The Evil Dead (1981)
A budget of $375k sounds like nothing at all in the film world. In an era where the biggest movies cost north of $100M and end up pulling in actual billions, it's hard to imagine how you can make any kind of movie for less than a couple mil, much less under $500k.
At the age of 20, though, Sam Raimi, along with a cast and crew of friends and family (including one Bruce Campbell, aged 21), set out to make a horror movie unlike anything the world had seen with just that. After 12 weeks of absolute hell, a film was created that spawned a cult franchise that's still releasing films to this day - The Evil Dead.
One thing that can't be avoided is that the movie is very clearly an amateur outing. Much of the movie can be very strange and come across as just outright hokey. I don't even want to think about how much Karo corn syrup production went through, or how hard it was to keep continuity. In fact, you can see breaks in continuity throughout the movie, as characters will be soaked through to the skin with viscera in one scene, only to be dry as can be the next.
You see, almost the entire movie takes place in a single room, and there's a remarkable sense of consistency through the entire ordeal. Broken furniture stays where it was smashed, as the main room slowly sees more and more violence. There’s something grounding about this concept. I know that bottle episodes like Breaking Bad's “Fly” are often just a technique to save money (a reasoning that surely wasn’t lost on this crew), but keeping all of this movie contained within these three or four rooms also gives it a certain weight.
The writing and plot is really good, honestly. 5 young college students go out to a cabin in the middle of the Tennessee wilderness, and accidentally summon a Kandarian demon. Slowly, they start getting possessed, with the infamous Necronomicon at the center of it all. They find a recording of a professor reading passages from it as he translates them, but these few lines are enough to summon demons from beyond our world who can possess the living and turn them into the series’ ever-present Deadites.
The flow of the plot is smooth, something that you can often see fall apart in amateur movies - pacing is notoriously difficult to get right. After all, when you’re only just starting out, it’s hard to think ahead on how exactly everything will string together. You’re often only concerned with the shots looking right. However, what I really want to draw attention to is our boy Ashley Williams.
The biggest strength of this movie, to me, is how it watches a sheepish, soft college student become a survivor. Despite being known know as a hardcore badass, Ash spends most of this movie scared out of his mind. He doesn't even really fight until the last 25 minutes or so. Bruce Campbell does an excellent job with what he’s given, as his early version of Ash clearly begins to buckle under the strain.
Oh, yes, there’s no quipping badass in this first installment. As more and more blood flows, and as his friends start to become grotesque monsters, Ash starts to lose it a bit. This is shown VERY well with Raimi's use of bizarre camera techniques and sound design. A hard zoom in on a sharply-lit Bruce gives Ash the feeling of someone slipping into insanity. Shots become tilted and disheveled. There's a particularly clever shot where the camera is directly above Ash, and as he moves, it passes behind the ceiling beams, with a sharp, harsh sound playing as they pass.
It's another case of the passion clearly being there. Sam Raimi, while a little edgy at age 20, envisioned a horror movie that stood out. The fact that Stephen King himself endorses the film and vouched for it to production companies is a testament to the work that was being done here. Raimi understands how the camera can be a tool that goes beyond simply recording the scenes as they happen; it can also convey quite a lot in its own actions.
The Evil Dead may be rough around the edges, glaringly so at times, but it also is clearly made by a team of people who had a talent for disturbing the audience and painting a house red. Prestigious in that it's the movie that put Campbell and Raimi on the map, The Evil Dead is a nice entry into the horror classics that deserves its beloved status.
