Let's say you're out in the country, and you see a beautiful pool. It's a hot day, and you walk up to that pool, and you think you're just gonna take one little step down into the water, just to wiggle vour toes around for a minute. But here's no gentle slope, there's no single step, and all of a sudden you're in 40 feet of unrelenting freezing water and you don't have a clue how to swim. But it's still a pool, and it's still a really hot day, so it's also simultaneously the best thing you've ever experienced. And that is basically Evil Dead 2. This is absolutely 100% required viewing material for genre fans.
Sam Raimi, with Evil Dead, created an entire subgenre, the Cabin in the Woods subgenre. And I think unlike a lot of other films that we've assayed here in the hallowed halls of Old Scare U, this one is almost purely visceral. There isn't a super rich and rigorously intellectual structure or approach like there is with a lot of the other films that I've curated for the syllabus. It is a roller coaster. It is just a scare-a-minute thrill ride that leaves vou breathless, but you just want to stay on the roller coaster every time it goes around.
There's something happening nearly all the time in every centimeter of the frame, to such an extent that you wonder how, on its conservative budget, what you're seeing has been achieved. And I think that sort of freewheeling spirit of fun doesn't mean that it doesn't hold together, doesn’t have a terrific integrity to its storytelling, or that it doesn't have internal logic or rules by which it operates. But you can and do appreciate it on a nearly purely visceralm gut level.
I would say from the get-go, from the cold open, prior to the start of the credits, we are being exposed to filmmaking choices that will come to be known as hallmarks of Raimi’s work. Dutch angles and a style of movement, a sort of editorial technique that you will see again and again and again, that have their origins in the 80s but are things that extend to films like Drag Me to Hell, which were made in the 2000s. Less than five minutes into the runtime of this movie, the magic words have been spoken, the narrative has been kicked off and is already moving at a clip.
As Roger Ebert says, it's theatrical, it's cartoony, it's delightful across the board. And by the time we're six minutes in, Ash has decapitated his girlfriend with a shovel because she is possessed by a Kandarian demon. Ash is asked by the demon early on to join us. He has no interest in that, but he also can't escape. And we, as an audience, we are Ash. We are witnessing and participating in the demonic hijinks. And it's so prescribed, so small in scale, so theatrical in its presentation, that Raimi and his team are in nearly total control of every element of filmmaking. It’s like half screwball comedy, half grisly horror, but it is all innovative, nearly independent filmmaking.
The writing is clever, but the story is gossamer. The story is employed — or maybe deployed — to create just enough linkage between moments to string together the objectively incredible and entertaining set pieces that compose almost all of our viewing experience. But there’s enough thought given to the backstory that it really contributes to our satisfaction.
There are clever and highly motivated cuts and transitions. I think with the exception of our meeting the Knowbys, Jake, and Bobby Joe, the entire film plays like a single scene, a single experience from start to finish.
But Raimi and his team — all of whom have gone on to become powerhouses in their respective departments in Hollywood — made a thing that was totally unique in the marketplace. They created an environment in which anything can and does happen. And they did it all in a house in the woods, in which all things seem possible.
From that house has sprung throngs of imitators of wildly divergent qualities and levels of execution, and that's up to and including things like The Cabin in the Woods, which is also an incredible movie, and also a love letter to the Evil Dead universe, and could not even have come to be without Raimi and this ragtag crew of gleeful, lunatic geniuses.
To hear our discussion of Evil Dead 2, click here.
Bradford Louryk