Don’t you hate it when you find a recipe online and the writer gives you their life story before you get to the actual meat of it all? Well, I’m about to do that. Sorry.
I grew up in the UK in the wake of the Video Nasties scare. Disgusting, corrupting, depraved movies were finally being released uncut!
Straw Dogs! Cannibal Ferox! The Driller Killer! BANNED IN 972 COUNTRIES!
Even the artwork was scary. I remember regularly scurrying past a big poster of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (tagline: “… it happened!”) that hung on the staircase of the Rainbow Plaza. An obscured, backlit Leatherface wielded a chainsaw aloft; it was just too freaky!
When A Clockwork Orange was re-released in 1999, the poster suggested unflinching, eye-gouging torture. Even newer releases like Reservoir Dogs and Natural Born Killers had blood-stained, murder-happy covers to go with their – as it turned out – melodramatic reputations.
Of course, all this was unbearably tantalising to young minds. So many titles came with variously exaggerated stories of how underwear-stainingly terrifying they were.
Not only that, but at the turn of the millennium, as I was in that crucial pre-teen slot, filmmakers worldwide were once again pushing boundaries of sex and violence.
Kill Bill was the big one, but titles like Irréversible, Audition, Intimacy and others were all piquing the interest of a boy who was allowed to watch almost none of it.
The screaming, clawing omission in all those lists, of course, is The Evil Dead. It had been a cause célèbre of the Video Nasties, a wellspring for playground bullshit about how volcanically bloody it was. Part II even had that creepy image of the skull with eyes, which blighted a trip to Asda supermarket in about 1998.
Crucially, all of this was around the emergence of DVD and my nascent obsession with movies and making them. In a new world of special features and commentary tracks, I lapped up any and all tales of no-budget features.
The Evil Dead had its place with well-worn anecdotes about an endless shoot, actors covered in syrupy blood, clumpy makeup, and excruciating, cheap contact lenses. Attainable misery and all for a budget barely over the rim of six figures. Didn’t watch it.
At that peak time of 2000s, middle-class, teenage credulity – flighty, latterly-diagnosed, ADHD-type that I was – my cinematic tastes were spinning off in a vortex of their own, sucking in as many influences as I could. As I began to realise the full scope of world cinema, stuff got pushed back.
Eventually, however, round at a friend’s house in Dunedin circa 2005, he asked if I wanted to watch Evil Dead II. Of course! Of course I wanted to see it! Let’s do this!
I didn’t like it.
Why? I dunno. The best answer is that my pretensions were budding. This splatter film was just… entertaining. Urgh. It didn’t even have the social satire of Romero or Cronenberg, which someone else told me it had. How disappointing.
Years later, I watched the original with a much less disdainful reaction, but it baffled me why it didn’t click. Again, everything was there, but the mood wasn’t right. This date was meant to be, but one of us hadn’t washed.
2026: it clicked. Mostly. What shone through above all was just how truly cinematic they are. Any route via which Raimi can tell the story with the camera, he takes.
Because of the intangible nature of the evil spirits that swarm around Bruce Campbell’s Ash, the camera often becomes a character, zipping around like a rabid bee.
That’s neat when you imagine zealous amateurs running around forests with it on a bit of wood, but really impressive when, in the later entries, you realise it’s a great big crane they’re swinging about.
Not only that, but Raimi uses those weird angles to his advantage, setting up later creeps and scares – the swing bench on the porch in part one, for example. Because of his off-kilter visuals, every corner of the frame remains in play. Your peripheral vision becomes wired.
That’s more the first one, obviously. It’s the scariest by far. In fact, the original is one of those phenomena that managed to traverse the movie-geek obsession and reach the mainstream.
It’s a very punk rock film, in a gleefully 70s kinda way. Many of the original punks will say they were just trying to make rock n roll music, but their lack of polish created something new.
That’s The Evil Dead to a tee. It rockets along with abandon, made by over-enthusiastic kids who went through hell and high water to get their ramshackle pop art made. Plus, it ended up becoming a political hot potato, with conservative politicians using it to wail about the decline of Western civilisation.
And, if all of that wasn’t enough, it’s variously cacophonous, offensive and unpleasant to look at. I love punk for all those reasons. How the fuck did I miss this one?
The whole trilogy breaks down like albums by The Clash. The original Evil Dead is The Clash: rough-sounding and raw, with some surprising covers.
Part 2 is London Calling: synthesising that energy with higher production levels into the masterpiece everyone remembers.
Lastly, Army of Darkness is Sandinista!: Variously denigrated as self-indulgent shit or reclaimed as a misunderstood masterpiece. The truth is, it’s somewhere in the middle.
Of course, any review of this franchise must include some fawning over Bruce Campbell.
Even though he’ll always be ageing Elvis to me, as Ash, his isn’t just a star-making role; he’s going hell for leather to become one.
His three performances run the gamut from old-fashioned Hollywood matinee idol to proper acrobatic clowning.
Sometimes it doesn’t entirely work. I never fully understood the whole ‘evil’ Ash thing, plus, the comedy grates in places.
That wacky, zany, cringe-y level of 50s-style, American slapstick reminiscent of Jerry Lewis never sat well with my preferences for Spike Milligan and Rik Mayall.
It doesn’t intrude too much in Evil Dead I & II, but Army of Darkness becomes indulgent to the point of patience-testing.
Far too often, critics can’t bear to talk about a film that’s pure craft. The word “craftsmanship” usually comes with some patronising, pat-on-the-back, tacit aside that at least the artist managed to grasp the basics.
How many richly subtextual, stylistic mediocrities have gone to the Oscars and disappeared from sight in a week or two?
The Evil Dead movies are far from deep, but their ludicrous energy barrels through all that, giving people what Sullivan’s Travels said in the 1940s: we need ‘mindless, fantastical entertainment to see us through’.
The series has survived the changing tide of tastes and technological advancements because, at its heart, it’s really well-made dumb fun.
I’ll probably never be a huge fan of Sam Raimi because there’s a fundamental, comic book tone to his movies that doesn’t gel with me. It’s a similar issue that keeps me from ever fully embracing Guillermo Del Toro, but I’m glad to have persevered on this one and come back to not just revisit the first two but complete the trilogy.
There is too much talent to ignore here, too much invention, too much of a giving nature: wanting to give the audience as much pleasure as possible, which, in its own twisted way, is what the horror genre is for.
If you’re young and you don’t like these movies, just wait twenty or so years. By then, you should be immature enough to get it.
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