A remake is a recipe for failure by its very nature.
For a film to be remade usually means that said film is either a classic in terms of quality or, more likely, well-loved: which is why studios (because indie remakes are rarely a thing) use them as a lazy way of making easy money. It’s easy to be cynical about remakes, especially if, like me, you adore the original film. This was the case for remake of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, titled Evil Dead. So, here is the question I asked myself when I watched the film for this retrospective: how the fuck is Evil Dead so good?
There was so much going against Evil Dead. It came out at the tail end of one of Hollywood’s horror reboot periods, which produced dud remakes, reboots, and prequels of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, all courtesy of Platinum Dunes. If there is a Mount Rushmore of Horror, it’s the faces of the monsters of all of these franchises, and this period of film history saw their facades being chipped away while executives mined for gold that was long gone.
If that wasn’t enough, before Evil Dead came out, Cabin in the Woods killed off this period with an incredible send-up and celebration of the genre. Who do you do a cabin in the woods movie when Cabin in the Woods made it look old hat? The result was the modern Deadites coming to that horror Mount Rushmore and pissing on the heads of these mistreated horror legends.
Evil Dead’s approach to the sacred material of the original was to make it actually about something. I love the first movie, but a character piece it is not. Instead of rebooting Ash and his ill-fated friends, we get Mia (the fantastic and obviously fearless Jane Levy), her brother David, his girlfriend, and their best friends together for Mia’s DIY detox. Already, there is a use for the cabin beyond just a setting, and a reason for the group not to leave when weird things begin to happen. Everyone has some kind of gripe against the other, giving the group dynamic a tension that informs the story rather than feeling like the tacked-on conflict of lesser movies.
That’s good and all, but where Evil Dead sets itself apart is when the shit – and gore – really hit the fan. It’s hilarious to think that the original movie was banned in the UK while this much harsher and more brutal version got a wide release and posters on buses. We’ve come a long way Sam. Director Fede Alvarez puts Mia through hell (though the production design is stunning), then everyone else, and then Mia again in a way that is both horrifying, triumphant, and a little devastating. Unlike the previous reboots, Alvarez sings his own song rather than the other director’s bad karaoke. He knows that we won’t accept a new Ash so he gave us Mia instead, and put her through the most brutal and least funny encounter with the Deadites. She should have become as iconic as Ash, and probably would have if the future of the franchise went in its originally-intended direction.
Make no mistake though, without Evil Dead showing that you can do a straight-up, nasty horror version of this story, we wouldn’t have Evil Dead Rise. Which I can’t wait to get to next!
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via Variety)
No But Listen 