The Evil Dead

1 The US marketing images were produced early in 1982, just prior to the Renaissance partners’ trip to the Los Angeles Film market to promote The Evil Dead. Consequently Bridget Hoffman, an actress who hadn’t appeared in the film, was hired to pose for the photographs that would be used for marketing purposes (Warren 2000: 86).

6 For instance, Bill Warren’s The Evil Dead Companion and John Kenneth Muir’s The Unseen Force both include glossaries or lexicons, which list and provide definitions of the terms and nicknames given to various filmmaking techniques and effects employed in The Evil Dead and, to a lesser degree, in Raimi’s subsequent films (see Warren 2000: 252–3; Muir 2004: 303–6).

8 Along with Stephen King, Richard Cook and Julian Petley, Fangoria was one of the first publications to associate the film with the Night of the Living Dead. In Fangoria, this association was not only due to the inventiveness of both films, but also to the fact that they were both independent productions financed by investors from industrial cities in the US (Detroit in the case of The Evil Dead, Pittsburgh in the case of Night of the Living Dead). As the contents page of the December 1982 issue of Fangoria notes, ‘The film that caused Riots at the Cannes Film Festival! Is Detroit the Next Pittsburgh?’ (Anon. 1982: 3).

9 As Colin McArthur argues, in his 1985 article on British film reviewing, while the ‘core’ of British Fleet Street film reviewers remained ‘monolithic and unchanging’ in their conservative views on the cinema, the previous decade had seen the emergence of a range of more ‘progressive’ and cinephilic reviewers, who were writing for ‘the listings press’, ‘the music/youth culture press’ or for monthly film periodicals (1985: 79).

10 The specific reference to Orphée is the moment where Ash’s hand goes through a mirror, after the cabin has become possessed. As Bill Warren notes, Raimi had not seen Orphée but had read about how Cocteau had achieved this rippling mirror effect through camera trickery and the use of a vat of mercury. Raimi then repeated this technique in The Evil Dead, using water rather than mercury (see Warren 2000: 201). For Petley, The Evil Dead’s connection to the surrealism of Georges Franju is most evident in the moments and sequences where Ash is torn between his love for Linda and his need to kill her (1982: 30).

11 Interestingly, considering Julian Petley’s references in his review of The Evil Dead, one of the horror films that Hawkins argues is ‘hard to pin down’ and can be seen to exist ‘simultaneously as high and low art’ is Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960).

12 Palace Pictures’ video version of The Evil Dead was actually the same version of the film that had been cut and certified for cinema release by the British Board of Film Censors (as the organisation was known prior to the establishment of the Video Recordings Act). However, this didn’t prevent the film from being seized by the Obscene Publications Squad.

13 See, for instance, Mackie (1983: 8) and Ultimate Experience (Anon. 1983a: 6).

14 Referring to the film’s monsters as zombies, rather than demons, is a common mistake made by fans and commentators. Even Stephen King made this mistake, in his famous review of the film (1982: 20).

15 Many IMDb user reviewers who indicate that they are long-term fans of horror also state that the film scared them and, in many cases, that it continues to do so. However, it should be noted here that a small number of user reviewers note that while they don’t like horror films, they do like The Evil Dead. This seems to back up Julian Petley’s argument that The Evil Dead was not only popular with seasoned horror fans but also ‘with a section of the audience that wouldn’t perhaps always be interested in horror movies’ (2003). Those reviewers who otherwise dislike horror give varied reasons for liking The Evil Dead. Some value the film’s formal style, others the fact that so much effort and love was put into the film, and some hold the film in high regard because they consider it to be a ‘genuinely terrifying’ movie (Nedla24, Gaithersburg, 22 August 2000). See also: Spiked47, Germany, 28 September 2005; M-G-M, San Diego, 2 July 2004; and jon_teng, Texas, 3 April 2002.

16 The difference between the first film and its sequels is also frequently acknowledged by IMDb user reviewers who prefer the sequels, or who know the sequels well and have only just encountered and watched the first film. One reviewer notes, for instance, that ‘no way at all should this film even be connected to the others. Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness are zany comic masterpieces with even more comic style violence thrown in. The original is something different altogether’ (viddywell_78, Sydney, 13 November 2003).

17 The decision to tone down the gore and make Evil Dead II more explicitly comedic was also related to the fact that the first film had generated so much controversy and, because of its explicit violence and excessive gore, had to be released unrated in the US. This lack of rating meant that the film could not be advertised in some newspapers and on certain radio and television stations. Campbell, Raimi and Tapert all discuss these problems on their DVD commentaries (see Campbell 2002a; Raimi & Tapert 2002).

