Carrion Creativity: The Sources of Evil Dead

Evil Dead (2013) was not a candidate for review on Lair of the Boyg. With 404 external reviews already on Internet Movie Database, mine would be a drop in a lake. Had I written a review, I would have expressed an equivocal appreciation. While I was disappointed with the film as a remake or quasi-sequel to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981), the film's gushy, violent energy made it a fairly entertaining horror film. In other words, without the Evil Dead label, I would have branded it a decent but unspectacular horror experience.

Instead of writing that review, however, I've decided to reflect on something more difficult to concretize. I started thinking about Sam Raimi's masterpiece, Evil Dead II (1987) and its relationship to its milieu. One hurdle is separating the myth from the reality. ED II is the first horror film I remember watching and it scared the snot out of me. I became certain Henrietta had moved out of her cool, dank fruit cellar into my cramped and toy-bestrewn closet. This film had a huge impact on nearly every horror fan and many cinema buffs, and is now referenced in their films more readily than any of the Hollywood classics. The layer of myth in all this being that Evil Dead II was offering something brand new, a barrage of original ideas this upstart independent filmmaker in the middle of Nowhere, USA invented himself.

The thing about Evil Dead II is, if you really study it and other good horror films made around the same time, you start to see that Sam Raimi's genius is really more synthetic than it is inventive. Rather than make such a statement and move on with a few examples, I would like to really examine the issue.

The first case in point is House (1986), Steve Miner's minor classic of '80s horror, just a step or two short of greatness. House, much like Evil Dead II, is a high-energy assault of rubber monsters, insanity, and goofy humor. House's own psychological seriousness and inability to anchor its insanity with some concrete explanation is what ultimately kept it from greatness. However, the techniques and ideas Steve Miner and Fred Dekker deployed were gleefully absorbed by Raimi. The dexterity of House's monsters, like its winged skull-creature, able to grab and use a shotgun, is mimicked in ED II by Henrietta in her skull-monster form. House also contains the all-important tool shed, where both its protagonist Roger and Evil Dead II's Ash find their shotguns. The scene of animated inanimates in the Evil Dead II cabin is an amplification of House's animated mounted fish and flying garden tools. House even contained an evil severed hand making all sorts of mischief.

The second case in point is Hooper-Spielberg's Poltergeist (1982), a masterpiece of horror filmmaking in its own right, one of the greatest haunted house films if only for throwing everything Spielberg could invent at the characters and audience. Poltergeist's chaotic climax includes an animated tree crashing through the children's bedroom window and grabbing the little boy with a giant tree hand. Evil Dead II's chaotic climax also includes an animated tree, which crashes a giant tree hand through the wall of the cabin to grab Ash. After the tree attacks in Poltergeist, a vortex between worlds opens up, sucking the tree to wherever. In ED II, as Annie finishes reading the incantation, a huge vortex opens, sucking the tree to wherever. The shots of the vortexes are almost identical. As the vortex opens, Carol-Anne is almost pulled to the other side as she grips her bed. Similarly, in ED II, Ash grabs a board as the vortex begins pulling him in. Both end up getting pulled to the other side. The finale of Evil Dead II, where the face of the demon manifests itself in the doorway, also borrows from the moment in Poltergeist where Craig T. Nelson pulls one of the more alarming denizens of the other side through the closet door. Poltergeist also contains flying, animated inanimates that could have provided equal influence on Raimi's animated lamps and chairs in ED II.

Other, smaller elements of Evil Dead II come from all over. The idea for the book and the demons it unleashes comes from the very strange 1970 film, Equinox. The skewed shots Raimi uses, suggesting the cabin being viewed from a presence only partially in our plane of reality, is a development of the technique Robert Wise used to make the house in The Haunting (1963) seem alive. With some effort, I'm sure several more sources could be found, perhaps even one for the famous roving camera movements, or 'demoncam.'

Nearly every element of Evil Dead II comes from some other source. Raimi took every cool technique he saw being effectively used in other horror movies and he made sure to use them in his own movie to thrill, scare, and entertain. This is not to detract from Evil Dead II. The film is a masterpiece, in a very real sense the Citizen Kane of horror movies. Just as Orson Welles had done with Citizen Kane, Sam Raimi took the best elements of style and the best ideas in horror at the time, and he deployed them all together for the first time. They were not used willy-nilly, as the effects in House tend to be, but very deliberately toward crafting a supreme experience of horror intensity.

If we return to Evil Dead (2013), I wonder if it had been made with the same synthetic genius as Evil Dead II, would it have been any better? Perhaps the case could be made that it would be just the same. If the films championed as the best of our time are James Wan's Insidious and Xavier Gens's Frontier(s), we're aesthetically impoverished. Insidious was a fun ghost movie, but it really invents nothing. If we really have become conditioned to see it as our The Haunting, Poltergeist, or even House, our demands on horror filmmakers have become too light. Evil Dead II was possible because of the general fertility of imagination in horror filmmaking at the time. Raimi was borrowing, yes, but he was borrowing fragments of genius.

The best Evil Dead (2013) gets is in the bloody final fifteen minutes, a great deal of which is borrowed from Xavier Gens's Frontier(s) and a little from Paco Plaza's [REC]. Both of these are very good films, but of the two only [REC] can be credited with real inventiveness. Frontier(s) is little more than a Gallic, very bloody Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We need filmmakers to take chances again, to try to come up with new ways of scaring us and disturbing us. We need new techniques, new styles, new camera movements, new sounds, new sights. Then, when another Sam Raimi does come along, he'll be able to steal from the best. Because right now, I don't think another Evil Dead 2 would be possible--we don't have enough good ideas to steal.