Sam Raimi's debut feature was made for nothing and rolled out to anyone who could be contacted and wanted to screen it. This took time in 1981 and I don't think Australia saw any version of it for years after that. I was intrigued to read of some of the scenes and the general atmosphere and the word was that, apart from a few relieving comedic moments, the movie took its job of scaring seriously. When I finally saw it all that came true.
I can't quite remember when I first saw this one at a cinema but have a clear recollection of seeing it on VHS, hired from the local vid shop. The main reason it made more of an impression as a home viewing was that I'd just got back into openly enjoying horror movies after first seeing and being impressed by John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (taped from tv) when it was over a decade old. The other thing was find a place to discuss it which was the alt.horror newsgroup on the auld Usenet network. So it was in 1998 that I ploughed through the crumbly old horror videos on the shelves at the local videobusters, ticking each recommended essential. They all fell like dominoes o' cineculture and The Evil Dead was an inevitability.
There was an unsung aspect to old video rental that I appreciate more now that it's long vanished: the chain of experience you created by being the next in line to use the container of this encounter. There's a distinction in information theory that splits distribution vessels into two types (patience, I'll drop this soon but it's worth knowing about): allographic which is a representation of the information only (like an epub novel) and authographic which is the information in a physical container (like a print copy of the same novel). The first gives you an unimpeded access to the content but the second gives you the experience of it being accessed; the creases, the dog ears, the sauce stains, maybe an old bookmark.
Rental videos are authographic (assuming prior use, o' course) and bear the ghosts of previous experience. Some of that is physical like pause glitches in racy or action heavy scenes, plot details missable in a blink. I remember hiring a copy of Herschell Gordon Lewis' folk horror Two Thousand Maniacs and letting it run to the end of the tape. Halfway through one of the end trailers, a previous customer had shot a closeup of his arse by way of a review. That's not a liberty you can enjoy on Netflix.
If something like Repo Man was made for the midnight arthouse The Evil Dead found glory in video rental. Commercial transactions aside, things like this film formed a kind of secret baton passing as the next viewer pressed play, feasted and returned it for the next stranger. As I write that I'm wondering if the movies that I will always have in physical format and in the best version I can find were originally rentals. Some definitely weren't: Citizen Kane and Apocalypse Now are among many I treasure from an initial cinema experience but there are a host of others I could only see on tape (and were too much for tv) like Suspiria, The Beyond, Tombs of the Blind Dead, Lips of Blood. It wasn't just obscure horror but these were movies that never made it to the arthouses or rep cinemas; it was VHS or nothing. The Evil Dead was among those. I have a friend who is the same way about the Friday the 13th franchise, there's a similar sense of owing it to the formative or rich experience of cinema in this dark neighbourhood: dark not because there were a lot of horror movies but simply because we didn't know each other as movie renters.
So, when I see the creepy voyeuristic tracking shots circumnavigating the cabin and peering into the private rooms and I know it's the point of view of the force, I feel at home and on edge at the same time. The waiting woods outside breathe mist and darkness while the cosiness of the interior is for drinking games and playing the tape from the basement by the evil archeologist who sternly voices the spell of awakening (through a vintage reverb unit) whereupon the restless spirits blowing around outside take life and the souls of the holidaymakers. The scene where we are shown this remains spectacular: two of the girls are playing at card reading when the one staring out the window starts correctly naming the cards as they are drawn behind her. Her voice sours with each syllable until she levitates, turns and barks in a demonic grumble: "Why have you disturbed our sleep, awakened us from our ancient slumber? You will die!" Her eyes are boiled white. However home made this might look it is still done with such conviction that complying with the horror of it is effortless.
Most of the rest of the film is more of this, situations of possessed people attacking or taunting those yet to be taken. Lots of stop-motion transformation effects and enough stage blood to fill a storm drain. A host of creepy sound effects that are far more potent and atmosphere-building than the sound library orchestral score which sounds cheaper than any of the purpose built material. There is a narrative arc and you do end up caring about what happens to the people on screen. The possessed are not just cartoonishly violent (though they can be) they are also frequently and genuinely eerie. The world around the cabin is not like the relatable urban streets of The Exorcist nor the imaginable holiday camp of Friday the 13th; it is a nightmare wood from a fairy tale gone out of business, closer to Hellscapes of Lucio Fulci than the nature strips of Haddonfield. The voices underground bellow for the sweet young things to join them and the trees -- oh ... the trees.