18 Halloween’s Michael Myers can clearly be read as possessing supernatural qualities (for instance, his ability to survive being shot by Sam Loomis at the end of the film), but the character’s backstory still grounds him in reality and explicitly presents him as a human serial killer rather than a supernatural being.

19 As Raimi, Tapert and Campbell have acknowledged on a number of occasions, the placing of gourds and bones in the cabin was a deliberate homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As Raimi and Tapert note, in their 2002 DVD commentary, they wanted to use this homage to ‘let Hooper know that he was the master of the 16mm horror picture’.

20 In particular three crucial aspects of the film, which will play key roles in my analysis, were all the result of improvisation during production – namely, the possessed cabin sequence (which was improvised after much of the cast and crew had left the production in Tennessee), the film’s ending and the decision to make the possessed Linda a kind of doll-like, giggly character (see, for instance, Warren 2000: 70; Baker 2007).

21 The exception is the lull moment in the middle of the demon ‘meltdown’ sequence at the end of the film, which is accompanied by strange creaking and cracking noises as the demons slowly break down. This sound potentially adds to the anticipation that another attack on Ash is imminent. In contrast, the moment where Cheryl attacks Ash from behind the wall is preceded by a moment of absolute silence in which all noise disappears (including the sound of the clock and the wind outside). Diegetically, this moment of silence seems to indicate that the demons have now completely possessed the cabin, but this example also illustrates the wide variety of ways in which Raimi uses sound (or lack of sound) in the film to generate suspense, tension and anticipation.

22 For instance, an example of a ‘false scare’ in Halloween is the scene where Annie tells Laurie that Michael wants to talk to her but, when Laurie reaches Annie, she finds that Michael isn’t there and that Annie has played a trick on her. An example where the audience is given more knowledge than the characters is the scene, near the end of the film, where Michael rises up in the frame behind a sobbing and oblivious Laurie. In fact, this second strategy is also used in The Evil Dead, when the possessed Scotty appears at the bottom of the frame while Ash has his back to the camera.

23 In her now classic analysis of gender in the slasher film, Carol Clover notes that Ash remains one of the few male slasher survivor characters (a rare ‘Final Boy’ rather than the more prevalent ‘Final Girl’). For her, the fact that The Evil Dead’s Final Boy has a gender-neutral name (Ashley) suggests that, like Halloween’s Laurie Strode, he is a character of ambiguous gender (see 1992: 63). However, as I will later argue, the fact that the survivor character is a man allows the second half of the film to play out as a distinctly male nightmare.

24 At least in terms of Vera Dika’s claim that ‘the young victims of the stalker film are often presented as sexual objects’ (1987: 89).

25 There have been various uses of this term. Hoxter calls this fusion of horror and comedy ‘splatshtick’ and argues that it constitutes a central appeal of The Evil Dead cycle and the A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984–94) cycle. Barry Keith Grant claims that the term ‘splatstick’ was coined by director Peter Jackson, to describe the fusion of horror and comedy in his films Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992). Grant then widens this category to include a range of other horror films from the 1970s and 1980s, including Dawn of the Dead, The Evil Dead trilogy, Basket Case (1982), Re-Animator (1985) and Frankenhooker (1990) (see 2000: 21).

26 Petley is here referring to the Lovecraftian aspects of Ridley Scott’s Alien, but, for me, this idea is also powerfully conveyed in The Evil Dead.

27 Raimi has outlined this motto in a range of interviews over the years, including in the first article on The Evil Dead to be published in Fangoria (see Martin 1982: 23).

28 This same editing pattern is employed in the sequence in the cellar, where, after Ash is covered in blood from the pipe, a record player and film projector suddenly switch on and blood begins to flow from a lightbulb and plug sockets. The use of this editing pattern in these two sequences (one where Ash is becoming stronger and one where the demons are attempting to make him weaker) thus visually and aurally signals and conveys the intensity of the battle between Ash and the demons.

29 For Dika, this focus on aggressive action could be seen to relate to the fact that ‘the stalker formula achieved its greatest success at a transitional period in American history’, a period, post-Vietnam, where America’s ‘enfeebled world position’ and ‘faltering economy’ led to a reversal of ‘the ideals, aspirations, and attitudes of the 1960s’ (1987: 97–8).

30 Julian Hoxter notes that Bruce Campbell’s performance in Evil Dead II works ‘as a key for the audience in decoding the problem of gauging appropriate response’ because ‘if we can’t take him seriously then perhaps this really is a kind of comedy after all’ (1996: 81; emphasis in original). This shift in performance style in the sequel clearly relates to the fact that the second film works to mine the first film’s more implicit (or even unintended) comedic elements, in a more purposeful way.

31 As Hoxter notes, the idea that a monster could capitalise on a victim’s weaknesses was also mined for comedy in the A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels (see 1996: 80).

