“This kinda looks like your old girlfriend!”

I’ve always heard that it was a bit of a crazy pick when Sam Raimi was chosen to direct the first Spider-Man movie, and after having watched his feature film debut, yeah, it definitely was. The Evil Dead was an independent horror film made on a budget of just around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, where Sam Raimi was able to get it financed after creating a short film called Within the Woods, which was essentially a proof-of-concept for this movie, and showing it to potential backers, who then helped finance the film. Once theatrically released, it went on to make a pretty massive return on investment with almost three million dollars at the box office, roughly nine and a half times its budget. Fun fact: while The Evil Dead was technically unrated at release, it later became notable for receiving an NC-17 rating from the MPAA in 1994 due to its extreme violence and gore, though it definitely feels pretty tame compared to a lot of R-rated horror movies released nowadays.

Easily what makes Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead worth a watch is its practical effects. No, they aren’t up to par with even some of the practical effects that you will see nowadays, but they were undeniably revolutionary for the horror genre, and when considering its release, extremely impressive. They have surprisingly aged fairly well over the decades, which is pretty remarkable since this was both an independent film and a feature length directorial debut. While there are some elements that look a little rough and dated, they honestly really do add a bit of an unsettling feel to the movie, and are definitely what have helped it remain one of the more important horror films ever made.

The atmosphere also helps make it pretty memorable at the end of the day. The story is about a group of friends who rent out a cabin in the middle of the woods for a weekend, and as you might suspect from this being a low-budget movie, it’s a one location story, and quite an effective one at that. They discover this book called the “Book of the Dead,” where from then on a bunch of supernatural events occur. Everything happens in the middle of the night, with lots of fog and mist effects that really help create an atmosphere to be remembered.

And while this might not be as scary or intense overall as I would have hoped, the climax is easily the best part of the whole thing. It’s when the tension is at its maximum, with a lot of the horror and unsettling parts actually coming from things being set up and not shown immediately, where is when tension is usually, if not always, at its peak. To quote Alfred Hitchcock, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” and that is certainly the case here.

Unfortunately what holds the original The Evil Dead back quite a bit is that it has simply aged poorly. The practical effects and everything like that are still impressive, but most of the gross-out and shocking scenes are things that have been done far better in the years succeeding it, so they don’t really hold the same value they certainly did in 1981. It’s one of those things where horror movies have just gone so much further, so a lot of viewers, including me, will have been desensitized to this type of stuff nowadays. I can’t emphasize this enough, though, this would have undeniably been extremely effective at release, and if this were somehow your first horror movie today, I could easily say the same thing.

Even adding to that, a film that this heavily reminded me of was 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in that I found a lot of the parts going for the “shock factor” to be much more obnoxious and even silly then disturbing, though to a significantly less degree than that film, which I think has aged far worse than this. The Evil Dead, similar to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is a very loud movie, though not in a way that’s very effective, but rather a bit of an assault to the ears instead. Again, it’s not nearly as excessive as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as those moments are far less common here, but still there enough to stand out.

This also has the very common trope in a lot of horror movies where the character writing was pretty clearly not a priority. No one from the group can be defined as compelling, really even in the least bit, including Bruce Campell’s character, Ash (who I imagine is better in the rest of the trilogy considering his iconic status), because they very obviously weren’t meant to be. Without going into spoilers, there is an attempt at going for something emotionally poignant that has to do with a necklace, but it comes off as a poor last-minute attempt to make this movie somewhat resonant. All of the characters also just act a bit weird as well, where whenever one of them becomes possessed, none of the other characters seem all that devastated that their friend has just turned into something else entirely, and instead their first instinct is to quite simply kill them. It also doesn’t help that the acting here is pretty poor, though I’m not going to blame that too much, considering everything with the movie’s creation.

So while The Evil Dead certainly doesn’t hold as much weight to it as once before, it’s still pretty entertaining and mesmerizing to see the practical effects and something that was done so well considering its budget and limitations. I’m intrigued to watch the rest of the series, including the upcoming Evil Dead Burn.

I should also probably mention that I wasn’t a fan of a certain “tree branch sequence,” and found it to be quite tasteless, though it didn’t go too far to make me turn off the movie.