93: Evil Dead, Redux

I had the opportunity to introduce some friends to Evil Dead II this weekend, so to celebrate, I'm re-publishing an issue I sent to paying subscribers last year after seeing Evil Dead Rise.

I'm a very late comer to the Evil Dead franchise. Some good friends of mine got me to watch the first three movies just last year. We're separated by state lines and time zones, so Zoom movie parties were our only recourse; we'd each sync up the movie we were watching so we could start at the same time, then chat while we watched. I'm normally a quiet movie watcher–no other activities unless I'm taking notes, no commentary when the characters are talking–but the Evil Dead movies have become my "exception" film franchise in more ways than one.

The exceptions are many. I don't ordinarily like talking in movies. I used to avoid horror entirely, and if I had to watch a scary movie, I'd steer clear of anything with excessive gore. Explicitly spiritual horror–hauntings and possession and the like–is a sensitive topic for me, even now. I like having rich, fully realized characters; I like being able to root for (or at least sympathize with) at least one of them, and I like having a sense of hope at the end. I don't like movies that are mean, and I get annoyed by rote formulas. The Evil Dead movies violate nearly all these rules. On paper, they seem to have been made in a lab to be Not For Sarah.

And yet here we are! I have a deep affection for Evil Dead in general, and I think it's becauseof all of the factors I've listed, rather than in spite of them. I came to this realization this past week, when I was watching Evil Dead Rise next to another friend of mine in the movie theater. 

Like all the other movies in the franchise before it, Evil Dead Rise takes about ten minutes to establish its setting and stakes, then hits the gas and doesn't let up until the credits roll. Rise differs from the other movies in that it takes place in an L.A. apartment building, rather than a cabin somewhere in the woods in Michigan; as such, there are a few more unlucky souls than usual in Rise, and there are also children in the cast. The differences heighten the stakes quite literally–the apartment our heroes are trapped in is on the 13th floor–as well as figuratively. Everyone's fair game in an Evil Dead movie, with the body count usually n-1, where n represents the entire cast. The kids don't stand a chance.

The premise is more than a little cruel. And that's true for every movie in the series: the first person to get possessed never does anything wrong. They were just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of one of their friends' bad choices. The Book of the Dead doesn't care who reads it. It's just there to summon demons. And the demons don't care who they possess first, either. They're just there to have a good time tormenting the people they've come across, until the people either succumb or fight their way out. The real strength of the Evil Dead movies is that their demons are petty. 

I love that detail. For the rapidly dwindling protagonists, the stakes couldn't be higher than the preservation of their souls; for the Deadites, it's a romp. It doesn't matter who they possess first, because they're past caring the moment they die; the demons possessing their bodies don't have any sense of respect for the sanctity of life in the first place, so they'll simply take whoever they find first. It's a refreshing angle on slasher movies; the classics tend to stick to a strict moral code, which is where the trope of the virginal Final Girl comes from. Coming across a slasher villain and making it out alive is functionally a moral judgment on any given character.

The Evil Dead movies don't lean on such black-and-white consequences. All of their characters are morally gray, and Bruce Campbell's Ash (and Mia in the 2013 remake, and Beth to a slightly lesser extent in Rise) is a shallow, bitter jerk. And yet I love Ash, because he's both terrible and deeply goofy: the duality of man with a chainsaw for a hand. He's also Sam Raimi's punching bag, doused in buckets of blood and just trying to make it out alive. A lesser movie would make each of the Evil Dead protagonists more likeable before they start their respective ordeals; as it stands, I like that these movies believe their protagonists deserve a fighting chance regardless of the states of their hearts before their lives are irrevocably changed by the Deadites. It feels like a little spark of subversive hope in a world gone mad.

What I talked about:

I guested on Almost Major, a podcast that covers some of the better-known "small" movie studios and the films they've released. They're covering New Line Cinema movies from the 1980s. This week, we talked about Stranded, an alien-abduction movie that was so terrible I almost found it endearing.