My earliest horror film memory was of Nightmare On Elm Street when Tina was dragged up the walls, screaming. My second was of Pennywise the Clown pulling a little boy down a drain. Somewhere along the way was the memory of a girl being raped by branches in the woods. That was what I remembered from Evil Dead. A bit of background and some refreshing new views on this comedy-horror franchise; it certainly is difficult to view a remake of a film without having seen or having prior knowledge of the previous entries in the series. Back then, I thought Evil Dead was cheesy, outdated but certainly had a story to tell, buckets of fake blood and horrifying creatures of the night. All with a low-budget but cinematically unnerving to watch. Today, I still think Evil Dead is cheesy and certainly prefer the second installment in the series for its cleaned up appearance while still delivering a story, comedy-horror and memorable moments. The dead hand, laughing furniture, dancing dead girlfriend and chainsaw hand are keynotes in horror cinema history.
Horror remake. That's all this new Evil Dead is and those words spell death of a film franchise for me. The past decade or so has been plagued with remakes, and not very memorable ones either, usually delivering the final nail in the coffin of a franchise. They arrived in the wake of the numerous found-footage horror films, that still crop up every so often promising a new experience of horror to truly terrify. I'm not sure whether the inclusion of archetypal characters was intentional but I certainly felt my hand being held throughout. Visually annotated and constantly told where to react in horror or to understand the state-the-obvious plot points and key character dialogue.
I understood that the character in the glasses with the long hair was probably a stoner with lack of confidence but a penchant for dicking about with the occult despite numerous bold red words warning him to not say a fucking thing in the book in front of him! In the world of modern horror you would think it familiar by now for the characters to not go outside alone or not to do the verb that the adjective is telling you to do. Tongue in cheek or not, the first act or so really bored me.
The premise here is that Mia (Jane Levy), her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez) and three of her friends are on a getaway to a remote cabin in the woods as an intervention. Mia is a drug addict and her family and friends are here to get her clean by whatever means necessary, rather than say admit her to a rehabilitation clinic and not the decrepit cabin before them.
Eventually their bespectacled token smart friend Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), who aptly notes aloud for us and his friends that he understands the difference between witchcraft and voodoo, reads from a bound book. The book is this film's Necronomicon, and understandably in that installment it was a recording of a professor and not the voice of our protagonist in the original who read from the book. The characters weren't stupid in the original. If a book looks foreboding and a location looks eerie, turn around immediately. Recent horror films play the same story, that the victims are stupid and probably deserve it pointed out excellently in Tucker And Dale Versus Evil.
Luckily, everyone soon feels that this engineered rehab getaway is a bit more terrifying than they first thought. Eric's curiosity certainly got the better of him and horror is unleashed into the woods surrounding the cabin and it's not long before Mia is taken away to be violated in the trees. The imagery and moments that were unnerving are over in a matter of seconds in this remake. There was a strange mixture of terror and sensual enjoyment from Cheryl upon her rape in the woods by possessed branches. Similarly this is Mia's indoctrination into possession and is over in moments. All hell breaks loose as she wreaks a bloody havoc in the cabin taking out her friends as she goes.
Confusion continues for the viewer stemming from the archetypal characters and then onto the violence that ensues. Uncertainty as to whether the violence is supposed to be comedic and unbelievable was left ambiguous. The violence is terrifically excecuted and similarly to the original and its sequel does not terrify but simply horrifies. There is a definite lack of harsh cinematography and character responses to the violence onscreen does not evoke a moment of psychophysiology in the viewer. There is no moment when it becomes difficult to watch what is happening on screen. The gore is plentiful in different forms of self-mutilation but the problem is that it is not the kind of horror that does terrify now. As cinema has evolved, horror has become one of the more difficult genres in which a particular method has to be employed to gauge a reaction in their audience. Introduction of different styles that end up being recycled and the audience's repeated exposure to these films drain the adrenalin rush and the emotional reaction to what is depicted onscreen.
In this instance, the cinematography is not carnographic enough. It is a method taught, tested and certainly successful that less is indeed more. If you can't see the creature completely you are left uncertain as to how large, how disfigured and how violent it is capable of being. Quick shots are employed to gain a movement in the viewer, to make you squirm. Unfortunately the only thing I found beautifully presented was the special effects makeup and the set design. Aesthetically it was disgusting and enjoyable, but the characters too much like the stupid good-looking victims of previous horrors. I understand that it's formulaic for horrors to do this, but it's been done since the 1960's. I also understand that a horror doesn't necessarily need character development. I didn't care what happened to would-be protagonist David, who suddenly displayed inventive skills from nowhere, as I had no connection to him. This felt like a horror killing off victims for the sake of doing so rather than engaging me in having some sort of moral bone in my body to not wish them harm but be definitely shocked when they were picked off one by one.
The ending deployed an interesting twist but not one I was unfamiliar with. I did not understand the physical return of a previous victim of the demon in the woods as I thought she had been burned to death in the film's prologue. Throughout I was not sat comparing the film to the original Evil Dead, but one cannot help but do so when you are explained thoroughly through press material and media that this is a remake. Like previously stated, set and effects were topnotch but camera, sound and story were bland. This could have been any setting, with a different title with the same exploits and this would have disappeared like the dozens of previous straight-to-shelf horrors today. The fact the title Evil Dead is pinned to it in order to gain thousands of paying viewers for it to burst at the seams in the box office is shocking in itself. It did, however, do what the tagline said and prove to be the number one in gruelling horror. There's a reason I look to Asian and European horror cinema for hauntingly memorable imagery. Also, Ash post-credits, for no other reason than to remind us the source material, no matter how cheesy, was better executed.
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