Is The Evil Dead Still The Ultimate Experience In Grueling Terror?

If you ever get sick of movies where a group of college students go to a cabin in the woods for a weekend of partying, only to be picked off one by one by an inescapable evil of some sort, you can blame Sam Raimi and The Evil Dead. The then-Michigan-based filmmaker and his friends didn’t originate the concept. (How could they, with something so elemental?) But the success of Raimi’s 1981 directorial debut was so striking —and so unexpected — that it’s served as an inspiration for generations of horror filmmakers.

The making of the movie isn’t the inspirational part: Shot by a small crew on a tiny budget under grueling circumstances, everyone who was there agrees that principal photography on The Evil Dead was a miserable experience, in part because of their director’s personal belief that, if you want someone to act angry or frightened, it’s best to annoy them and/or scare them a little bit.

That being said, the way the film came together was pretty neat. Two years before the movie went into production, Raimi directed a short film called Within the Woods, which he, star Bruce Campbell, and producer Rob Tapert would show at dinner parties to dentists and lawyers across the greater Detroit area trying to persuade them to invest in a feature-length expansion. It worked, and The Evil Dead was shot in the winter of 1980 and completed later that year with the help of editor Edna Paul and her assistant, an aspiring filmmaker named Joel Coen. (Yes, that Joel Coen.)

How was The Evil Dead received upon its release?

Given the filmmakers’ complete lack of Hollywood connections, it took a while for The Evil Dead to make the leap from an initial cast and crew screening at Bruce Campbell’s childhood movie theater to a simultaneous release on VHS and in theaters from New Line Pictures. How did they make it work, you ask? Two names were key: First there was Irvin Shapiro, an influential distributor of European arthouse fare in the United States who saw the potential of Raimi’s film and used his connections to book a screening of it at the Cannes Film Festival. (Yes, that Cannes Film Festival.)

People always forget that there’s more to Cannes than starry red-carpet premieres, and the Evil Dead screening was definitely one of the more, let’s say, out-of-the-way selections at the 1982 edition of the festival. But it was attended by one more key person who would change the movie’s fate. Stephen King was blown away by The Evil Dead when he saw it at Cannes, writing a lengthy review calling it “the most ferociously original horror film of 1982.” He adds: “The Evil Dead has the simple, stupid power of a good campfire story — but its simplicity itself is not a side effect. It is something carefully crafted by Raimi, who is anything but stupid.”

King’s review goes on to urge American distributors to pick up the film, and not be scared off by the intense gore — which would indeed be a problem when the movie was finally released in April 1983. The Evil Dead was banned on home video in the UK from 1983 until 1990, and was heavily censored in British cinemas, earning it the title of “number one nasty” on the country’s infamous “Video Nasties” list. In America, the “Unrated” label saved the movie from cuts, but controversy over its famously intense gore scenes undoubtedly lengthened the movie’s road to becoming a classic.

Why is The Evil Dead important to see now?

Although it’s since been outdone in terms of the sheer volume of blood — not least by its own sequels — in retrospect, the gore in the original Evil Dead is still intense. Raimi has said that he regrets an infamous scene where a character is sexually assaulted by a tree after it becomes possessed by one of the film’s soul-hungry Deadites, for example (although he doesn’t regret it enough not to include a similar scene in Fede Alvarez’s 2013 remake, on which Raimi served as a producer).

Intensity has always been a hallmark of the Evil Dead series: The tagline for the original is “the ultimate experience in grueling terror,” after all. And the films that came after The Evil Dead became a cult classic have all escalated the bloodshed. First, Evil Dead 2 turned the grueling original into a bloody slapstick version of itself, then — following a brief detour into delightful Ray Harryhausen-style fantasy in Army of Darkness — the 2013 Evil Dead literally set a record for the most fake blood ever used in a film (a record that was recently usurped by YouTuber Markiplier’s self-released Iron Lung).

With a new movie, Evil Dead Burn, set to up the ante even further, the time to go back to the franchise’s DIY beginnings and study Raimi’s creative camerawork — which is still being copied today, 45 years later — is now.

What Special Features does Sony’s New 4k UHD Steelbook have?

The Evil Dead has been repackaged, restored, and re-released onto the market a few times since it first came out on VHS. It’s now legal to watch everywhere in its uncut form, which is good — those bans lasted much longer than you might think. (The original Evil Dead wasn’t cleared for home video in Germany until 2016.) So maybe it’s for the best that there are multiple 4K UHD discs of The Evil Dead currently on the market, including a new 4K/Blu-ray Steelbook combo pack from Sony Pictures. Special features for that disc include:

DISC DETAILS & BONUS MATERIALS4K ULTRA HD DISC

• Feature presented in 4K with Dolby Vision, at a 1.33:1 aspect ratio
• English 5.1 + English 2-Channel Surround

BLU-RAY DISC™

• Feature presented in HD, at a 1.33:1 aspect ratio sourced from the 4K master
• English 5.1 + English 2-Channel Surround
• Special Features:
• Commentary with Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell
• Picture-in-Picture: Join Us! The Undying Legacy of The Evil Dead
• One by One We Will Take You: The Untold Saga of The Evil Dead
• Treasures from the Cutting Room Floor
• At the Drive-In
• Discovering Evil Dead
• Make-Up Test
• 4 TV Spots
• Theatrical Trailer

It’s also still rated NC-17, which is awesome.

The Evil Dead is out now on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Sony Pictures.