Evil Dead 2 (1987)
Sam Raimi
"Let's head on down into that cellar and carve ourselves a witch."
Ok, keep that in mind and check out the opening sequence of Evil Dead 2:
It's not a blow-by-blow recreation, but the influence is undeniable. The swirling background, the color shift, the surrealism, even the music...it's all there. Raimi also utilizes the kinetic Hitchcock camera that I mentioned in the Vertigo review. Sometimes it's for dramatic effect, like the deadite spirit speeding through the forest and into the cabin; or for comedic effect, like the excruciatingly long, 360 degree panorama shot in the cabin. Hitchcock used his camera-in-motion to put the audience in the film and generate tension. Raimi goes one step further and turns it into farce while still drawing the audience into this hellish situation.
Going back to the opening scene for a minute, look at how fucking awesome the art is in the Necronomicon. It's beautiful, it's bloody, and it looks like it was a total pain in the ass to make. The art looks like a bonafide gothic anatomy book and the runes seem so official (despite being total nonsense), which is how you know a real artist spent time and love on that book.
And when you think "Book of the Dead" what do you think of? Of course it's this 30 second clip of a book bound in human flesh and inked in blood floating above an ocean of gore. It's the quintessential grimoire of cinema and still looks creepy and amazing to this day. Consider that H.P. Lovecraft, the book's original creator, had this to say:
Ok, so a brilliant film can't be based just on a 30 second sequence of a cool book (no matter how fucking cool it is), but the rest of the film does not disappoint.
Thoughts of Ghostbusters ran through my mind while at the theater last night. It's also a funny movie with some genuinely disturbing horror in it, but I think Evil Dead 2 is different. One might classify Ghostbusters as a comedy that has invaded a horror, but Evil Dead 2 is clearly a horror film that's also riotously funny. Tonally they feel different from each other, even if they end up achieving the same general result.
There's a lot to parse comedy-wise here: we have Looney Tunes style nonsense (like when Ash is trapped on the front of the deadite spirit, spinning like a pinwheel), Three Stooges style physical comedy (the front flip that Bruce Campbell pulls off in a tiny kitchen is impressive), and even a little homage to Duck Soup:
Sam Raimi did the same thing with slapstick comedy that The Simpsons did with Itchy & Scratchy: by being just twisted enough to understand that sometimes gratuitous gore can be really funny. It also helps to have an actor like Bruce Campbell to pull off some truly excellent physical comedy. The struggle with his evilly infected hand is everybody's favorite:
It's the best alien-hand acting since Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove.
Standing in the lobby talking to my friends last night, we discussed how Evil Dead 2 works in the same way that Airplane! works. Sure it's a farce, but it's so smartly written and directed that we still care about what's happening. There's a plot here, and we're invested in its resolution, no matter how wacky things get.
Jokes in Evil Dead 2 are distilled from the care and craft of the filmmakers and the actors, not from a Plan 9-esque amateurish quality. We're laughing with the film, not at it.
A good example of the time and energy that Raimi put into making something special can be seen in the cabin set. There's a definite geography to it, and Raimi makes sure we know the layout by taking us on a journey through the whole thing while still giving us something to enjoy. It's like the walk to the Copa in Goodfellas...only with demons:
It's incredible! Raimi adds texture to the filmmaking by showing where the characters are spending this cursed night, room by room, while still demonstrating the power of the evil and the hardiness of Ash. Manipulating a camera for that long of a shot, with physical stunts along the way, is something special. I think the last time I've felt the same way about camera usage on a closed set was Tarantino's exploration of Minnie's Haberdashery in Hateful Eight. Raimi loves and understands his set, and that makes the cabin almost another character in the film.
The effects got a bunch of laughs last night, and probably for good reason. They look splendidly old, and I doubt they looked any more timely in 1987. There's a Ray Harryhausen quality to the stop-motion girlfriend zombie doing her ballerina dance, but instead of trying to hide it, Raimi is up front with it. He's not ashamed of using stop-motion. He probably cut his teeth on Harryhausen films when he was a kid, and knew that they looked both funny and cool simultaneously. Plus there'd be no other way to get his vision onto film without utilizing the (cost effective) techniques of classic horror/science fiction cinema.
