It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
When childhood friends Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell decided they wanted to make a low-budget horror film in 1978, they did their research, gathered some funds and made a proof-of-concept short called Within the Woods. It screened well and helped them secure funding for their first feature-length film, the now classic The Evil Dead (1981). Little did they know that they were launching a horror franchise that would spread from film to video games to comics (including a crossover with Marvel Zombies) to TV, and would even eventually inspire a stage musical adaptation!
But in 1981, The Evil Dead was simply a brutal horror film about a group of friends who discover the Book of the Dead in a cabin in the woods, and then accidentally unleash demonic forces called Deadites (although they won’t get this moniker until the very end of Evil Dead II) and suffer the consequences. With little money and experience, the shoot was a nightmare for just about everyone involved, with multiple injuries and sickness, painful effects, and freezing conditions. But when filming was complete, Raimi had somehow crafted one of the 80’s most iconic horror films.
Stephen King loved it when he saw it at Cannes in 1982 (out of competition). In fact, it was King’s praise that helped the film find distribution and it ultimately earned nearly eight times its production budget. Behind the scenes, Joel Coen (Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men, etc.) was involved in the editing process, and inspired by the use of Within the Woods to raise interest and money, went a similar route on the way to making Blood Simple with his brother Ethan.
Although the film is gut-wrenchingly brutal at times, featuring violent murders and even a scene where a tree rapes a woman, by the time the film ends, Raimi had embraced an over-the-top style of action and gore; practically inventing the genre Splatterstick single-handedly and devising a mad swooping and diving camera effect that became synonymous with Raimi’s filmmaking. But not much of the film would have probably worked without the bravura performance of Bruce Campbell as Ash.
As the film opens, we don’t really know that Campbell is the lead. The ensemble cast consists of Campbell and Betsy Baker as Ash’s girlfriend Linda, Richard DeManincor as Scott and Theresa Tilly as his girlfriend Shelly, and Ellen Sandweiss as Ash’s sister Cheryl, the first real victim of the entities in the woods. The gang is heading out to a run-down cabin for a fun and romantic weekend in the woods, but as luck would have it, this particular cabin had been previously occupied by the mysteriously missing archeologist Raymond Knowby and his wife as he attempted to translate the mysterious Book of the Dead, the Necromicon Ex-Mortis.
Unfortunately, he left behind a reel-to-reel tape of his translation of the incantation that resurrects an ancient evil in the woods outside. By the time our heroes arrive, all that’s left is the recorder, the book, and an ancient Sumerian dagger stashed away in an immense cellar. The entity in the woods is already active, communicating with Cheryl as soon as they settle in.
It’s a bit of a slow burn opening, but is helped along by fantastic lighting and cinematography, particularly for a 16MM film shot by a director who had just turned 20 before filming began. Seriously, the Anchor Bay Blu Ray release is just gorgeous (there are a number of releases but this one was fine for me).
I’m not going to spoil the events of the film, but suffice to say, this is a gore-fest that, despite being shot on a budget of $375,000, goes above and beyond and is still, forty plus years later, as shocking and disgusting as it was when released. There’s a reason it was notorious in the years after its release and was only really experienced as intended once home video really took hold. One of the biggest surprises for me, returning to rewatch it for the first time in a decade, was that while a chainsaw is found, it is never used in this first film. We’ll have to wait until next time for that.
For those readers who haven’t seen this but already know Evil Dead II, be warned. While the sequel/remake/requel?? leaned heavily into the splattersick comedy, this initial entry in the franchise is short on humor and is much more disturbingly serious about its horror film intentions. Even the final moments, where despite seeming to have accomplished everything necessary to survive until dawn, our hero Ash finds himself in mortal peril again as the screen cuts to black. It’s a moment that is revisited in the first ten or fifteen minutes of the sequel and we discover that in the world of the Evil Dead, there’s never really a simple ending.