The Evil Dead

Kate Egan

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780231501781
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981) has been celebrated as a rollercoaster ride of terror and a classic horror hit, a defining example of the tongue-in-cheek, excessively gory horror films of the 1980s. It is also the film that introduced the now-iconic character of Ash (played by Bruce Campbell). This study considers the factors that have contributed to the film's evolving cult reputation. It recounts its grueling production, its journey from Cannes to video and DVD, its playful recasting of the genre, and its status, for fans and critics alike, as one of the grungiest, gutsiest, and most inventive horror films in movie history.

1

HOW TO BE ‘FEROCIOUSLY ORIGINAL’: PRODUCTION, PROMOTION, INITIAL RECEPTION

The story of the making of The Evil Dead is now very well-known. Two books – Bill Warren’s The Evil Dead Companion (2000) and Bruce Campbell’s If Chins Could Kill (2002) – have recounted the planning, financing and production of the film in detail, and these details have been recounted, time and again, by Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and others in interviews and in the DVD commentaries that have accompanied all the versions of the film released since Elite’s Special Edition DVD in 1999. Consequently, my aim here is not to retell a story that has already been told innumerable times, but to focus, specifically, on those factors that fed in to, and laid the groundwork for, The Evil Dead’s distinctive cult reputation.

As Bill Warren notes, the story of the origins and making of The Evil Dead is, above all else, a ‘story of friendships and a business that grew out of having fun’ (2000: 9), and, as I will show, this focus, in all accounts of The Evil Dead’s making, is one of the keys to the film’s specific cult appeal. The story begins with the meeting of a group of teenagers in Wylie E. Groves High School in Birmingham, Michigan between 1972 and 1975. Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi, Josh Becker, John Cameron, Mike Ditz and Scott Spiegel form a film group and begin to make Super-8 short films on Sunday afternoons in Birmingham. Crucially, their reasons for teaming up relate both to their passionate love of popular cinema (particularly, and famously, their love of the Three Stooges) and, more strategically, to the fact that, between them, they own all the necessary equipment to stage and make their amateur productions.

In 1977, another key member of The Evil Dead crew joins this film collective, when Sam Raimi, now a student at Michigan State University, meets Robert Tapert, a roommate of his brother, Ivan. As Bruce Campbell notes in his book, this occurs at around the same time as their production activities began to move from the realm of fun to their realisation that, actually and potentially, they could ‘make money with these things’ (2002b: 41). This realisation leads to the production of two Super-8 comedy shorts – The Happy Valley Kid (1977) and It’s Murder! (1978). Both films not only mark the growth, as Bruce Campbell notes, of the group’s ambitions and budgets (with the budget of It’s Murder! amounting to over $2,000) but also the growth of their business acumen, with multiple screenings being held at MSU (for $1.50 a ticket for The Happy Valley Kid) accompanied by advertising campaigns (including an elaborate illustrated poster for It’s Murder! produced by The Evil Dead’s make-up and special effects supervisor, Tom Sullivan). This crucial period of filmmaking activity therefore consolidated the approach to film production that would also inform The Evil Dead: combining fun, camaraderie and hard work with a willingness to learn about and address the commercial realities of independent production (budgets, screenings, advertising, box office revenue).

However, alongside this collective process of learning sits the more intimate story of Sam Raimi’s growing relationship with cinema. As recounted by Warren (and Raimi himself), Raimi had fallen in love with the cinema (and with cameras in particular) through watching his father’s home movies, and, crucially, what fascinated him most about these films was the way in which they demonstrated cinema’s effectiveness as a vehicle for illusionism and magic. For Raimi, an amateur magician, his father’s home movies illustrated how, through cameras and editing, time and space could be played with and could create a world of impressive illusions that had the potential to amaze an audience. As Campbell notes, for Raimi, ‘motion pictures were the ultimate sleight of hand’ (2002b: 104), and it was this approach, amongst others, that would, in 1979, inform Raimi, Tapert and Campbell’s decision to move from Super-8 comedy to the horror genre, when planning their first feature film production.

A common misconception, in many journalistic, academic and fan writings on The Evil Dead, is that Sam Raimi is a long-term horror fan. In fact, and as pointed out by Warren, Raimi and company had primarily bonded over their love of slapstick comedy, crime and mystery films from Hollywood’s classical era, and Raimi had, as a youth, always avoided horror, finding it unpleasant and scary. The decision to move towards horror was therefore one informed, primarily, by the group’s growing focus on the economic and commercial aspects of independent production. During screenings of It’s Murder!, the group noted that the only moment that provoked a clear and effective reaction from the audience occurred during a suspense sequence, when a criminal leapt out at a potential victim. As Campbell notes, this consistent response pointed to the fact that a focus on scares and jumps might be the way to go when planning their first feature film, serving as a potential ‘guarantee of provoking a strong reaction from the audience’ (2002b: 65).

