 Every once in a while a movie comes along that is more than just a great movie; that is more, even, than a work of art. A movie that represents a tectonic shift in the aesthetics of film. You know, those movies that come out and seem to change everything you thought you knew about movies: Metropolis was such a movie when it came out, Stagecoach, The Maltese Falcon, , Rome: Open City, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Star Wars, The Matrix: all those movies you know about from your film studies class. Horror, perhaps because it is more closely attuned to our subconscious than most genres, has had more than its fair share: Bela Lugosi's Dracula, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing (from Another World), Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Halloween.
Most or all of these movies you will find in the National Registry because they were “deemed culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" or on the American Film Institute's “One Hundred Greatest Films of All Time” list or some such. One that you won't find in such esteemed places is The Evil Dead. The Evil Dead is like the great movie that people in polite company don't talk about – because they don't admit to having seen it or if they do admit that much, they won't say that it scared the living bejeezus out of them. The Evil Dead is like iconic porn for horror fanatics, the Debbie Does Dallas of gore geeks. It's the horror movie your mother always warned you about. When society looks around for a scapegoat for its ills, the reason behind its serial killers and teens committing suicide, for its preemptive wars and drug wars, for who or what is to blame for the erosion of the moral infrastructure of America,The Evil Dead is the kind of movie they look for.
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The plot is pretty standard for end-of-Twentieth-Century-horror movies: five college-age kids drive out to an abandoned shack in the middle of the woods and are attacked by (you pick) an armed maniac/zombies/BlairWitch/evil incarnate. The last of these literally kicks the living shit out of the five hapless victims…in living colors I might add. Between the rolled up eyes, the rape by a tree (no less), the buckets of blood and the green gloppy shit boiling out of an orifice that didn't use to be there the viewer might feel like they're losing their mind...and for an hour and a half, they're right. At the end of a first time viewing said viewer will be left, exhausted, emotionally drained and wondering what the hell happened to them. There's nothing else in movies quite like it. 
| The genesis of The Evil Dead is a legend of independent film-making, what with Sam Raimi and Co. funding their project from the pockets of local-area dentists, stand-ins being used for actors who were no longer there, the ensuing near-censorship of the movie due to its excessive, even gleeful, violence and gore and of course, the inception of Bruce Campbell into the public consciousness. What can sometimes get lost in the hazy mist of legend is how extremely effective a movie it really is. Raimi didn’t go on to be a hot-shot A-list director because of the hype – he’s a genuine bad-ass. Even now, headed towards thirty years later, (Holy shit, really?)The Evil Dead still feels like a shot across the bow, a rebel yell in the face of fat and slick Hollywood horror, the Never Mind the Bollocks of the movie industry. If you put it next to any of the cynical, glib, superficial pap that passes for horror being put out by mainstream Hollywood now, The Evil Dead still excites, thrills and horrifies. So often in art when we talk about someone being “irreverent” we mean only in the most superficial terms. The word has lost meaning much the same way or “brilliant” and “genius” have lost meaning. The Evil Dead is a truly irreverent film because it’s so honest. It doesn't break the rules or trumpet its individuality. It's insidiously conventional. It shows the audience exactly what it wants to see, takes the audience places it wouldn't -- or couldn’t -- admit that it wanted to go to. Raimi’s craft and intelligence, his lack of artifice in creating his effects, his complete willingness to be exactly who he wants to be gives The Evil Dead its verve and power.
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| That audiences want or need a happy ending is a nefarious myth perpetrated by money changers with small minds and smaller hearts. The story should dictate the ending and sometimes…the audience wants blood, you want blood, I want blood. Campbell and the other students are doomed from the outset not because of Raimi’s perversion but because of our own. We take them out to the woods for a pleasant weekend of camping. We lead them to this lonely cabin in the woods and it is we who one by one take them apart. We want them to suffer and to do so as painfully and gruesomely as possible and so they do. (Really, it's almost Christ-like in a way.) The famed “tree rape” is the basest kind of violent fantasy made gruesomely manifest. We can’t judge because it’s what we wanted. What’s terrorizing us is our willingness to sacrifice youth and beauty to our own bloodlust and gore-greed. It’s a harrowing realization. It only makes sense then, that the “evil”, whatever it is, doesn’t have a corporeal form. Like the wind, it only becomes visible when it is affecting something else. Until the moment when it takes over a body, whenever a victim is screaming in horror or running from whatever-it-is they’re always looking at the camera—at us. We’re the Evil that’s coming to get them. We're both victim and perpetrator. | 
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It’s perfect when the students find the Necronomicon…and then its read. Out loud. Of course, it’s going to end up badly. But let’s face it, in the woods with your friends who wouldn’t read it? Who wouldn’t play the tape? Give us what we want! And when we get it -- when we get them -- it’s like pulling the wings off the proverbial fly or holding your kid sister’s Barbie doll over the open flame until she starts to bubble and crack. That is the essence of the abyss and for an hour and a half, we’re looking right into the heart of it and it is glorious. 
| Of course, The Evil Dead was hugely influential movie and you can still see traces of its particular brand of frenzied pacing and maniacal aesthetics all over movies made nowadays. I would argue however that we’re due for another one. We need another movie to shake us out of our ennui, to teach us about ourselves, to tell the real deep down truth beneath the lie. We just suffered through eight years of the most horrifying regime since Nixon. There must be something there. |
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