The Horrible Horror Vault: The one that's the other best horror reboot

 

 

Title: Evil Dead

What Year?: 2013

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

As I write this, I’ve been debating what do for an off-week post while trying to maintain a ludicrous output for another project. After going through several promising contenders, I decided to investigate some recent chatter. That brought me back to something I had thought about reviewing for quite a while. It also brings me into territory that was already opening up once I reactivated this feature, the “modern” horror reboot, which has long since become synonymous with the most hated trends in modern genre films. Just to be contrarian, I’ll be taking on an entry in one of the most infamous and iconic franchises of all time. Here is Evil Dead, 2013 edition, and it is… really, really good???

Our story begins with a young girl captured by yokels who believe she is possessed by a demon. We then jump to the beginning of another story as we meet Mia, a young lady on her way to a cabin with her brother and her friends as part of her recovery from substance abuse. The friends soon warn the brother that Mia has already had to be resuscitated after an overdose, and this intervention must be hardcore. But the group discover signs that someone has been using the cabin, including a book with dire warnings scribbled in not to ever, ever read from it. Naturally, the smart guy of the group manages to disobey. As Mia gets wired, strange visions appear. As her madness begins to spread to the others, it becomes clear that there is a supernatural force in their midst, and the darkest secrets are what they brought with them. It’s up to Mia and the brother to defeat their literal and metaphorical demons, before Hell arrives on Earth!

Evil Dead was a 2013 horror/ dark fantasy film directed and cowritten by Fede Alvarez, developed as a reboot of the 1981 film and franchise created by Sam Raimi (see Darkman). The film reportedly entered production in 2011, with Raimi and star Bruce Campbell credited as producers. The film starred Jane Levy as Mia, with Shiloh Fernandez as the brother David. Effects for the production used a reported 70,000 gallons of fake blood, mainly for the rain of blood in the finale, breaking a record previously set by Dead Alive. The film was released by Sony in April 2013. It was a commercial success, earning $97.5 million against a $17M budget, and received largely favorable reviews. Alvarez followed the film with Don’t Breathe, also starring Levy, in 2016. A TV series Ash Vs. The Evil Dead, starring Campbell and directly following the first two films, aired on Starz from 2015 to 2018. In 2023, a new film Evil Dead Rise was released, which did not directly follow or reference any prior films.

For my experiences, what really popped into my mind going into this is that remakes and reboots are usually the kind of film that go over my radar. The further irony is that the relative few I have dealt with are easily among the best movies I have ever reviewed. In the process, I have ended up giving a reasonably comprehensive survey of the different approaches to remakes. Night of the Living Dead gave a straight do-over of the original film, with a bigger budget and a few twists to reflect changes in society at large. The Thing, by now the most revered in the whole category, went back to the pulp source material for what became a readaptation as much as a remake. In the middle, you have the 1980s The Blob and Invaders From Mars (which I now must admit belonged on my “best” list), which kept the essential concepts with plenty of updates for effects, production values and politics. By comparison with these, most of the modern remake/ reboot waves objectively reach no more or less than the proverbial high standard of mediocrity. The real result is a certainly frustrating glut of films that are simply too unambitious either to inspire or offend. The present film stands as the outlier that did something different, and that is just the beginning of why it is by far the best of an iffy lot.

Moving forward, I will add as I usually would have already that I saw this in the theater, pretty much at its opening. (Yes, I also just saw the new one, but I don’t want to talk about that one yet.) What was jarring at the outset was that it almost entirely removed the humor of the franchise, something I would have said was so essential that a film without it might as well be marketed as completely separate. In fact, what emerges from under the one-liners and splatstick is an allegory of madness, grief and redemption. I must say as a further rant that it also highlighted a counterintuitively conventional spirituality that was there all along. In the midst of the secular nihilism of the slasher era, the original films offered admittedly imperfect good against absolute supernatural evil. (I will get back to that…) The further step of making the demonic forces into a symbol of addiction and familial dysfunction was perhaps not the best or even the most original move, but it makes for a film that at a minimum has something to say. That, in turn, builds to a jaw-dropping payoff with the literally Biblical finale.

Then there are the “Deadites” themselves, which have no name here. What’s most noteworthy is that they are made far more vulnerable than their earlier counterparts, without being any less terrifying. These are true demoniacs, and as such can be permanently neutralized by the things that would kill a normal human. At the same time, the prominent role of bodily fluids gives a biological logic that supports lends itself to alternative semi-scientific explanations discussed in the film, at least for a while. The limitations of mortality are more than made up for by their utter savagery and a further penchant for self-mutilation that had not appeared in the franchise before. The most intriguing result is a genuinely two-sided escalation in brutality as the uninfected defend themselves by increasingly desperate means. Another emerging subtext is an emphasis on violence by women against men and each other, which somewhat eases the especially uncomfortable sexualization of the first film. The difference shows especially in the direct remake of the most infamous scene of the franchise to represent the possession of Mia by the slimy spawn of the Abomination. Things are toned down enough to give the feel of the symbolic, and perhaps debate the reality of the events within the film’s own universe, but the implications remain clear and brutal.

Now for the one scene, I am giving honorable mention to what was really my first choice, the smart guy reading the possession spells, which stands out as a notable remnant of the humor of this odd franchise. But I couldn’t avoid a scene that has stood out from the beginning, the first possession besides Mia’s. After the main character’s first freakout, the one character with medical training (played strikingly by Jessica Lucas from Cloverfield) runs for supplies while still covered in gunk of uncertain composition. After a few moments of conversation, we find her in a bathroom trying in vain to clean up. She finally gets out a fateful syringe and a container of medicine. The door slams shut, and she sees her own face, grinning and mutilated, before the mirror shatters. As more creepy sights builds up, she starts to withdraw into another room, further from the group. That’s when she freezes literally in her tracks, an action that feels as violent as any number of the many convulsions before and since. Then the camera zooms in on her legs, and we see another fluid trickling. It’s a subtle detail, yet brutal (and borderline misogynistic) in its implications, and it’s everything one would expect from an Evil Dead film.

In closing, what I wanted to close with is what made the Evil Dead franchise great to begin with, something that figured very much in my reactions to the latest installment. What set it apart from the first film onward was its humor. I would argue that what made it last (especially from Evil Dead 2 onward) was its underlying optimism about human nature. This is a series that says you can be weak, fallible and outright cowardly, but still have a chance as a champion of good, and if the cosmic forces of evil take your hand, replace it with a chainsaw. I posit further that this is exactly where the present film got the point of the original and ran with it all the way. For me, that’s more than enough to get it the highest rating, and that’s where I’m fine ending it. Hail to the king!