Imagine a world where someone could've make Evil Dead 2 with computers. Would the undead ballerina scene be any better? Of course not. It'd be substantially worse. I've yet to see a way that you can make CGI both gritty and funny. There's a charm and a tangible element to the stop-motion work that succeeds in both making the scene funnier and scarier than it would've been had she been generated on a loveless computer. An artist had to spend time and energy making that scene look as great as it does. Filmmaking doesn't have to be about pure and brutal realism. It's about the message or feeling that the filmmaker is trying to convey.
You'll never see anything like this again:
Holding onto this thread a bit longer, let's talk briefly about Cabin in the Woods. It's safe to call it a spiritual successor to ( and taps into the same horror tropes as) Evil Dead 2 but is genuinely funny and charming on its own merits. Still, I think that Evil Dead 2 both created and perfected the genre of horror-comedy and forced filmmakers to rethink how they'd approach this idea without plagiarizing. Any attempts to make another horror-comedy dripping with blood and gore will forever be compared to Evil Dead 2.
Cabin in the Woods is successful because it's self-referential and meta, understanding that the audience has an understanding of the themes that Evil Dead 2 established. This makes Raimi's work a seminal piece of filmmaker's filmmaking. The old adage that the Velvet Underground & Nico only sold 1,000 albums but everyone who bought it started a band probably holds true here too. It inspired a generation of filmmakers to take a camera into the woods and try to create something disgustingly awesome.
Before the film started last night, trailers ran for the rest of the horror film lineup at the Wealthy Theater in October, including next week's showing of Army of Darkness. It's a pretty bland trailer that advertises the film as a standalone comedy directed by the man who "brought you Darkman." My friend sputtered with derisive laughter at the absurdity of that. Not to besmirch Darkman, but this is a perfect example of how Hollywood dominates. Nobody cares about Evil Dead 2 because it didn't make any money for some studio executive, thus we have to market Army of Darkness as its own thing.
Last night proved that this simply isn't true. If you pour yourself into your creation, if you take the time to make the pages for a fictional book that only features for 30 seconds as a Mcguffin, if you convince your actors to torture themselves for no money whatsoever, if you take your audience on a tour of the set where they'll be spending the next 90 minutes of their lives, and if you are brave enough to do exactly what you set out to do, that genius will shine through and you'll create something that people genuinely care about. It's a hard row to hoe, but thank goodness some filmmakers have the stamina.
Summary:
Are you kidding me? It's the fucking best. If you've somehow never seen it, I both pity and envy you. The film world would be a cleaner and safer place without Sam Raimi, and a more horrible thing I cannot possibly imagine.
If you were a nerdy kid in the 90's or early 2000's, you love Evil Dead 2; I think that's just an immutable law of the universe. It's one of the first movies that I remember wanting to show to as many people as possible, because I knew they'd love it. If they didn't, they were either a weirdo or Armond White.
I think I was probably 9 or 10 when I first saw it. My dad was a big influence on my film tastes and introduced things to me early, perhaps out of impatience and perhaps out of understanding what a ghoulish cretin I'd become in my adulthood. Back then, I thought it was something that only my dad and I knew about and loved. But then you get to high school or college, you meet other unfortunately dressed goobers, and you share your love of depraved media. Invariably, Evil Dead 2 was at the top of everybody's list.
Way back when, I feel like Evil Dead 2 was the best we could do in underground cinema. Netflix wasn't a thing yet, the Internet couldn't provide us with thousands of potentially great/weird movies to see, and you could always reliably rent Evil Dead 2 from Blockbuster Video. My tastes have certainly expanded since then, but my love of Evil Dead 2 seems to be eternal.
Last night I had the chance to see Evil Dead 2 on the big screen at the Wealthy Theater in Grand Rapids:
I can't remember if I saw it in a theater before, maybe at some midnight showing, but if I have, it wasn't as memorable as last night will be. The crowd was huge (probably as full as I've ever seen the Wealthy Theater) and genuinely excited to be there. There was lots of cheering, and laughing, and clapping for all of the classic scenes, but it was ultimately a respectful crowd. Nobody tried to shout out jokes to be funnier than the movie, probably because that's impossible. Also, after the movie was over, the lobby was full of people talking excitedly about how much they love it and what their favorite parts are. That's as sure a sign as there is of a great film.
