Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Sony Pictures
Always with the cabin, these kids. The woods. The evil book. The geysers of blood. The Evil Dead movies have the feel of a dark ritual, some sort of rite taking place on celluloid every couple of years, not so much rebooted as reanimated. Director Sam Raimi first headed to the woods to perform the story as a 32-minute short in 1978, before scraping together enough financing to do it again at a feature-length 85 minutes in 1981. The production was legendarily brutal; crew members slept in the derelict cabin and burned furniture to keep warm at night. Wounds were commonplace, to Raimi’s malevolent delight.
The resulting movie contained something primal and unhinged: a camera unmoored from convention, Bruce Campbell’s frankly NSFW chin, and a gory climax with so much viscera, it appears to—and in fact does—contain creamed corn.
Stephen King raved about the movie so much after seeing at the Cannes Film Festival that it eventually got distribution, becoming a hit for New Line Cinema. In 1987, Raimi got a chance to do it all a third time. Ostensibly a sequel, Evil Dead II follows an identical plot: again with the cabin, the kids, the woods, the evil book unearthed from the basement — but this time inflamed with Three Stooges-style physical comedy, grotesque puppetry and stop-motion effects, and an extremely ’80s thirst for high fantasy. And it all, again, happened in under 90 minutes.