#18: Evil Dead 2 (1987) (dir. Sam Raimi)

I had no idea that a camera could do what it does here, until the year 1990 when a local video store let me rent ED2 so I took it home and made my mom very angry.

There’s often a conundrum when writing about favorite movies especially when they're likely on a lot of lists and a lot has already been written. What else can be said about Citizen Kane or Evil Dead II? We’ll start here: The fact is that when I rented this from Citizens Video in Griffith, Indiana in the summer of 1990, I had just turned 12 years old and recently attempted suicide. Anxiety and depression were far too overwhelming.

Not too long after this, a mere couple of months later, I saw another film that was a game changer that I’ll write about soon as well (I’ve certainly podcasted about it enough to where I even told the director that watching it saved my life). But maybe this came first for a reason. I had obviously seen several horror films by this point but nothing prepared me for what I was about to experience.

There were two movies within the early 90s that I vividly remember watching twice in a row, one was Evil Dead II, the other was Reservoir Dogs a few years later. My first viewing of Evil Dead II was late at night in the basement while my parents were restfully asleep upstairs. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. As much as I loved Bruce Campbell’s performance, the effects, the gore, the comedy, the cartoonish absurdity of it all, this was the first time I stood up and said, “hey how did a camera actually move like that? how did he get that kind of angle? how did the sound design get manipulated so intensely at times?”

It was the first time I was questioning how a movie was put together. There’s a lot to say about Raimi’s influence on how I looked at film and another title of his will come up later on as well. Sure I had seen Halloween and became aware of a gliding camera’s POV through the eyes of a killer but this was the first time I had seen a camera smash through doors, graze against its victims, forcefully charge at poor Ash running through the woods and so much more. I even thought to myself, “wow you can really do anything. maybe I could too.”

A few years later I recruited friends for a serial killer slasher series called Blood Moon which was just an excuse to go balls-out weird. I didn’t care about telling a coherent story, I just wanted to make my friends laugh and do weird things with the camera. I had friends wear a silly skeleton mask I bought at Walgreens and found different ways of killing them off. There were strange detours and montages and even my friend Denny playing his own father at one point.

That home movie wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for having experienced Evil Dead II a few years ago. I have rewatched it once a year since 1990. But of course, the second viewing that happened the day after my first viewing, my mom came down and saw what I was watching. When she saw Ash being carried along by the evil force only to emerge from a puddle as a deadite, she turned it off and took it back to the video store. She had assumed I hadn’t watched the whole thing yet and wanted to prevent me from seeing it all. Little did she know I watched it the night before, secretly, discreetly, with the images already implanted. I was a changed person from that point on.

“Sam Raimi's masterpiece never forgets to settle down and observe the silence between the sustained flourishes of exuberant chaos. Reflection is the name of the game, and its mirror visualizations begin with an odd recap of the first installment and continue until the final image of destiny being awoken through the fabrics of space and time. Sam Raimi takes the entire form of his original film and flips it until everything is upside down and spewing some kind of substance. It's a glorious subversion of the horror genre and its typical usage of tension. Most horror uses silence as a way to build suspense, but Sam Raimi uses that absence of demonic noise as a time for the audience to catch their breath.” - SilentDawn

Evil Dead II is not a sequel, but a comic reinterpretation of the original story. This time it’s a balls-out zombie demon movie on cocaine even if it’s not reinventing the wheel with the setup. Same structure, different details: Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler, replacing actress Betsy Baker) travel to a remote cabin to spend their vacations. Ash found the Necronomicon and a tape recorder in the living room of the old cabin. Verbal enchantments occur. The POV of the Evil Dead running through the forest is activated. All hell breaks loose to where yes, Ash has to not only cut his possessed girlfriend with a chainsaw but he has to amputate his own possessed hand.

We are pummeled with swallowed eyeballs, snickering lamps, undead girlfriends, psychotic appendages, wisecracking doppelgangers, well-meaning archeologists, revenge-fueled hillbillies, a gigantic rotten apple-head demon, and geysers of red, green, yellow, and black blood. Bruce Campbell as the reluctant hero is being tortured to death like Wily Coyote or one of the Stooges but there’s also a lot of terror in the midst of the laughs. Mainly due to some frightening deadite imagery but even the sense of claustrophobia is felt.

With the higher-budgeted Evil Dead II, Raimi had more money to play with. Consequently, he was able to use latex applications, specially designed suits, and even some stop-motion animation in his quest to make the appearance of the "Deadites" more outlandish. Indeed, they are more convincing in Evil Dead II, but they never lose the demonic, comedic appearance that is in keeping with the overall tone of the film. Raimi's goal is to frighten us a little, not to scare us out of our wits. He wants us to be freaked out only to laugh seconds later. Similar to when Ash ends up laughing directly into the camera when many inanimate objects in the room begin to laugh and sneer at him too.

When Ash cuts off his own hand after having killed his girlfriend Linda (twice) we see the reality of the desperation Ash is operating from in order to save his life. But we’re also laughing at what he has to endure. This was my first realization that sometimes we need to laugh at how horrible things can be, almost as a way to cope. At the same time, this ingenious film essentially created its own genre combining horror elements with comedy in such a way that it becomes new, going to inspire so many. Not to mention the innovative, go-for-broke, let’s DIY-style try anything with the handheld shaky camera even if it’s dangerous. Of course, Raimi was friends with a certain pair of brothers and they learned a lot from one another.

