Cheap Thrills: In Praise of The Evil Dead

Dur­ing his for­ma­tive years, Sam Rai­mi spent much of his time mak­ing ama­teur Super‑8 films with child­hood friend Bruce Camp­bell. Rai­mi had just turned 20 when, in late 1979, shoot­ing began on his fea­ture debut, The Evil Dead. He and Camp­bell raised the bud­get them­selves, beg­ging friends, fam­i­ly and any­one who would lis­ten, with only the $1,600 pro­to­type short With­in the Woods to estab­lish the cred­i­bil­i­ty of their intent.

The total out­lay ini­tial­ly came in at $90,000, though it would even­tu­al­ly reach $350,000, account­ing for post-pro­duc­tion and mar­ket­ing. What fol­lowed was, by all accounts, an ardu­ous six-week shoot in and around an aban­doned cab­in dur­ing the Ten­nessee mid­win­ter, with long hours, prim­i­tive facil­i­ties, mul­ti­ple injuries, dwin­dling funds and frozen equip­ment that would have to be thawed at the derelict building’s fireplace.

The rest, as they say, is his­to­ry. As well as bring­ing in a healthy return on invest­ment ($29.4 mil­lion at the box office), The Evil Dead has var­i­ous­ly been praised by Stephen King, vil­i­fied by Mary White­house, cut to rib­bons and banned in sev­er­al coun­tries (incred­i­bly, until as recent­ly as 2016 in Ger­many); it has become a home video best sell­er, spawned mul­ti­ple sequels (both offi­cial and unof­fi­cial), a remake, a musi­cal, a TV spin­off series, video games and com­ic book crossovers; it has secured last­ing careers for Rai­mi and Camp­bell, and a per­ma­nent place for itself in pop­u­lar cul­ture. It is now fre­quent­ly recog­nised as one of the all-time best entries in the hor­ror canon.

This pas­sage from tiny indie pro­duc­tion to genre great is part­ly down to Raimi’s great ambi­tion and ener­gy as a film­mak­er who, instead of allow­ing a lack of funds to get in the way of his vision, let neces­si­ty be the moth­er of inven­tion. His fre­quent use of heav­i­ly cant­ed angles, shoot­ing char­ac­ters and their envi­ron­ment from seem­ing­ly every which way except dead-on, brings a (cru­cial­ly afford­able) sense of skew-whiff unease to the film’s visu­al style. Unwill­ing to restrict him­self to tri­pod or hand­held shots – the defaults for low-bud­get film­mak­ing – Rai­mi impro­vised cheap alter­na­tives to expen­sive rigs, all in the ser­vice of ensur­ing that The Evil Dead looked a whole lot bet­ter than its mod­est bud­get promised.

Cab­in-in-the-woods was born of cam­era-on-the-wood: a dol­ly cam effect was realised by slather­ing vase­line on a plank of wood and lit­er­al­ly slid­ing the cam­era along it; and the effect of a ​‘low mode’ steadicam, recent­ly devel­oped and pop­u­larised in Stan­ley Kubrick’s big-bud­get The Shin­ing, was sim­u­lat­ed by hav­ing two oper­a­tors run along on either side of a two-by-four on which the cam­era had been mounted.

The open­ing, dis­em­bod­ied ​‘track’ across a misty lake’s sur­face was cre­at­ed by Camp­bell, in the water, push­ing a dinghy in which Rai­mi held the cam­era. For the final shot, the cam­era was fixed to a speed­ing bike. It was pre­cise­ly because these ​‘shaky cam’ shots nev­er came close to achiev­ing the smooth­ness of gen­uine steadicam that they evoke the POV of some­thing oth­er­world­ly, beyond not only the sight­line, but also the expe­ri­ence, of the viewer.

Of course, what is good for the view­er need not be good for the cast. The cheap, thick con­tact lens­es used to give the char­ac­ters a demon­ic appear­ance took 10 min­utes to put in, and could only be worn for 15 or they would dam­age the eyes; the dyed karo syrup in which Camp­bell was reg­u­lar­ly spat­tered took hours to remove. Towards the end, the prac­ti­cal effects that show two char­ac­ters melt­ing on-screen are very obvi­ous­ly claymation.

Yet Rai­mi has three tech­niques which he deploys togeth­er to help his view­er over­look the cracks and seams in some of his more obvi­ous­ly bar­gain-base­ment effects work. First, there is the punchy pace of Edna Ruth Paul’s edit­ing (with assis­tance from a young Joel Coen), which nev­er gives view­ers breath­ing space to dwell too long on any­thing. Sec­ond, there is the sheer relent­less­ness of the blood and gore that Rai­mi throws at the screen, stun­ning us into submission.

Third, there is Raimi’s best spe­cial effect: Camp­bell him­self, whose jut­ting jaw, corny line deliv­ery and mat­inée-idol looks bring a brand of old world charm to pro­ceed­ings that makes any mat­te-paint­ed full moon or smoke machine mias­ma just seem part of the film’s self-con­scious stylisation.