SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

By: Colin Campbell
November 27, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

EVIL DEAD (2013) | d. FEDE ÁLVAREZ | 2013

The 2013 remake of Sam Raimi’s 1981 horror comedy The Evil Dead grabs you — and doesn’t let you leave early. The body horror and gore made me wince when I initially saw it in the theater. Those bloody aspects made me grit my teeth again in a recent viewing.

We first meet Mia Allen (Jane Levy), whose friends bring her to a cabin (familiar from Raimi’s The Evil Dead) so she can get off drugs cold-turkey. What they don’t know — but the audience does — is that demonic events occurred there the night before. These phenomena lead to Mia becoming possessed and seeking to kill her loved ones.

The strength of this Evil Dead is in its unbelievable visuals — when Mia scalds herself in the shower, you feel it, thanks to the fantastic makeup. Meanwhile, every Thanksgiving I carve the family turkey with an electric knife — and when I do so, I think about Mia’s friend, Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore), cutting off her possessed hand with an electric knife.

The Evil Dead reboot faced an uphill battle after Fede Álvarez revealed there would be no Ash (Bruce Campbell). But it pays homage to the first two movies not only with the eerie cabin but when Mia loses her hand after a demon rolls a jeep on it — for those keeping score, that’s two severed hands in one movie. (PS: Ash does make a post-credits appearance.)

Evil Dead’s release date marked 10 years of horror movie remakes beginning with 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Are all the horror remakes from that era worth a rewatch? No, but it’s worth going back for what one could interpret as the Hammer Horror remakes of the ’70s and ’80s. This era benefitted from a much more serious tone. Ash in Evil Dead 2 places his possessed hand under a bucket, weighing it down with a copy of A Farewell to Arms. The scares are there, but so are the winks at the camera. And series such as A Nightmare on Elm Street evolved into Tex Avery-like cartoons with Freddy Krueger cracking one-liners while hamming it up for the camera. Also, Jason took Manhattan — ’nuff said.

Meanwhile in 2013’s Evil Dead, when demon-possessed Mia asks her brother to come down to the basement for a little incest, the laughs become uncomfortable. I’ll come out and say it — this Evil Dead is not only the most underrated of the series, it’s also the best. The deaths aren’t a comeuppance for the characters. The characters make mistakes, but I didn’t root for any of them to die, which is what horror should be. Spoiler: Mia is the main Deadite. (Deadites are possessed demons in the Evil Dead universe.) But by the movie’s end, she turns into the heroic Final Girl and kicks ass with a chainsaw. You can’t ask for more than that in a movie.

I will not be taking questions at this time.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

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