This realisation led to a further period of learning and research, illustrating the group’s growing, and partly strategic, interest in cinematic craft and audience response. In early 1979, Tapert, Campbell and Raimi began to frequent drive-in screenings of horror films, keeping a close eye on the sequences that met with approval (or disapproval) from the patrons, and, at the same time, studied and catalogued the plots and budgets of a range of key independent horror productions, most prominently, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Through this research, the group realised what Romero had also realised back in the late 1960s: that making a horror film was the most economically viable strategy for a first, independently-made feature film, not only because of its potential to elicit strong audience reactions but also because horror films do not, as a rule, require stars or exotic locations (see Campbell 2002b: 66).

What the horror film also offered, for Raimi, was a vehicle for practising, and learning more about, the cinematic craft of suspense. As Raimi’s knowledge of horror grew, he had begun to realise and appreciate the ‘art’ and ‘craft’ of the suspense created in certain horror films, and the potential impact of this process on the audience (see Warren 2000: 37). As Geoff King has argued, a ‘familiar genre location’ like horror can work, in independent productions, as ‘a stable base – in terms of both form/content and of economics – within which to offer something different’ (2005: 166). It was horror’s ability to work as ‘a stable base’ for both the commercial and creative ambitions of Raimi, Tapert and Campbell (its status as an effective vehicle for commercial success and audience response but also for creativity, learning and experimentation) that would, subsequently, inform the distinctive, ‘different’ tone and character of The Evil Dead.

FINANCING AND PRODUCTION

Aspects of the turbulent story of the making of The Evil Dead mirror the equally famous stories and circumstances that informed the planning and production of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. As with Romero’s debut feature, the production of The Evil Dead took place in a location with no running water, and was characterised by long shooting days, a skeleton cast and crew who took on multiple roles (both on and off camera) throughout the shoot, and the drafting in of family members and friends to support the production in some way. For J. P. Telotte, these aspects of Night of the Living Dead’s production background ‘suggest just the sort of bricolage that characterises these [type of cult] films, a catch-as-catch-can approach toward production that seems more their rule than an exception’ (1991: 11).

Despite this being identified as a common characteristic of cult films with low budgets, this homemade, ‘catch-as-catch-can approach’ was particularly central to The Evil Dead’s financing and production strategy. Unlike Romero and his associates, who had already formed a production company and produced a number of television commercials and industrial films prior to the production of Night of the Living Dead,² Tapert, Raimi and Campbell had (outside of a few family friends) no real local business contacts, and had to rely on the goodwill of local investors (snowballing outwards from family and friends, to friends of friends, to cold-calling local companies) to raise enough money to finance the production of their first feature. Prior to this process, in Spring 1979, the group had produced a 32-minute, Super-8 film called Within the Woods at the Tapert family farmhouse, outside Marshall, Michigan, which not only served as a testing ground for Raimi, in terms of trying out and perfecting scary sequences, but which was made explicitly as a ‘prototype’ version of The Evil Dead which could then be screened to potential investors.

After testing out the film through screenings at a local high school and a local cinema, and (inspired by Romero and Hooper) making the decision to film The Evil Dead in 16mm rather than Super-8, Tapert, Raimi and Campbell drew up a contract with Phil Gillis (the Tapert family lawyer), formed their production company, Renaissance Pictures, and then realised that they had only thirty days to raise their target budget of $150,000 (see Campbell 2002b: 84).³ As Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik note, ‘the murky and bizarre legends’ of a film’s origins can ‘help form a basis’ for its subsequent cult reputation (2008: 7), and this is as applicable to the process of financing The Evil Dead as it is to the film’s actual production. The colourful, vivid stories that emerged from this process (screening Within the Woods during a dinner party for a group of dentists, or in the soap aisle of a local supermarket) have been recounted innumerable times, and illustrate the bizarre, incongruous intertwining, throughout The Evil Dead’s production, of the strategic and economic and, through the involvement of relatives, friends and local businesses, the homemade (or home-spun).

By early October 1979, the group had raised enough money from this process ($85,000 of the $150,000 target) to start planning The Evil Dead’s production. After bringing together their skeleton cast and crew (which included a mix of family and old friends, most notably Bruce Campbell’s brother, Don, old school friends, Ellen Sandweiss and Josh Becker and, from Wayne State University, Bruce Campbell’s old teacher, John Mason, plus cameraman Tim Philo and some borrowed Arriflex 16mm cameras), the group headed to a cabin in Morristown, Tennessee, where principal photography began on 14 November 1979. As with the film’s financing, the production of The Evil Dead was gruelling, and full of the kind of colourful and memorable events that contribute to ‘the murky and bizarre legends’ of many cult films. Such events can be seen as an inevitable part of the process of low-budget independent filmmaking in general (with a lack of money and time leading to no sleep and 24-hour shooting stints). However, in the case of The Evil Dead, what seems particularly noteworthy about many of these stories and events was the way that they related to the ambitions and personalities of Raimi, Campbell and Tapert. The most famous product of The Evil Dead’s shoot in Tennessee was the invention of a range of what Campbell calls ‘low-tech but unique camera rigs’ (2002b: 103), which involved the mounting of the camera on 2 by 4 boards: the ‘Shaky Cam’ (used to simulate Steadicam point-of-view shots of the film’s demons), the ‘Ram-o-Cam’ (which enabled Raimi and Philo to achieve the effect of the demonic force smashing through windows) and the ‘Vas-o-Cam’ (which employed gaffer tape and Vaseline in order to simulate dolly shots).⁴

