The Evil Dead

INTRODUCTION

THE EVIL DEAD AND ME

I’ll start with a confession. I’m someone who spent my entire childhood being petrified by, and resolutely avoiding, horror films of any kind. I was so traumatised after watching Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) at the age of thirteen that my mother informed me that I shouldn’t attempt to watch any horror films ever again. However, I now focus on teaching and researching issues and debates related to the horror film, spend a significant part of my free time watching and talking about horror films, and The Evil Dead has undoubtedly played a part in this.

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved films. As a teenager, I set myself the task of watching and learning about as many different kinds of films as possible. While my friends were out socialising, I would sit at home, watching films that I had read about in magazines and then recorded from the television. While I always loved and enjoyed these films, my viewings were also informed by a broader goal: to learn as much as possible about all aspects of cinema. My project to educate myself about the cinema became so all-encompassing that, in the middle of a GSCE examination at school, I gave up attempting the exam and instead spent the rest of the allotted period writing down as many Alfred Hitchcock films as I could remember off the top of my head.

As time went on, I began to acknowledge the fact that, at some point, I would need to steel myself, sit down and begin to watch those horror films that were considered classics. For there is no denying the fact that horror is a hugely significant part of the cinema, as a popular genre and as a mode that informs all kinds of wonderful and memorable films, from art-house classics to fantasy blockbusters. In some respects, I had already begun to encounter aspects of horror through my viewings of a range of Hitchcock films. Yet, despite my growing interest in film censorship and controversial or banned cinema, I still felt nervous about actually watching those films whose advertising images had scared me so much on my visits to the video shop. For some reason, I could cope with A Clockwork Orange (1971), but would I be able to actually sit through The Hills Have Eyes (1977), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Hellraiser (1987) when just seeing images of these films’ looming, petrifying monsters on video covers had been enough to give me sleepless nights?

At the age of 18, I just about managed to sit through a screening of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) on late-night television, without resorting to hiding behind the pillow that I had kept to hand, just in case the unfolding horrors on the screen became too much for me. But Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead was another matter entirely. I was only eight when the ‘video nasties’ panic erupted in Britain and my parents and friends weren’t fans of horror, so the scandal that occurred around these films, and the subculture that developed after their banning, completely passed me by. I was too busy watching television screenings of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Chinatown (1974) to bother myself with what I presumed were a bunch of offensively gory horror films. After all, I couldn’t even build up the courage to watch a Freddy Krueger film, let alone a film that had been deemed a ‘video nasty’. I had dimly acknowledged the fact that The Evil Dead existed, after reading about the sequels (and their distinctive use of the ‘Shaky Cam’ technique) in the pages of my favourite film magazine, Empire, but this interesting use of camerawork was not enough of an incentive, in itself, for me to actually seek out and watch a film that had been deemed the ultimate in extreme horror.

Then, just after I had finished my undergraduate degree, I had my first, accidental encounter with the film itself. On a night out in Cardiff, I glanced up to register that the dreaded The Evil Dead was playing on the television screen above the bar. I tried to ignore this but, try as I might, my eyes kept drifting back to the images unfolding on the screen. I registered one image in particular: a shot of Scotty’s decomposing corpse with a huge hand sticking out of his torso. It was this image that, for the next few years, would dominate my perception of the film. For me, it wasn’t the monstrous hand that scared me, but the demonic expression on Scotty’s skeletal, melting face as he stared into the camera. It was this expression that confirmed what I had already suspected: that The Evil Dead wasn’t a normal, run-of-the-mill film but was something that, to quote British filmmaker Edgar Wright, was literally ‘born from hell’ (2007). This, I thought, was the deciding incident. At this point, I had begun to appreciate, and even to gain pleasure from, certain horror films, most particularly Alien, whose creepy, claustrophobic qualities I had learnt to enjoy and admire after studying the film during my undergraduate degree. But, after my encounter with the film in Cardiff, I made the decision that it was probably wise to avoid subjecting myself to the hellish and traumatising The Evil Dead.