One of the girls, Cheryl, hears something outside and goes to investigate. The force moves pursues her through the woods and soon she is tangled and then actively bound by vines which secure her limbs, wrench her legs apart. A branch shoots straight into her crotch. She breaks free and runs back to the cabin. This scene is called the tree rape. It has kept this film on the iffy list for decades. It is never less than shocking, no matter how often you see it.
For my part I think it's painful to the eye and goes to an unnecessary extent. It's not extreme cinema like Cannibal Holocaust nor even unbearably brutal like the rape/assault in Irreversible but it sticks out from the tone of even the nastiest horror setups in the rest of the film (including role-reversed attempted rape, however demonically driven). But then again I just don't know. I watch it, I wince and then I keep watching. So, I can't pretend it ruins the movie for me. The violence of the rape in Irreversible has a point and forms a pivot for the whole film. There's a plot point in this one but I wonder two things: did it need that last shot to make its suggestion and if it was removed would that only add a leering suggestion to the tone, removing the shock that renders it appropriately ugly?
Here are some things to be aware of. This will sound flippant but I mean it sincerely: add a "however" or "well, actually..." as you will between these statements:
It's violence is meant to shock, a moment of horror.
It is not depicted as comedic.
It is a supernatural act not a human crime.
It is unmistakably a sexual assault.
As it is the point of figurative as well as literal penetration by the evil dead it is a genuine plot point.
Scotty returns from his own investigative sortie in a similarly ravaged fashion. There are splintered branches in his body. It is likely the same happened to him.
We do not see him suffer as we did Cheryl.
Sam Raimi has long regretted adding the moment, calling it brutal and recognising that many find it offensive.
Removing this second of screen time would not involve more than an easy edit in an era where cigarettes and guns are digitally erased from characters' in earlier movies.
He has never removed it.
...
What remains is a feat of anarchic horror cinema, the movie equivalent of an avant-gardist composer creating a punk song - the string of the melody and pop song arc are there but everything else is made of found sound, distorted nature recordings and anything they could find that could hit anything else. Sam Raimi climbed up a comparitively rapid career path to establish himself as a respected film maker who kept an inclination toward genre in the league of Joe Dante or Tobe Hooper (no slights there, by the way) His films are never less than watchable and at their best effectively thrill but nothing he has done since (including its sequels) has come close to the delirious, ugly wonder of this first bratty ghost ride.
Viewing Notes:
So, I saw this last weekend as a forty year old film. This time it was in 4K ultra high definition. On VHS everything looked equally murky, especially when seeing the upgrade. The first DVD I saw of it was so brightened that the extra details visible included the square inset where a grossly enlarged full moon sat as though gazing through a window in the night sky. The aspect ratio of that one was in the original 4:3. The one I replaced that one with was cropped for a contemporary 16:9 screen. By the most recent Blu-Ray there was a choice offered. All of these continued the overbrightened night sky shot. Now, at the highest resolution available for home viewing I am delighted to report that the moon in the original 4:3 ratio has been corrected to look like the moon in the sky (albeit unrealistically large but that was the intention); someone did the work and it's good. For the rest of the film not only do get a lot more detail of film grain from this 16mm source but colours that feel closest to natural out of any version I have seen. The audio (Dolby Atmos) is a little more like the effect of the brightened early DVDs in that while it spreads the sound field further the fact remains that there is nothing to be done about things like hard-set reverb (used in all the supernatural voices) but there is more clarity to all the dialogue and soundmix. From ricketty, splotchy blownup 16mm in a cinema, through analogue to digital video to now, we can expereience this film from the budget side of the tracks with nothing between us and it. This is the allographic version to beat the lot and while I wouldn't want to rewind to a VHS copy I will always, to some degree, miss the stretch marks and glitches, the thumb prints of the relay of persons unknown who, hand by passing hand, knew what I came to know.
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