There's no point in me going through a beat-by-beat plot summary, because everybody's seen it, right? If you haven't, why are you here?
For the rest of you, I'm going to try and elucidate on the thoughts that popped into my mind last night. I doubt there's a way to be exhaustive with all of the things one could say about Evil Dead 2, so make sure you let me know what you think.
Something that I love about doing these long-form reviews is that I've gained a greater understanding of how certain filmmakers approach their craft. Last night, I was struck by how much of an influence that Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo had on Raimi, notably on his use of a kinetic camera and surreal effects.
If we go back to the Vertigo review (#2 on your Spooktober II dial), take a look at Scottie's dream sequence:
If we go back to the Vertigo review (#2 on your Spooktober II dial), take a look at Scottie's dream sequence:
Ok, keep that in mind and check out the opening sequence of Evil Dead 2:
It's not a blow-by-blow recreation, but the influence is undeniable. The swirling background, the color shift, the surrealism, even the music...it's all there. Raimi also utilizes the kinetic Hitchcock camera that I mentioned in the Vertigo review. Sometimes it's for dramatic effect, like the deadite spirit speeding through the forest and into the cabin; or for comedic effect, like the excruciatingly long, 360 degree panorama shot in the cabin. Hitchcock used his camera-in-motion to put the audience in the film and generate tension. Raimi goes one step further and turns it into farce while still drawing the audience into this hellish situation.
Going back to the opening scene for a minute, look at how fucking awesome the art is in the Necronomicon. It's beautiful, it's bloody, and it looks like it was a total pain in the ass to make. The art looks like a bonafide gothic anatomy book and the runes seem so official (despite being total nonsense), which is how you know a real artist spent time and love on that book.
And when you think "Book of the Dead" what do you think of? Of course it's this 30 second clip of a book bound in human flesh and inked in blood floating above an ocean of gore. It's the quintessential grimoire of cinema and still looks creepy and amazing to this day. Consider that H.P. Lovecraft, the book's original creator, had this to say:
"...if anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it."At this point, if the Necronomicon existed and did not look like the book from Evil Dead 2, I'd be sorely disappointed. It's a little touch like this that turns something from a fun, goofy movie into a special film worth treasuring.
Ok, so a brilliant film can't be based just on a 30 second sequence of a cool book (no matter how fucking cool it is), but the rest of the film does not disappoint.
Thoughts of Ghostbusters ran through my mind while at the theater last night. It's also a funny movie with some genuinely disturbing horror in it, but I think Evil Dead 2 is different. One might classify Ghostbusters as a comedy that has invaded a horror, but Evil Dead 2 is clearly a horror film that's also riotously funny. Tonally they feel different from each other, even if they end up achieving the same general result.
There's a lot to parse comedy-wise here: we have Looney Tunes style nonsense (like when Ash is trapped on the front of the deadite spirit, spinning like a pinwheel), Three Stooges style physical comedy (the front flip that Bruce Campbell pulls off in a tiny kitchen is impressive), and even a little homage to Duck Soup:
Sam Raimi did the same thing with slapstick comedy that The Simpsons did with Itchy & Scratchy: by being just twisted enough to understand that sometimes gratuitous gore can be really funny. It also helps to have an actor like Bruce Campbell to pull off some truly excellent physical comedy. The struggle with his evilly infected hand is everybody's favorite:
It's the best alien-hand acting since Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove.
Standing in the lobby talking to my friends last night, we discussed how Evil Dead 2 works in the same way that Airplane! works. Sure it's a farce, but it's so smartly written and directed that we still care about what's happening. There's a plot here, and we're invested in its resolution, no matter how wacky things get.
Jokes in Evil Dead 2 are distilled from the care and craft of the filmmakers and the actors, not from a Plan 9-esque amateurish quality. We're laughing with the film, not at it.
