Angle On: The Cabin Laughs Also
The Beguiling Heart of Evil Dead II (and all of the Evils Dead)
Almost twenty years ago I rented Evil Dead II with some friends at a video store. That’s an old fashioned sentence. Even just writing it I’m experiencing an intense pang of nostalgia. For fear of sounding like the rapidly aging nerd that I most certainly am, I won't bemoan the loss of the movie rental store or dwell on what an impactful and genuinely joyful pastime it was to drop by on a weekend with a couple of friends and pull things from the shelves at random. Things you’d never heard of but maybe had a strange image on the cover that called to you in ways you weren’t even sure you understood but were helpless to ignore. Images like a fleshless skeleton in profile. Two living eyes staring straight out at you from sheer blackness.
It’s a simple image. Instantaneously iconic. The kind of thing it’s hard to ignore when you're looking for something scary (and maybe a little funny) to pass the time. I distinctly remember pulling down the plastic box with this image on it and seeing another picture on the back: a guy with a ripped and bloody shirt with a chainsaw for a hand. I’d never seen anything like it before but I recognized it immediately as something I wanted to see.
So we rented it. We went home. We watched it. We watched it again. At a certain point (several points) I was entirely baffled by what I was seeing, but I was also thinking one thought with absolute clarity:
“This is for me.”
Now, whenever I throw this movie on (which is, as people who know me know, semi-constantly) I find different things to enjoy about it, but I still struggle with defining exactly what it is about this movie that I feel so connected to. In fact, I think that struggle to articulate and distill this film’s hold over me is one of its joys. But all this time later, I’m no less certain that whatever Evil Dead II is, it is still squarely and precisely my kind of movie.
The first 15 minutes of Evil Dead II are a recap of the first film (a micro budget gore-fest released in 1981). It’s a simple story: a guy named Ash brings his girlfriend Linda to a remote cabin where they find an old reel-to-reel tape with some ancient Sumerian incantations on it. Ash presses play…and things spiral into nightmarish hilarity. From there, the majority of the film is simply Bruce Campbell as Ash alone in the cabin, fighting off undead loved ones, parts of his own body, and mounting insanity in the face of an ill-defined and pestering evil. It’s a scenario that supports a delightfully destabilizing combination of acrobatic slapstick and grotesque scares that remains entirely singular in the genre.
There are moments in Evil Dead II that are some of my very favorite comedic sequences all time. Even (and especially) tossed of lines or single overdubbed words that make me laugh just thinking about them. But the comedy is only one part of what makes this movie so unique, because it is also genuinely disturbing in its visual ideas and thematic implications.
What if your life was forever changed for the worse because of a single mistake? How do you maintain a sense of moral and intellectual clarity when you are isolated and provoked? Even when these ideas are rendered comedically, they still creep me out. It’s great fun to watch as Linda’s corpse dances in the garden or as Ash’s possessed right hand breaks plate after plate over his head, but there is also a cruelty to it all that is genuinely unsettling.
This dizzying cocktail of humor and terror comes to a head when the entire cabin begins to laugh at Ash’s torment. Literally. The lamp, the books on the shelves, and the mounted head of a deer all cackle with sinister delight. It’s one of the funniest bits in the film (with some of the best effects), but it is also disturbing to watch as Ash’s own laughs curdle into screams of helplessness. As he realizes he is trapped in this maddening comedy. The object of our ridicule.
Edgar Wright (a director who also broke through to the mainstream by making a small budget horror comedy with his best friends) once said that while most horror movies have a cast that is getting picked off one by one, in Evil Dead it’s mostly just one man getting picked on. It’s the core aspect of this film that announces it as a true “horror comedy,” and not a “parody” (Evil Dead is no Scary Movie). It isn’t putting on a costume of horror to poke fun at the genre, it is the genuine article. It’s also happens to be hilarious.
A lot of this comes from Bruce Campbell’s remarkable performance, but the other stars of the show are the practical effects and director Sam Raimi’s seemingly endless well of visual ideas. There are moments in these films where you know for certain you are seeing something fabricated, when the artifice is not hidden but celebrated, and you are nevertheless disgusted, disturbed, and totally engrossed by what you’re seeing. It’s real and unreal. Funny and scary. Both at once.
