The Rewind

Back in our Patreon days, we used to offer subscribers a series called Film School From Hell, which mostly consisted of Matt Donato making me watch horror movies I had tried to avoid for one reason or another. So with Evil Dead Burn in theaters this weekend, I thought we would do something different in this newsletter and reshare my inaugural watch of the 2013 Evil Dead. This piece was originally published in March 2023 and I stand by most — well, some — of what I wrote.

I don’t remember how a battered copy of Evil Dead II ended up in our family’s VCR my sophomore year of high school. In hindsight, it was a strange choice. I had spent the past few years being scared of my own shadow; the alien autopsy sequence from Independence Day had given me nightmares just a few years before, and I made a point of avoiding anything that promised too many scares. But watching Evil Dead II for the first time was a revelation, a new understanding that horror did not have to be measured in cruelty alone.

I credit Evil Dead II with sparking my lifelong love of horror, but that love was built around a healthy sense of mistrust. I had Evil Dead action figures – I even had my own rubber version of the Necronomicon from collector’s edition DVD releases – but my appreciation for those films was rooted in their balance of comedy and horror. When 2013 rolled around, I was in the early throes of being a horror critic, but even then, I spent time avoiding films that seems too violent or in bad taste. In 2013, I was tasked with reviewing Frankenstein’s Army for the Tribeca Film Festival and decided I’d seen enough body horror for the year. That mean no new Texas Chainsaw and no new Evil Dead.

And I’ve maintained those healthy boundaries with horror until recently, with this series tasking me with examining some of the horror films I’ve been avoiding for years. I probably would have sought out Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead at some point, but I made it ten years without feeling left out. I’ll bet I could’ve made ten more, easily.

For the updated version of the movie, a young group of friends has been replaced with an intervention. Mia (Jane Levy) is an addict, but her previous attempts at quitting cold turkey have ended in failure – and overdose. To increase the likelihood of her success, brother David (Shiloh Fernandez) and high school friends Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) and Olivia (Jessica Lucas) take Mia to her grandparents’ cabin in the woods, where unbeknownst to them, a terrible ritual has been recently performed to exorcise a demon. From here, things go pretty much as expected: the book is read, the friends are possessed, and at least one of our protagonists loses a hand.

While I’ve never sat down to map out the boundaries of my horror tolerances, there are a few rules I’ve stumbled upon through trial and error. Despite my admiration for the practical craft of gore onscreen, torture is almost always a big no-no. The violence itself is usually enough to make me squeamish, but it is also the frequent approach to that violence that I find unsettling. Many films caught in the wake of Eli Roth forget that audience members – or at least this audience member – should be rooting for the characters to survive. The nihilism of the twenty-first century sits poorly with me, and movies like Evil Dead have been criticized both now and then for treating their characters as gristle for the mill.

So I was surprised to find that the cruelty of Evil Dead never quite overshadowed the other elements of the movie. Perhaps this is the nature of remakes. On the podcast, I often describe horror as cinematic jazz – a series of familiar melodies that are enjoyed for their interpretation, not their origination – and Evil Dead is the rare remake to truly benefit from its connection to the source material. Álvarez’s pursuit of violence still honors the story beats of the original film, so what might have been a shallow narrative on paper becomes a rather fun exploration of authorial voice. We want to see how this Evil Dead will echo the beats of its predecessors and knowing that each character will die a monstrous death allows us to focus on the how rather than the why.

Which is good, because Evil Dead is every bit as violent as advertised. I spent most of the film holding a pillow tight to my chest; when Deadite Mia uses the box cutter to split her tongue, I found myself absently slapping the pillow, muttering, “Come the fuck on,” under my breath. But even after a decade of whispers, Álvarez unleashed is something that must be seen to be believed. I knew to expect the tongue sequence, but there were other acts of violence – syringes to the cheek, nails to the forearm, machetes through the wall – that are still as impressive in 2023 as they must have been upon release. The things this man is going to do with an Alien sequel, I swear to Christ.

(After a certain point, I was just in awe of the amount of violence Eric had absorbed. It moved past shock into a weird form of horror enlightenment. I think I understand Clive Barker characters better now.)

But if horror is only as good as its final girl, then all credit belongs to Levy for creating both the hero and the monster that propels the movie forward. I won’t pretend to have any insight into the portrayal of addiction that Álvarez and his writing partner Rodo Sayagues put on screen, but this is just enough meat on the bone for Levy to work with as a performer. The slow transition from withdrawal to possession is inspired, and with all due respect to Linda Blair, Levy has created the rare possession victim that is actually scary onscreen. The shots of Deadite Mia poking her face through the chained cellar door are some of the most unnerving moments in the film. Her physicality is second to none.

None of which answers the question: did I like Evil Dead? I think the answer is yes. It’s brutal in a way that few horror films can match, but there is genuine love behind each act of torture. We can feel the presence of a filmmaker who is delighted to be working in this particular sandbox, and the movie never feels nihilistic – just violent as hell. It is also undeniably the scariest of the Evil Dead franchise and charts a new course for any films that dare to follow in its footsteps. It is hard not to love something so determined to chart its own course, and even if Evil Dead is an infrequent watch for me, with the right audience, I think this could be a truly singular viewing experience.

And if nothing else, Evil Dead proved to me the malleability of the template. The greatest gift Sam Raimi ever gave audiences was his own ambivalence towards Evil Dead canon. This is a formula that can be recreated in a hundred different isolated settings, and the most recent Evil Dead is proof that Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise deserves to operate with a blank slate as far as fans are concerned. It is hard to imagine anyone topping the delivery that Álvarez brought to the screen, but then again, most films do not lean so heavily into cheese graters as weapons that it becomes the movie’s licensed hashtag. One thing is for sure: I won’t wait ten years to catch Evil Dead Rise in theaters.

Quick hits from around the world of horror and indie journalism.

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