Standing beside Donald on the village green you cast your eye about at the fantastical costumes people are wearing. The event feels similar to Halloween back home but only if everyone put 110% into their costumes and took things very seriously.
Mentioning this to Donald he smiles and explains.
The Festival of The Dead is a local tradition going back centuries, though it shares the costumes with Halloween we’ve kept our own festivities strictly traditional. Some of those costumes you see are passed down through the generations, you won’t find any shop bought examples here.
Every year we don these ancient outfits and this year’s narrator reads from The Book of The Dead. Every year a single sentence is read, no more, no less. Then we proceed through the woods in a great procession, each villager with a lantern and we sing to the dead so they know we haven’t forgotten them.
Ah see, this year’s narrator is stepping up.
A small wooden stage has been set up and you see a young woman open an ancient looking book. She runs a finger down the page, pauses briefly and then begins to speak.
Wow, we’re 3 for 3 with big names, though today’s is not as known outside of the horror scene as Halloween is and is not as historically significant as Nosferatu it did however spawn its own franchise and helped launch the career of a director probably best known by ‘the man on the street’ for directing the Tobey Maguire Spiderman films, Sam Raimi.
You know what it is, today we review 1981’s The Evil Dead.
The Evil Dead follows five friends who are visiting a remote cabin in the woods of Tennessee. The place is fairly run down looking and full of hunting trophies and the usual old fashioned country style furniture. Later they find the cabin has a basement full of unusual items, including a disturbing book and accompanying audio notes by an archaeologist who had been studying it. Soon all Hell breaks loose and they’re fighting for their lives.
My own experience with The Evil Dead was watching it on DVD while at University. At the time I was picking up films which I’d heard (According to the blurb on the boxes at least) were controversial or extreme, at least by the standards of the day. This one I’d even heard of already so it was an easy choice.
Slight spoiler for my overall feelings but I was not disappointed. The Evil Dead really has everything you could be looking for from a film like this…well almost everything.
Firstly let’s get my negative feelings out of the way because I really do want to mostly be praising this film. The acting and characterisation is where the film suffers I feel. Perhaps it’s because of watching the later two films of the original trilogy but the mighty Bruce Campbell, who plays Ash, in particular feels very odd, like he’s just woken up and needs his morning coffee, he barely reacts to a lot of the crazy stuff that’s happening around him, at least until the finale where he does get more involved. Maybe he’s just a quiet guy and to be fair this is pretty early in his acting career.
The other acting varies from decent to over the top, I hope you like screaming because there’s lots of it. The characters are pretty forgettable, in fact it wasn’t that long ago I watched it and other than Ash the only name I remember is Linda as I seem to recall Ash always has a Linda as a girlfriend.
So on to more positive things. The general look of the film is fantastic. It is the archetypal cabin in the woods movie with a spooky dilapidated cabin, foggy woods, a dank basement and all in a remote location.
The camera work is excellent, with Raimi making certain shots his own, particularly the camera as a character, moving through the woods like the eyes of a creature we never see. This more than anything I feel makes the film stand apart from its peers, something you can point to today and say ‘That’s an Evil Dead thing’.
Is this a scary film? As with most things that’s fairly subjective, for me I wouldn’t say it’s scary, it’s a special effects film, and though it has plenty of atmosphere it soon becomes more of a fight for survival than something that has you peeking through your fingers. Something I personally feel is that this film has a good level of threat to it, you do feel that the characters are in danger and though like I say it isn’t scary, it does take itself quite seriously most of the time. The sequels are often lauded over the original but for me this is preferable. The first two sequels are straight up comedy horror, the third one in particular, but I like my horror less silly…mostly.
The effects work is fantastic (for the most part) and varied, we have some great gore effects, some brilliant make-up, and then to top it all off we have stop motion effects towards the end of the film.
Speaking of gore, this film is loaded with it, and it’s pretty graphic for 1981, in fact, it’s time for an ‘Emma talks about film certificates’ section, or in this case ratings, because for a change I’m going to talk about the US rating. Normally I don’t take much notice of this, being UK based, but this is an unusual case. Most films like this get an ‘R’ rating in the US, but The Evil Dead actually received, and still has, an NC-17 rating. This is pretty unusual as these are normally saved for films with a very adult theme, be that sexual, or drug use or very extreme violence. There is one scene I’ll mention in the spoiler section which may have contributed to this but I’m pretty sure it’s a case of an over-reaction at the time that has never been adjusted. It IS a violent film but by today’s standards, not really. The sort of sequel sort of reboot from 2013 is significantly more graphic and that has an ‘R’ rating.
So what about my personal rating? Well I really debated on this, to the point where this is me re-writing this section. I would give it a 4 ½ if I was doing halves, but honestly, I absolutely love this film. It may not be as polished as something like Alien but it’s one of the titans of the genre and another example of a low budget film defying the odds. It deserves to be up there with Halloween in that regard and for my money this is more fun, so I’m giving The Evil Dead 5 pencils out of 5.
**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**
Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.
OK so the part of the film which may have garnered the NC-17 rating, at least from how I look at it would be the part where Cheryl is assaulted and raped by the tree branches. Though it’s not overly graphic, the content is perhaps the sort of thing the MPAA would come down harder on, and that combined with the general level of gore and violence is maybe what pushed it over the edge. These sort of scenes always up the discomfort level of films for me. I can watch extreme violence (To a degree, I struggle when it gets too realistic like in something like Hostel) but as soon as there’s sexual violence I find it a lot more uncomfortable to watch.
I alluded earlier that not all of the effects are great and the scene which stood out to me was when Cheryl has turned to a Deadite and Scott is hitting her in the face as she tries to escape from the basement. She goes from mostly looking like Cheryl to clearly fake model in an instant. It was abrupt enough that I found it a bit jarring and considering how good most of the rest of the effects look it was a bit strange to see.
What is great though is the whole last 10-15 minutes or so of the film where Ash actually wakes up and starts dealing with the rest of the cast. This part is loaded with fantastic effects, camera work, stop motion and physical acting. Faces melt, blood spurts, skulls shatter and another Raimi staple of gore and bodily fluids going all over somebody’s face. Ash comes into his own in this over the top bloodbath and we start to see him show glimpses of the character he will become in later incarnations.
Right, I’m going to go read a book.
Summerisle 