Directorial debut from Sam Raimi, about a group of friends staying in a remote cabin, who unearth an evil secret.
Cult horror films often survive amongst the plethora of other gore movies because they have elements that make them special. Raimi’s The Evil Dead can be considered one of these because it remained true to the genre, and offered something which viewers found, and can still find, disturbingly entertaining.
Not much needs to be said about the plot, just that five people go on a trip to a cabin, and find an ancient book there. After reading some of the spooky extracts, weird things start to happen, and they become possessed by evil. It’s simple and abides by the golden rule of horror: throw in enough oozing blood and you can gloss over any patchy story.
What should be commended about Raimi’s film is his outstanding use of special effects. Some scenes within The Evil Dead are spectacular to watch, even to a modern audience used to all the techniques of today’s filming, and the use of older methods seems to make the horror all the more effective. The aforementioned oozing blood has a relentlessness to it that maintains this atmosphere of unearthly terror, and the make-up artists must have had a lot of fun creating these possessed campers that look like a cross between clowns and zombies.
The Evil Dead is what you want from a horror film: it doesn’t try to be too smart, or offer up lots of character backstory which becomes irrelevant when a player is decapitated by a shovel. Instead, Raimi offers up a smorgasbord of horror and panic, plenty of blood and guts, and a brutality when it comes to killing off main characters.
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