On paper, it’s very simple: a group of friends go into a cabin and they don’t come out. Ash, Scotty, Linda, Shelly and Cheryl head to a cabin in the woods for the weekend, a cabin they haven’t even seen yet and know absolutely nothing about. They find a mysterious, nightmarish looking book in the basement, and a tape recorder. They play the recording for just a minute, a professor’s recitation of supposed resurrection passages from the ancient book, and just like that they are doomed for their moment of curiosity. Nothing can stop what’s coming. The demonic spirits awakened by the recording inhabit the forest itself, closing them off and keeping them stranded. But the spirits don’t want to be in trees, they want to be in people. One by one, the friends are possessed until only Ash remains, perhaps the first time in horror that the person hacking their friends up in a cabin is the hero of the piece.
THE EVIL DEAD is the first in what’s widely considered to be one of the best, most consistent horror franchises of all time. But it’s also often seen as the “least best” (as this series really does not have a worst) because it’s rough around the edges and much lower budget than everything that followed it. That’s one of my favorite things about it and part of why it’s actually my favorite of the series. This is the pure, distilled essence of independent horror. They went out in the woods to film a movie and they found a way. They had no money but they never limited themselves. The scares pack a punch, the gore is outrageous and so is the camerawork.
This is pure creativity. It’s every kind of horror movie at once. It goes for visceral jump scares, it goes for creeping dread, especially with white-eyed Linda’s unsettlingly childlike “We’re gonna get you” rhyme. The gore can be raw one moment (the pencil) and cartoonish the next (the hose of blood that shoots out of the last Deadites at the end) and that is absolutely part of the appeal. This put Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell on the map to such a degree that it’s impossible to imagine the genre without them. One of the most relentless horror movies ever made.