A good example of the time and energy that Raimi put into making something special can be seen in the cabin set. There's a definite geography to it, and Raimi makes sure we know the layout by taking us on a journey through the whole thing while still giving us something to enjoy. It's like the walk to the Copa in Goodfellas...only with demons:
It's incredible! Raimi adds texture to the filmmaking by showing where the characters are spending this cursed night, room by room, while still demonstrating the power of the evil and the hardiness of Ash. Manipulating a camera for that long of a shot, with physical stunts along the way, is something special. I think the last time I've felt the same way about camera usage on a closed set was Tarantino's exploration of Minnie's Haberdashery in Hateful Eight. Raimi loves and understands his set, and that makes the cabin almost another character in the film.
The effects got a bunch of laughs last night, and probably for good reason. They look splendidly old, and I doubt they looked any more timely in 1987. There's a Ray Harryhausen quality to the stop-motion girlfriend zombie doing her ballerina dance, but instead of trying to hide it, Raimi is up front with it. He's not ashamed of using stop-motion. He probably cut his teeth on Harryhausen films when he was a kid, and knew that they looked both funny and cool simultaneously. Plus there'd be no other way to get his vision onto film without utilizing the (cost effective) techniques of classic horror/science fiction cinema.
Imagine a world where someone could've make Evil Dead 2 with computers. Would the undead ballerina scene be any better? Of course not. It'd be substantially worse. I've yet to see a way that you can make CGI both gritty and funny. There's a charm and a tangible element to the stop-motion work that succeeds in both making the scene funnier and scarier than it would've been had she been generated on a loveless computer. An artist had to spend time and energy making that scene look as great as it does. Filmmaking doesn't have to be about pure and brutal realism. It's about the message or feeling that the filmmaker is trying to convey.
You'll never see anything like this again:
Cabin in the Woods is successful because it's self-referential and meta, understanding that the audience has an understanding of the themes that Evil Dead 2 established. This makes Raimi's work a seminal piece of filmmaker's filmmaking. The old adage that the Velvet Underground & Nico only sold 1,000 albums but everyone who bought it started a band probably holds true here too. It inspired a generation of filmmakers to take a camera into the woods and try to create something disgustingly awesome.
Before the film started last night, trailers ran for the rest of the horror film lineup at the Wealthy Theater in October, including next week's showing of Army of Darkness. It's a pretty bland trailer that advertises the film as a standalone comedy directed by the man who "brought you Darkman." My friend sputtered with derisive laughter at the absurdity of that. Not to besmirch Darkman, but this is a perfect example of how Hollywood dominates. Nobody cares about Evil Dead 2 because it didn't make any money for some studio executive, thus we have to market Army of Darkness as its own thing.
Last night proved that this simply isn't true. If you pour yourself into your creation, if you take the time to make the pages for a fictional book that only features for 30 seconds as a Mcguffin, if you convince your actors to torture themselves for no money whatsoever, if you take your audience on a tour of the set where they'll be spending the next 90 minutes of their lives, and if you are brave enough to do exactly what you set out to do, that genius will shine through and you'll create something that people genuinely care about. It's a hard row to hoe, but thank goodness some filmmakers have the stamina.
Summary:
Are you kidding me? It's the fucking best. If you've somehow never seen it, I both pity and envy you. The film world would be a cleaner and safer place without Sam Raimi, and a more horrible thing I cannot possibly imagine.
2 comments:
One of my favorite effects is the small touch of Ash seeing the monster made flesh and having the streak of hair go white in real time. It's just a neat effect and really brings home how terrified our hero is in the moment. He's not quite the shockingly skilled buffoon that he becomes in Army of Darkness and is more of an every man in a terrifying situation.
Also I think the real difference between ED2 and AoD is just how instead of a horror comedy AoD is an adventure-comedy horror. They're both so much fun in different ways that I truly can't pick out which one I like more. Plus, "First you wanna kill me, now you wanna kiss me.... Blow." Is just such a great damn line.
Yeah the hair streaking is a great Abbott and Costello type gag.
And you're totally right about the tonal difference between ED2 and AoD. I think ED2 holds the edge for me, but Ash becomes the Ash we all know and love in the sequel.
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