoyed all three of his stand-alone features, but making him essentially the trust-fund kid of Tony Stark for most of the trilogy has never felt quite right, regardless of where the character stands now. Sorry.

Reflecting on these movies made me realize that Sam Raimi has been a surprisingly constant presence in my life. It also made me realize that this October would be the perfect time to double back and check out the Raimi trilogy that FIRST put him on the map, the EVIL DEAD trilogy.

For those somehow unfamiliar, THE EVIL DEAD is a series of movies that has, against all reason, mange to maintain itself past the 90’s and into the 21st century, with legacy sequels/remakes and television extensions.

I don’t recall if I’ve elucidated on this or not in the past, but I’m a relative latecomer to horror, and especially to GOREY horror. My mom had a definitive aversion to movies that were particularly violent when I was growing up, so something like THE EVIL DEAD would…uh, not have been on the menu. I don’t really blame her or anything; violence is a constant in life that one would be wise to not expose their children to too early (we have the rest of their lives to deal with it, ya know?)

One of the (only) benefits of being an adult, though, is that I can generally watch whatever I want, up to and including a trilogy of super-bloody horror movies.

So here I go! Forty-plus years later, here’s me catching myself up on a series of midnight features that I hadn’t seen before. Let’s see if Raimi can put a smile on my face again!

THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly

Written by: Raimi

Released: October 15, 1981

Length: 85 minutes

Most people know the plot of the original EVIL DEAD, and if you don’t, it’s absurdly simple: four college students drive out to the woods of Tennessee to a cabin to enjoy a weekend of debauchery, only to start becoming possessed by ancient demons after a discovery of an audio cassette unleashes an ancient curse. Our fivesome: Ash Williams (Campbell), his girlfriend Linda (Baker), his sister Cheryl (Sandweiss), their friend Scotty (DeManincor) and his girlfriend Shelly (Tilly).

This super-simple, almost austere starting plot was a seemingly popular one in the early 80’s; for instance, the original FRIDAY THE 13TH is a series of teenagers staying at a cursed summer camp and getting picked off one by one. That’s it! The appeal of this particular set-up is obvious. A) It’s a ridiculously cheap premise to make a movie off of; ya just gotta find a cabin and a few young people willing to be covered in red goo, and B) it’s an easy situation for a potential audience member to imagine themselves in the middle of. Haven’t we ALL gone to a location that’s a little too off the beaten path just because it somehow sounded like a good idea at the time? No? Hmmm.

Their first night at the cabin, Cheryl finds that her hand has been possessed by some mysterious force; because it’s a movie, she makes the curious decision to keep this to herself. The evening turns from bad to worse as a trapdoor pops open all by itself during dinner. Because it’s a movie, they all head downstairs rather than close the door. Down below, they find a skin-covered Book of the Dead and a cassette tape filled with incantations. A play-through of the tape unleashes the souls of evil demons and spirits, although this is initially unknown to our cast of characters.

Inevitably, Cheryl becomes fully possessed (the manner of which we’ll discuss in a second). From there, it’s a game of Last Man/Woman Standing, as our characters either die or become possessed themselves. I hate to spoil a forty-year movie, but it should come as no surprise to anybody even vaguely paying attention to pop culture that Bruce’s Ash is the sole survivor, although THE EVIL DEAD’s final seconds put into question how much he really survived at all.

Look, for as much as there’s all this implied mythology at EVIL DEAD’s core, what with the presence of all these demons, a Sumerian curse, and an evil Darkhold-esque tome at the center of everything, the point of the movie is the blood and the gore. And there’s a LOT of it.

“Blood and guts”- type horror isn’t my natural go-to, mostly because there tends to be a nihilism behind those types of features that burns me out more than anything else, especially when there’s an attempt to make it “realistic” (oh lord, like all we need is more realism in our violence nowadays). But sometimes, movies apply such an ungrounded logic to their gore that it actually goes all the way back around to being kind of appealing? For instance, KILL BILL VOL. 1 is SO violent that it doesn’t actually register as something happening to an actual human (which might be its own form of nihilism, but that’s a whole other conversation). At that point, you’re kind of just watching a cartoon.

And THE EVIL DEAD is such an absolutely audacious cartoon. And I think that’s its great appeal. I mean, people eventually start bleeding white and yellow goop out of their wounds. How can you really consume the images you’re seeing as hardcore grindhouse fare at that point? Just sit back and enjoy the mess. If you can, try to figure out how much cornstarch must have given its life in order to bring us this insane tale.

There’s such a relentless, over-the-top, low fidelity nature to its gore that all you can really do at a certain point is laugh; when all the various corpses started arbitrarily exploding at the end, there was nothing else for me to do but start cackling.

The movie isn’t without its frustrations: the point of the original EVIL DEAD movie is the spectacle of the special effects and the brazen audacity behind them. As a result, I don’t know how compelling I found our cast of characters as actual human characters beyond being vessels for said special effects. Bruce Campbell stood out as the obvious cream of the crop to me, but it’s impossible to tell at this point if this is a result of his inherent stardom (nobody looks quite as accessibly handsome as young Bruce Campbell) or the mere fact that his name is synonymous with Sam Raimi and EVIL DEAD now. He might have just stood out because I knew he was going to be the last man standing.

Then there’s the movie’s biggest moment of infamy, the aforementioned moment of possession for Cheryl. I haven’t figured out how exactly to tackle the, um, tree rape scene. On the one hand, it kind of comes out of absolutely nowhere, it’s uncomfortable, and even Sam Raimi himself has expressed regret about including it in the first place, blaming it on a too-young mind. However, If I could mount a defense of it, I’d argue it somehow feels less exploitative than other scenes of its ilk due to the fact that it’s not particularly titillating or erotic. For whatever reason, it might have hit much differently for me if the offender were another human (or at least a human-esque being), as opposed to an obviously fake tree made up of practical effects. I ultimately could have done without it, but I somehow felt less embarrassed for Ellen Sandweiss than if it were more rooted in reality. YMMV.

Still….as mentioned, an early star role for then-unknown Campbell, some genuine moments of terrifying tension (the scene where everyone is playing cards before everything hits the fan seems to take a page from the famous ALIEN playbook), some insane character design….it’s no surprise to me at all that this movie hit big with certain audiences. Especially in the very early eighties, where the blockbuster era was firmly solidifying itself within Hollywood and America at large, here came this tiny, goofy movie with an almost alienating amount of blood bloody, a film almost built to be enjoyed but not mass-produced. And now Campbell’s playing Ash on the Starz Plus app or whatever. Life is strange.

That all said, I had a good time with THE EVIL DEAD, although it does feel like the best way to maximize your viewing experience is to screen this movie as either a midnight movie at a second-run movie theatre, or with a scratchy lo-fi VHS copy that you’ve popped into your VCR during a sleepover. The vibe is just so gloriously micro-budget at its core and its heart that it basically demands to be watched on a bad, beaten-up print. I couldn’t imagine this one getting the Criterion 4K experience.

Perhaps the real legacy of the first EVIL DEAD movie is that it was the fulcrum for an enormous franchise: five official movies, five video game adaptations, a cable television series, a bunch of comic books, and a full-fledged musical! And it all stemmed from a college kid screwing around in the woods with his friends. It’s proof positive that lasting art can come from almost anywhere. All you really need, besides a couple of grand in your pocket, a little luck, and the youthful stupidity not to know that you can’t, is the wherewithal to finish your project.

And I think that’s legitimately inspiring.