The Evil Dead

With his feature-film debut, Sam Raimi brings us a claustrophobic horror movie that capitalizes on excess. In fact, after a deceptively relaxed opening, the eruption of evil in the cabin bathed in white moonlight constitutes a sort of point of no return: dismemberments, mutilations, rivers of bodily fluids, and horrifying transmutations keep coming non-stop in a suffocating, almost nightmarish atmosphere.

The makeup and special effects retain a crude efficacy even today, despite the meager budget and an extensive use of makeshift solutions. The cast, mostly composed of the director’s friends, includes the square-jawed face of future horror icon Bruce Campbell, who had starred in Raimi’s earlier short film (“Within the Woods” – 1978) which contained the nucleus of a good number of the elements expanded upon in this film.

The plot gets repetitive and is weighed down in places by an excessively serious tone (during an interview, Campbell himself even admitted that the film was overly melodramatic at times). It’s not the consummate masterpiece that some fans’ enthusiastic comments would lead you to believe, but rather a work whose primary importance lies in the influence it exerted on the evolution of the genre, especially in the figurative representation of horror. In that regard, young Raimi’s techniques and insights – enhanced by the fine work of Bart Pierce and Tom Sullivan – have justly been the subject of numerous academic studies.