The Evil Dead (1981)

Director: Sam Raimi
Stars: Bruce Campbell


Review:

Work is so utterly terrible, and I am giving myself a good treat tonight. Despite being a horror movie fan, there's quite a number of mandatory horror movies that I havent seen yet, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), It's Alive (1974), and this one. I have seen Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992), but it even surprise me that I havent had the opportunity or occasion to watch this original masterpiece.

A group of friends went for camping. They came to a camp that hidden a book and a tape. The tape was recorded by a archaeologist that was researching the evil demons. He left an incarnation in the tape translated from the book to woke the evil demons, and the demons are possessing the group of friends. To cast out the demons, our hero Ash must dismember them one by one.

The basic is same as other horror movies, but it gets to original content as soon as possible. We spent several minutes to know that they get to the camp, and several minutes for them to discover the book. And from then on, all hell was gonna break loose.

Raped by a tree. Where else could you see this?

Many of the shots are taken in subjective camera angle, in which the audience were in the position of the demons, watching the victims screaming scared, but not exactly know what the victims were seeing. A cheap reason for using this camera angle is to avoid special effects. Another reason that works for the movie is the audience get to see how scared the characters was, and imagine the horrible things that they see. Nowadays it would be a monster in CG, but that is not imaginative. The beauty of it is the audience will automatically project what they think is scary to what they did not see, but showing everything ruined the whole imagination.

Subjective Camera. What you can think of is what they see.

I am a Computer Scientist and CG is no mystery to me. Ray tracing, Marching Cubes, Point-cloud reconstruction with B-spline surface and Newton's Method etc I know all their tricks, and this really makes CG non-effective to me. One main weakness that they couldnt do in at least 5 years I would say, is CGI looks too clean. People's guts were flying out, but they look shiny and clean without a particle of dust, and we know it is CG. This is beyond their reach since actually they are not modelling the CG with every little tiny details, but just generate it with bump mapping and interpolating. (Sorry for getting a little technical) And with such cleaness we are not scared. We are scared of dirtyness, which only old special effects can give.

He has blood, or at least red liquid, covered his face. At least you know that.

The director Sam Raimi now best known for his Spiderman movies, shown a change of tone in his Evil Dead trilogy. The movies gradually increase in comedy and lessen horror, and that is why I like the original 1981 Evil Dead the best. Horror and comedy are really opposite things. You do not laugh when you are scared, except you have lost your mind. A movie can be funny or scary, but not both. For a movie like Evil Dead, I like it the scarier the better.