The Movie Forums Top 100 Horror Movies

The Evil Dead (1981)

On a low budget, three shmoes- actor Bruce Campbell, director Sam Raimi, and producer Robert Tapert, came up with a story about some college students who accidentally summon spirits deep into the woods of the Tennessee mountains. The trio finished a half hour short film titled "Within The Woods," as a proof of concept, that they shot for a budget of $1,600 over the course of a three day weekend. When they went to find investors to make the full feature, the problem was nobody knew who they were. They staged hundreds of screenings of "Within The Woods" to make up for the total lack of credibility. In an interview, Bruce Campbell admits, "We showed the movie in the Detergent aisle of a grocery store after it closed, to a couple of merchants, and they didn't invest." The three filmmakers came up with $85,000 after months of work, not nearly enough to finish the full movie, but enough to get started. The three had to be merciless to grind costs down, they got shots of the camera breaking through a window by shoving the camera through a real window, before the lens could touch it, while another guy smashed the window with a big 2x4 lumber board.

Throughout the shoot, the fiasco included an actress losing her eyelashes while making a mold of her face, others thrashed up by branches in the brutal night scene in the woods, sprained ankles, and whacking the busted ankles with a stick right before takes to get a better performance. Surprisingly, Horror writer Stephen King published a review in Twilight Zone magazine, where he called it "The most ferociously original film of 1982." The filmmakers capitalized on that by using it on every advertisement they could, and Raimi acknowledged that Stephen King's endorsement opened the door for the film to be seen. That is NOT an easy thing to have happen. I'm learning that magazines had a lot of importance to getting some of the great low budget classic horror films exposure. Pretty interesting to think about as the wicked internet takes over everything. Maybe the Internet is the real Evil Dead. Maybe the Internet kills everything. Anyways, terrific flick brimming with style, creativity, blood, erupting brain matter about five weekenders who head to the mountains to spend some time together at an old cabin. They find an arcane Sumerian book, provoking forces which roam the forest and dark bowers of man's domain- to come back to life. A film that never would have become known in the early 80s if it weren't for magazine promotions. The Evil Dead is still around today after it became a trilogy, a remake, a TV series, and has been referenced by all kinds of films and pop culture since, most memorably for me from when Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) watches the movie in her bedroom to stay awake so Fred Krueger won't get her, in A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), and when Megan Fox steals her friend Amanda Seyfried's Evil Dead T-shirt before their tantalizing-hot scene in the bedroom in Jennifer's Body (2009). I've come to love this movie a lot, as the best and most pure horror film of The Evil Dead series of productions. Some really inventive gore effects and the possessed college students manage to be both funny and likable at the same time.

80s Flashback Christmas Disco

Rating: + 8.5 / 10

From Fireside Horror Chats with Santa Claus Nostromo, that's all for this time.