Evil Dead

1981’s The Evil Dead and its sequels have a cult fan base that essentially guarantees a built-in audience for the new remake. I’m not among those diehard fans, or even really a fan of horror movies in general. But one stat from the new picture caught my eye: 50,000 gallons of fake blood used in a single day of filming. This I had to see. Even in an era of constantly pushing the envelope for violence in entertainment, that is impressive.

The original film, made by several young filmmakers and actors over a few weeks in a wooded cabin, is an effective little horror movie. Not particularly scary, but the filmmaking techniques create a frantic atmosphere that’s impressive for such a low-budget picture. The gore is often stomach-churning (though you can tell at times the blood is just syrup), and the bloody excess reaches levels that become downright comical. The new version is obviously aiming for straight-up horror rather than comedy, but it isn’t shy about the matching (or surpassing) its predecessor for excess. 

The plot has been slightly changed from college kids simply vacationing in the woods to the five protagonists (Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Tyler Pucci, Jessica Lucas, and Elizabeth Blackmore) retreating to the family cabin to help one (Levy) kick a heroin habit. But what happens at the cabin is much the same: they find a book bound in human skin left by the previous tenets (shown in a brief pre-credits prologue), and failing to heed the warnings scribbled on the pages to leave it alone, they summon an evil force that possesses some of them and terrorizes the rest. Bloody mayhem of all types ensues.

Every production value in the picture has been given an upgrade from the original. The real woods in which they filmed in 1981 have been replaced by a dreary, much spookier landscape of fog and black, leafless trees that looks like something out of a nightmare. The adequate but not very convincing demons from before have been replaced by truly scary ones. And the gore, in short, doesn’t disappoint. Once the carnage starts, we’re treated to a parade of stabbing, slicing, shredding, splattering, burning, dismemberment, and shudder-inducing bodily horror (the infamous tree sequence has been replaced with something way more disgusting and horrifying, and one scene of possessed self-mutilation involving a box cutter made me squirm). Blood is spilled at monsoon levels even before the finale where it literally begins raining blood (but, alas, no Slayer on the soundtrack). And while the film is more shocking in its gross-out factor than truly terrifying, there are several tense moments that pay off with a jump scare rather than just gore (well, actually, along with the gore; things are rarely more than a minute away from something bloody).

All that blood, however, can’t wash away the weakness in the acting department. Jane Levy is the closest thing to good in the picture, as she is moderately believable as someone going through drug withdrawal, which kind of makes her trauma as she becomes possessed seem a little more real. Most of the time, though, the cast (including Levy) not only makes every horror movie mistake in the book, but their reactions, decisions, and dialogue are dumb by even the lowest standards of stupidity. Sometimes, this makes for unintentional comedy (the funniest thing about the film, intentional or not, is how Lou Tyler Pucci’s nerdy character keeps suffering maiming after maiming and yet doesn’t die, and even looks content and lackadaisical just moments later). More often, it just makes you roll your eyes. But in the end, the bad acting actually works in the film’s favor because you never get close enough to the characters to care that such awful things happen to them. Also, the audience’s expectation of certain horror film clichés makes the ending, a deviation from the original, something of a surprise.

Evil Dead is the cinematic equivalent of a great haunted house ride, except stretched out to 90 minutes and definitely only for mature audiences with a high tolerance for blood and gore. And like all good horror films, it’s made to be seen in a theater: not just to see the cheerful ultraviolence in all its glory, but to share amongst a rowdy audience of like-minded viewers.