Raimi famously employed the "Shaky Cam" to depict the POV of a demonic entity moving rapidly through the woods in "The Evil Dead." Not long after, Joel Coen lifted this technique directly for his and his brother Ethan Coen's feature directorial debut on 1984's "Blood Simple" in scenes like the one above, where the wrathful Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) tries and fails to kidnap his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) from her lover's home. Yet, much like Raimi, the Coens made the "Shaky Cam" their own, using it to capture Julian and Abby's volatile emotions while heightening the intensity of their struggle - Sandy Schaffer

Raimi's film is quite clearly showing that it is the foolishness of man that brings forth such evil. The book of the dead is a piece of material that should be destroyed as its findings simply cause bloodshed and bring no life. Our curiosity about what’s inside the book not only kills cats, but ourselves. So the professor knowing what he was reading perpetuates evil upon Ash and Linda by making a recording of the book of the dead. In this he has essentially damned anyone who accidentally listens to it and takes away the choice to read from the book or not.

In a way, we have to endure what Ash endures to get to the end of this nightmare. My mom simply didn’t want me to be exposed to such vile imagery but she also had no idea that this was an over-the-top gory comedy on top of it being about the possession of demons. We’ll get to The Gate at some point, but that was another gateway into horror that has similar vibes and themes only with less inventive camerawork. It’s possible my mom wouldn’t object to that film only because there were teenagers dealing with the madness. But one of the few times she ever said, “NO you can’t watch this” was for Evil Dead II.

In a way, that made me want to re-experience it all the more. And I did without her knowing. I’ll go back to my initial time and place regarding the first viewing and my emotional state. Being raised as an only child with poor social skills, movies became a refuge, a source of comfortable escapism where I could lose myself in the lives of others. But the idea of my parents divorcing, me gaining a lot of weight and having no friends entering junior high school was enough to get me to swallow a lot of pills one night. After it didn’t work, I thought of trying again especially if things didn’t get better.

Thankfully I survived and then six weeks later, I went to the video store and saw my first true horror/comedy that was made by a born filmmaker with an insane vision that appealed to everything I wanted at that time. Things did get better. I needed to laugh and cringe at someone else’s horrific situation instead of my own. Puberty, body image issues, parents on the verge of splitting - none of that compares to dealing with a bunch of living dead demons coming at you in hopes of swallowing your soul. Not to mention the quotable lines throughout that anyone reading this probably already knows. On top of all of that, the “getting ready” montage is something I simply thought was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. Especially the delivery of one word spoken by Ash at the end, “groovy.”

I’m not saying that Evil Dead II is also responsible for saving my life in the same way another film did but in a way, it changed the way I looked at movies forever. I started to think of them as an art form - that it wasn’t just about acting and writing and directing, it was about so much more. The camera placement, the sound scapes, the random effects, the first shaky-cam-invisible-force-P.O.V. shot that rams through a cabin window and shatters it before zooming into Linda’s screaming mouth. There’s just so much to appreciate about the cinematography.

Really when I think of the moment when this movie hooked its claws into me (included above), it’s the shot of Ash first being chased - continuing as it carries Ash through the woods, spinning around like he’s attached to a windmill. (In fact they filmed it by bolting him to a cross spinning on a motor on a crane attached to a moving truck.) There’s another sequence thereafter when the evil crashes into his car window and chases him back into the cabin that’s equally as astonishing. Still, the moment when Ash is first possessed was not only the moment I knew I was seeing something new and exciting, it was when my mom came downstairs and said, “nope, this is too much for you even at age 12.”

It really made me exciting about movies at a time when I felt very little excitement about anything. I started renting as much as I could from the video store and luckily, I could thanks to the owners letting me rent anything, including R-rated films. We also had a cheater cable box which did make me a little more popular over the years since yes, I had access to adult films and other subversive content. But most of my memories from 1990-1995 all revolve around sleepovers with friends, horror movies, mountain dew and pizza. One could say, Evil Dead II is like comfort food, evoking a specific kind of nostalgia while making me recall a very scary time in my own life where I didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Little did I know the light was actually cinema and in a couple of years, alternative rock / grunge music too. Sam Raimi was my favorite director for many years until a third viewing of Punch-Drunk Love changed that a decade or so later. The reason being: he was daring, strange and just knew how to visually entice me with camera movements of the highest caliber. There’s a lot to say about his overall filmography eventually but let’s just say that Evil Dead II will always be at the top of the list (though it fights with a more dramatic movie he made in 1998). I’d like to think that inventive, unexpectedly busy camera work along with the blending of comedy/horror is what helped me during a severe depression, because it was thrilling to witness during a vulnerable time.

Few movies are such pure, unadulterated entertainment – fun and funny, fast moving, stylish, original, playful and scary. This is the one that I feel most grateful for because I think I discovered it for a reason. Along with listening to movie reviews on the radio and seeing Siskel & Ebert, the sense of discovering something on my own was just as powerful. Evil Dead II never lets up, but never gets tiring, ending so quickly but not a moment too soon.

My dad ended up loving Army of Darkness because it was more comedy than horror and as a Three Stooges fan, it makes sense why he laughed hysterically at the skeleton cemetery sequence. Every once in awhile, we’d find common ground with our senses of humor. Maybe that’s when I realized I had more in common with my dad than with my mom, he would’ve never have turned off Evil Dead II. He would’ve laughed just as hard as I did when both the deer and the lamp start snickering at Ash. I also may have never picked up the home video camcorder and started making friends by making my own movies that were basically an excuse to try and be as goofy as Raimi was.