The image that convinced me to avoid The Evil Dead

The problem, though, was that I was becoming increasingly interested in controversial films and British film censorship. For me, what was fascinating about these controversies was the way in which they revealed aspects of British culture at particular points in history: particular prejudices, particular cultural fears, and particular perceptions of what it was (or is) to be ‘British’. When I therefore decided to face another fear and embark on a PhD, I was keen to focus on some kind of British controversy around film and censorship. An obvious option was to centre my work on the big daddy of such controversies: the ‘video nasty’ scandal of the early 1980s. I had already read Martin Barker, Julian Petley, Kim Newman and Mark Kermode’s fascinating and engaging accounts of the ‘nasties’ scandal, and knew that this was a subject that could sustain my interest long enough for me to spend three years researching the topic. I therefore made the decision to approach the whole ‘nasties’ controversy as an objective researcher. I didn’t want to watch or have to engage with any of these films, so, I thought, I would use my focus on censorship and controversy as a kind of barrier that I could hide behind.

Then, I began to research the fan interest in these films and, as I trawled through magazine letters and Internet discussion boards, my fascination with the experiences and memories of those who had watched and collected the ‘nasties’ during the 1980s and 1990s began to grow. The ‘nasties’ phenomenon was something that had been going on all around me as I was growing up, but which I had either ignored or, in the case of the Cardiff nightclub experience, had attempted to avoid. Indeed, it was the fact that I had avoided anything to do with the ‘nasties’ for so many years that seemed to propel my fascination, and my inclination to find out more and more about these murky, illicit films which seemed so important to these fans.

As I continued to research aspects of the ‘nasties’ phenomenon, my interest in The Evil Dead became focused around two aspects: its status as a symbol of ‘coolness’ (particularly amongst men) and its status, for me, as a bit of a mystery. A collector of ‘video nasties’, who I interviewed twice during the course of my research, had commented that, at his school, it had been almost a badge of honour to be able to state that you had watched The Evil Dead, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Quadrophenia (1979) and Porky’s (1982). This aura of ‘coolness’ around The Evil Dead doesn’t seem to have gone away. Last year, when I gave out the course handbook to students at the beginning of my undergraduate horror film module, I registered a number of male voices exclaiming ‘The Evil Dead – cool!’ as they looked at the list of films that would be screened during the course. While this could also be related to the growing cult interest in Bruce Campbell and The Evil Dead trilogy as a whole, it could also suggest that, at least in the UK, The Evil Dead’s association with controversy and illicitness still makes it a film that absolutely needs to be seen.

After my interviews with the ‘nasties’ collector in 2001, my personal curiosity and interest in actually seeing the film that had caused all this fuss began to increase. This curiosity had also been fuelled by the fact that, at this stage in my research, I had become very familiar with the film’s British and American marketing images and had also encountered numerous stills of the film itself in a variety of horror magazines and books. What fascinated me about the film’s marketing images was that, while they have circulated far and wide on the front of various video and DVD covers, they are not actually images taken from the film itself. As I soon discovered, the woman included in the US marketing images did not even appear in the film.¹ The fact that my perceptions of The Evil Dead were, up to this point, based on a small collection of images (some of which were not images from the film) thus fed into my curiosity. What was the film actually like? Was it the kind of film that Palace Pictures’ cartoonish marketing images suggested it to be? Was it entirely composed of images like the demonic corpse that had so traumatised me? The fact that the marketing images and stills that I had encountered all seemed so different from each other (focusing, in turn, on skeletal corpses, green-tinged, fog-shrouded demons, blood-soaked young men and nightgown-garbed heroines) meant that the film itself continued to be shrouded in mystery.

The conventional end to this story would be for me to state that I saw the film and it changed my life. This was not, however, how things went. I sat down one evening, in my house in Nottingham, during a period when I was consistently watching a number of the ‘nasty’ titles on video, and watched the 2002 Anchor Bay UK DVD version of the film. I was immediately struck by the fact that the re-mastering process had brought out the film’s distinctive use of sound. This greatly enhanced my enjoyment and appreciation of the film (which scared me in the most wonderful, pleasurable way), but also made me regret that I