You can feel that this movie was made by hand. You can see the stick holding up the dislodged eyeball as it flies through the air into a character's open, screaming throat. You can catch the seams in the latex masks and even pieces of the lighting rigs as Campbell stumbles through the set (built in a local high school gymnasium). You can tell when the stop motion kicks in, watch the patterns of blood on a character’s face rearrange from shot to shot, and feel when the camera has been strapped to the handlebars of a motorcycle tearing through the forest at what you can only assume are unsafe speeds. And not one of these inconsistencies or bits of transparent trickery diminish the experience of Evil Dead II. They enhance it.
There are of course all the behind the scenes facts and half-truths that make this a franchise that you can really sink your teeth into. It’s one of those scrappy cult classics that is as fascinating for its production as anything that happens on the screen. Rumors of actual murder and phantoms haunting the original cabin location. Apocryphal stories about Raimi falling into a deep sleep after three straight nights of filming and the crew being unable to wake him for hours. True trivia like the fact that a young Joel Cohen was the assistant editor on the first Evil Dead and, inspired by the bootstraps production, decided to make a film with his brother Ethan: Blood Simple.
But in the end the story of Evil Dead is really the story of two old friends with almost no resources, running around in the woods with cameras. And that’s a story that becomes really compelling when you consider what an impact those kids had on culture and what an incredibly long shadow their independent experiments have cast.
Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell picked right up where Evil Dead II left off in 1992 with Army of Darkness, which took a giant leap toward comedy and adventure. The Ash we see here is not longer a terrified and tormented kid but a full-blown action hero who speaks almost exclusively in cheesy one-liners. It’s both a far cry from their first film and also a natural evolution. The kind of campy, adventurous movie making that they clearly loved. while it’s not my favorite in the series, it’s an undeniable joy to watch them play with bigger, more expensive toys.
Of course, Raimi would go on to much, much bigger things. It's easy to forget now just what a big impact he had on culture when he took a little title called Spider-Man. It’s shocking to see just how strange and brimming with personality Raimi’s Spider-Man movies (especially the strange and wonderful Spider-Man II) are when compared with today’s samey superhero fare. Given what a giant hit these movies were, it’s not an overstatement to say that Raimi is one of a handful of directors who has shaped modern blockbuster filmmaking and helped push genre into the mainstream. Whether you like the results or not, it’s still astonishing to consider this Michigan kid with a super 8 camera who liked watching his best friend get hurt climbing to the absolute top of the filmmaking ladder.
Evil Dead hasn’t faded into cult obscurity like so many other scrappy independent horror films of the 80s. The legacy of these films is alive and well. In 2013 Evil Dead was “remade” by Fede Alvarez. It’s pretty great and truly scary, but lacking a funny bone, if not a sense of self-awareness (in this film it quite literally rains blood). Earlier this year the latest entry in this ongoing, and loosely tied franchise, Evil Dead Rise, came to theaters. It left the woods behind, but has a spirit much closer to Evil Dead II than any other film since. Someone chokes on an eyeball; possessed tenants chant “I’ll swallow your soul”; blood sprays in ridiculous quantities and the undead laugh maniacally. I walked out of my theater happy as hell, and given the film’s success it might not be too long before the deadites rise again.
And that would be plenty of fun. But I’m not holding my breath, because I’m not sure I really want a clean, polished, professional rendition of this particular tune. I like seeing the strings, feeling the camaraderie between the people in front of the camera and the ones behind it, sensing the risks being taken, and witnessing the lengths people will go to to be a part of making something together. It’s the intention behind these films that really excites me and keeps me returning year after year. For how scary and funny and cool I find these films to be, the thing they make me feel most is inspired.
It feels funny to be this sincere about a movie this silly, with this many severed heads and splashes of goo, but I do sincerely love Evil Dead II. I love it for its familiarity and for its sense of humor and wonder that made me feel awake to my own. It also reminds me with each frame, each startlingly original idea, each comedic beat, each dash of individuality that the people making these things we love are just people who love these things too. People who decided to take a couple friends and a couple cameras and a couple hundred gallons of fake blood out into the woods and make something out of nothing.
This is the end of the horror…for now. Next month I’ll be posting two new essays on films that are distinctly outside the horror genre. I hope you’ll keep checking in with Angle On and subscribe if you haven’t already. Thank you for reading!