The Evil Dead (1981) Was A Masterclass In Horror Production
A new Evil Dead movie is on the horizon and it’s taking a bold, new direction by going back to its original, bold, new direction.
The Evil Dead franchise has been anchored by its brash and bloody protagonist, Ash Williams, played brilliantly by the awesome Bruce Campbell. The horror film universe is filled with celebrated villains, but The Evil Dead was one of the first cult horror film series to have a hero instead of a serial killer or mythic monster as the face of its story.
Campbell retired the character in 2018 with the end of the Starz series Ash vs. Evil Dead, in which this dashing leading-man-with-a-chainsaw-hand defeats the bastions of Hell one last time, and wakes up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland to spend his “retirement” carving up evil, because a guy like Ash wouldn’t be content just spending his remaining days basking in the sunlight of Jacksonville, Florida. But his fans knew that eventually he’d end up once again opening the Necronomicon or having to chase down and slice up Deadite remnants.
The end of Ash marks another turn in the franchise with the new film Evil Dead Rise, which opens on April 21, 2023. Just like the Evil Dead remake of 2013, Evil Dead Rise appears to be turning away from its horror-comic signature and more towards its straight-up bloody and messed-up horror roots.
The first film, starring Campbell and directed by Sam Raimi, played out as a dark horror film about a group of teenagers who go to a cabin in the woods, where they accidentally unleash possessive, murderous demons by playing a recording of incantations read from an ancient, flesh-bound tome called The Necronomicon (aka The Book of the Dead). Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn picked up where the first film left off, but it started to bring in more comic elements and bigger special effects, like popped eyeballs flying into people’s mouths and a sentient, severed human hand that would become one of the franchise’s calling cards. The series spawned a third cult film — Army of Darkness — several video games, and even a musical. Hell, there’s probably an Evil Dead Babies animated spinoff and a holiday special in the works, for all we know. “Dead,” my ass.
The first Evil Dead film, shot in 1979, is a textbook example of a shoestring, indie film. Raimi, Campbell and producer Rob Tapert grew up in Michigan where they spent their high school days shooting Three Stooges-inspired flicks on Super 8 film while dreaming of mounting their own feature-length movie productions. Eventually, they decided to make a horror film, and started with a short called Within the Woods that they could show as actual “scream tests” to test audiences and also skeptical-but-possible investors in order to film what would become The Evil Dead, according to Campbell’s 2002 memoir If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor.
Tapert’s family lawyer, a certified public accountant, and other friends-of-friends they made in the industry gave the trio a crash course into the business side of filmmaking. But the principle production for The Evil Dead would become just as big of a nightmare as one of those ill-fated teens in the cabin would have to endure, except for, you know, the fact that one of those groups came out of it alive. Well, we suppose one of them had to if they ever wanted to do a sequel.
The cast and crew found an abandoned cabin in the deep woods of Morristown, Tennessee, that could serve as the film’s central setting. The six-week shoot was scheduled to begin in the middle of November, but actually turned into 12 weeks and almost led to a total cast and crew revolt. You see, the cabin itself had no bathrooms, no heating, no running water, and a whole bunch of cow manure, according to actress Betsy Baker in an interview for Anchor Bay Entertainment’s special DVD release of the first two films in 2002.
Add copious amounts of stage blood and gore makeup in a freezing cold environment on top of that, and you’ve got the makings of a great string of therapy appointments and OSHA complaints.
And even by 1970s standards, the first Evil Dead shooting schedule had a very small budget and some very complex scenes that required long, panning shots with the use of a Steadicam, and floating figures without the kind of rigging you’d see even on a low budget porn parody of The Evil Dead.
However, the cast and crew (mostly) relished the challenge by inventing their own methods and means of movie-making.
Raimi filmed several tracking shots simply by sitting in a wheelchair with a camera and filming the shot while a crew member pushed him along the scene. If they needed a tracking shot from a higher angle, they would put the camera on what the crew called the “vas-o-cam,” consisting of several two-by-fours covered in duct tape and Vaseline that rested on two sawhorses so the camera could be bolted to a U-shaped piece of wood and slid across it.
The long, continuous shots of the unseen evil floating through the woods were captured through another invention called the “shaky cam” that would become the signature style of Raimi’s work and every show on MTV in the 1980s. A camera with a wide-angle lens was bolted to a two-by-six inch block of wood, then the camera operator “grabbed the board at either end and ran like hell,” according to Campbell.
The undead entities in The Evil Dead have the power to make their human vessels float as they sputtered threatening omens. So the crew rigged up an old magic trick to create the effect on film that they called the “Ellie-vator,” named for actress Ellen Sandweiss who played Ash’s sister Cheryl, the first to fall victim to the evil entity. A pair of crew members known as “fake Shemps,” the set’s term for crew members who appeared on film as stand-ins or as part of a Deadite, would lift Sandweiss up on a wooden see-saw and the camera would film straight on her to hide the rigging.
Given all of this, the big question is: “Why would anyone endure all this madness just to make a film that may or may not make back its money in the time you promised your investors? Why risk hypothermia, head trauma, non-ironic cabin fever, and God-forbid splinters, to make this movie? Why would they torture themselves like this?
“The point isn’t to just make the film,” Campbell writes in his memoir. “It’s to amaze yourself and everyone at the same time. If you think what you’re doing is neat, chances are everyone else will too.”
