Laughs and Chills

I was bored the other night and looking for something to do. I browsed around the channels for a while, and ended up watching ‘The Evil Dead’ on direct tv satellite. It’s one of my all time favorite horror movies. Sure, the gore and violence are downright creepy. But it’s just so completely over the top that I can’t help laughing at times. The early 80′s unleashed a flood of schlocky B-movies on the horror market, but ‘The Evil Dead’ developed a cult following and is still easy to find on direct tv.

This was Sam Raimi’s first full-length film. He wrote, directed, produced, and even appeared in it; Raimi is one of the fisherman waving to the car in an early scene. For its time, ‘The Evil Dead’ is pretty much an outrageous movie. Remember, this was decades before the ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel’ franchises pushed the limits of how much brutality you could show on film. ‘The Evil Dead’ was banned in many countries for its excessive gore and is still banned in Germany to this day.

Raimi used many innovative and interesting techniques in making this movie. The first few times I watched it, I couldn’t figure out quite how he had managed the weird, swooping camerawork during the scenes shot from the monster’s perspective. It turns out that Raimi and star Bruce Campbell mounted the camera on a 2×4 and ran through the woods with it, each man holding on end of the board. On rewatching the movie, I laughed to myself each time I saw those scenes. I’m sure most filmmakers these days would commission some expensive camera rig to create a similar effect. I prefer the ingenuity of making your star run through the woods with you.