It may be Evil, but it certainly isn't Dead...

For those of you that don’t know me well, I live for movies.  Not just any movies; horror movies.  They are my absolute favourites.

I love nothing more than to chill out with a choice snack and flick on a film that I hope will send shivers down my spine, tingles to my toes and gurgles in my gut.  Generally, I feel none of these things, just disappointment and a sense of disbelief – can they actually come up with a decent concept?

I’ve laughed my way through many modern horror movies, although ‘horror’ isn’t really a good definition of the genre.  More like ‘poxy teenybopper gore-porn’.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve shuddered through ‘Saw’ and hidden my eyes from ‘Hostel’, but those movies rely on bloody torture and shock factor.  The only reason they cause me grief is from the thought of having those disgusting, inexplicable things done to me.  Not out of scare factor.

So when I feel like a good scare, which is often follow by a hearty laugh at myself, I turn to classics.  Very few modern films have the same thrills and chills as an old-school horror movie, and so it is obvious I have to turn to films that were made even before I was born.

Today I revisited a movie that I would deem one of my all-time favourite; it is original, scary, funny and sadistic.  It checks all the right boxes and cements itself as not only one of my classics, but one of the horror world’s ultimates.  It is 1981’s ‘The Evil Dead’.

If you have never seen this movie then you now have a mission.  It is beyond cool and is just downright awesome.  Sam Raimi wrote and directed this one, as well as its sequel ‘Evil Dead 2’ and the last in the trilogy, ‘Army of Darkness’.  That one is a whole different ball game, but let’s not get off track.

‘The Evil Dead’ follows the traditional formula; a bunch of American teenagers venture out to an isolated cabin in the woods, strange things start happening and one by one, each character is picked off.  I will have to do a bit of investigating to see if this was where the clichéd formula began, and it is quite possible that this was one of the very few movies where the formula worked.  The thing about ‘The Evil Dead’ is that there are no axe-wielding psychos, no chainsaw-revving in the background.  It relies on the concept of ‘The Book of the Dead’; a book that exists in the cabin that causes all sorts of fun and games as the film progresses. 

‘The Evil Dead’ was Bruce Campbell’s breakout role, and for those of you that don’t know who he is, he is God.  No, obviously he’s not, but you need to Google him.  I cannot explain to you how amazing he is; he is a cult hero.  I’m sure most of you are familiar with Sam Raimi’s work on ‘Spiderman’, which was very good, yes. But there is nothing more satisfying than the claymation-type exploding bodies that you will witness in ‘The Evil Dead’.  If you are in need of something a little more recent to get your Raimi horror fix, try ‘Drag Me To Hell’.  Another of my self-declared classics.

I very much recommend ‘The Evil Dead’.  You will either love it or hate it; either way you will laugh, jump, roll your eyes and wrinkle your nose.  It is a brilliant horror movie that sets the benchmark for every other horror movie you will ever watch.