32 As Sam Raimi notes, in his DVD commentary, this sequence was a ‘tribute to the imagery in old Hammer pictures’ (in Raimi & Tapert 2002).

33 See, for instance, Barbara Creed’s discussion of these connections and associations in a number of modern horror films (1993).

34 Peter Hutchings has argued that the tendency, in academic debates around the horror film, to interpret horror films as, ultimately, relating to social and cultural issues in society disregards the possibility that horror films can potentially be enjoyed because of the fact that they explore the horror of ‘something that lies beyond’ our world. Hutchings identifies a range of horror films that particularly focus on this kind of horror – including Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980), Lucio Fulci’s E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà (The Beyond, 1981) and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), as well as The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II – and also notes that many of these films ‘show the influence of the horror writings of H. P. Lovecraft’ (2004: 105). What is interesting in the case of The Evil Dead, however, is the way in which cultural and psychological issues relating to sexual and gender difference are tapped into (through the female demons’ torture of Ash) but, at the same time, the film also distances us from these issues by illustrating that the demons are exploiting the petty concerns of humans for their own ends. This, again, illustrates the consequences of Raimi bringing together tropes from different sub-generic traditions (Lovecraft-influenced horror films and horror films that seem more explicitly focused on gender and sexual difference).

35 Another way in which the film draws attention to its status as a film is through the focus on the film projector and screen (which drips with blood) in the sequence where Ash is tormented in the cellar by the demons, and the shot where the blood drips down the camera lens, as Scotty dismembers Shelley. As noted in the 2002 DVD commentaries, these shots were actually a reference to a comment made by a potential distributor of the film, who had told the Renaissance partners that they needed to make sure that the blood dripped down the screen when making a horror film.

36 As Campbell explains in If Chins Could Kill, the inclusion in the film of the poster of The Hills Have Eyes was the origin of a game that Raimi would continue to play with Wes Craven. Craven had included a shot of a torn poster of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) in the background of a sequence in The Hills Have Eyes, and Raimi had read this as Craven telling the audience that his film would surpass Jaws in its ability to scare. Consequently, Raimi included a torn poster of The Hills Have Eyes in his film to indicate that it would surpass Craven’s in its capacity to scare and terrify. Craven would subsequently respond to this in A Nightmare in Elm Street, by including a scene in which The Evil Dead plays on a television set in the background (see Campbell 2002b: 128). The inclusion of The Hills Have Eyes poster is therefore the most explicit use of intertextuality in The Evil Dead, constituting the kind of reference which can be termed as ‘meta-generic’ in that it can encourage audiences to engage in a ‘“smart” game in horror-genre reference-spotting’ (Hills 2007: 446).

37 As has been well documented, in the DVD commentaries and in Warren’s book, Sam Raimi was hanging from the cabin rafters and operating the camera during this sequence, as the cinematographer, Tim Philo, had left the production in Tennessee by the point when this sequence was filmed.

38 For instance, drawing on the well-known fact that Raimi enjoys torturing his friend, director Edgar Wright has noted that while ‘most horror films are about people being picked off … The Evil Dead is essentially about one actor being picked on’ (2007).

39 This seems to inform the claims, made by Rebecca and Sam Umland and Julian Petley, that The Evil Dead could be appreciated as a surrealist film or, at least, a horror film with surrealist elements. This illustrates the effectiveness of Raimi’s strategy of remaining in dialogue with generic appeals and conventions, while still allowing himself enough space for formal inventiveness and experimentation.

40 For instance, aside from the reasonable amount of space devoted to a discussion of the film in Geoff King’s American Independent Cinema (2005), The Evil Dead is also one of only a handful of horror films included in Jason Wood’s 100 American Independent Films (2004). This suggests that The Evil Dead has come to occupy a more central place in the academic canon of key American independent films, than in the canon of key landmark contemporary horror films.

41 To be fair to Brophy, his article was published prior to the release of Evil Dead II, so he can’t be expected to have known that the second film would exemplify the characteristics of ‘horrality’ more fully! As Brophy notes, the first film does illustrate some of these characteristics. However, Evil Dead II is far less interested in the psychology of Ash’s character and more focused on the comedy generated by Ash’s loss of control of his own body, most prominently and famously, in the sequences where Ash’s hand becomes possessed and does battle with its owner.

42 Julian Hoxter has argued that The Evil Dead trilogy as a whole ‘represents simultaneously the end of a phase in genre history – that of the “classic” stalker film – and the beginning of another – that of the return of the horror film to vaudeville’ (1996: 78). However, as chapter 3 illustrates, the first film functions much more overtly and obviously as a transition or a bridge between these two generic phases.