The creation of these rigs (and of other techniques such as the use of a wheelchair for dolly shots) not only illustrates what many have noted and appreciated about this film – the extent of Raimi and company’s inventiveness and creativity in the face of a restricted budget – but also points to two further qualities that characterised the production of The Evil Dead. Firstly, while these rigs were practical (in that, as Campbell notes, they were cheap and lightweight), their invention and use also illustrate Raimi’s ambitious approach to low-budget horror filmmaking, his desire to create an impact through the production of original and attention-grabbing horror sequences. Consequently, the use of these rigs and techniques, and Raimi’s uncompromising approach to particular shots and sequences,⁵ were frequently the source of much of the injuries, upset and discomfort experienced by the rest of the cast and crew (not to mention causing eventual damage to Tim Philo’s borrowed Arriflex cameras). As acknowledged by all those involved in the production, it was this painstaking approach that eventually led the production to go way over schedule (from a planned six weeks in Tennessee to twelve weeks), to the majority of the cast and crew having to leave Tennessee before all necessary shooting was completed and, consequently, to the establishment of the film’s other famous production strategy: ‘fake shemping’.

As is now well known, ‘fake shemping’ refers to a practice that had also been employed during the group’s Super-8 filmmaking days, where actors who weren’t available were replaced by others in the crew who doubled for them in certain shots. The flight of much of the cast and crew, five weeks before the end of shooting, led to Raimi, Tapert and Campbell’s reliance on this technique, with Tapert and drafted-in friends, locals and family members (including Tapert’s sister and Raimi’s brother) standing-in for the limbs, heads and torsos of the actors playing Linda, Scotty, Shelley and Cheryl. What this illustrates is that, while any low-budget independent production can produce colourful anecdotes about the gruelling nature of the shoot, it was Raimi’s particular fascination with invention and experimental camerawork that specifically informed a number of the most memorable and distinctive aspects of The Evil Dead’s production story, from Sandweiss bleeding on the plywood affixed to the wheelchair dolly during the filming of her possession in the woods, to Raimi falling asleep behind the camera, to the rewriting of scenes and copious ‘fake shemping’ that occurred in the last weeks of the film’s location shooting.

However, the naming of these camera rigs (the Ram-o-Cam, the Shaky Cam, the Ellie-Vator, the Vas-o-Cam), and of the actor doubling technique (fake shemping), also points to another aspect of the production story of The Evil Dead: the way in which the filming was imbued and informed by the unpretentious jokiness of Raimi, Tapert and Campbell. Indeed, this was not something that began with The Evil Dead. As noted above, ‘fake shemping’ was a strategy that had first been employed by the group during the production of their Super-8 films (and was a term that had originally been coined by Raimi, Campbell and Spiegel, to refer to the standins employed in some of the Three Stooges short films). Furthermore, the terms ‘It’s Murder beams’ and the ‘It’s Murder hand’ referred to the use, during The Evil Dead, of the same Styrofoam beams and rubber hands that had been employed during the making of one of their previous Super-8 productions. As I will go on to demonstrate, the unpretentious jokiness of these three men (and its seeming incongruity when considering the fact that they were making an excessively gory and dark horror film) would continue to play a role in the subsequent reception of The Evil Dead. However, its embodiment in the nicknames given to particular filming techniques also led to the creation of a lexicon of cult terms associated with the film,⁶ giving the film’s production story a distinctive charm while also contributing to the subsequent ‘proxy’ cult interest (Mathijs & Mendik 2008: 8) in the group’s previous short films.

MARKETING, DISTRIBUTION AND INITIAL RECEPTION

After twelve gruelling weeks, Raimi, Tapert and Campbell returned from Tennessee on 23 January 1980. However, a further year then went by before the film was completed and ready to be screened. During this period, the group obtained loans from banks and investors to shoot the last third of the film, to complete editing and to record the film’s inventive sound effects. In another example of the makers imbuing the film with their own personality, the recording of the sound effects involved Raimi and Campbell’s experimentation with voice effects, faults in the control panel, food, cooking utensils and Three Stooges sound effects recorded directly from the television. Meanwhile, showing a dedication and ambition the equal of Raimi’s, the film’s special effects and make-up technicians, Tom Sullivan and Bart Pierce, were left alone to complete the film’s final ‘meltdown’ sequence, which took over three months due to the time-consuming process of combining stop-motion animation and live-action make-up effects.

Such activities, in the last leg of the film’s production, once again highlight what was, and continues to be, seen as distinctive about The Evil Dead. While the move to horror had been a strategic decision for the Renaissance partners, the creativity and painstaking hard work of Raimi, Sullivan, Pierce, Campbell and Tapert pointed to their desire not just to make money through the use of a tried and tested genre, but to make an impact with their first feature, to make it, in the words of the film’s famous marketing tagline, ‘the ultimate experience in gruelling terror’. As I will go on to show, this desire to create something new, through hard work and experimentation, would be appreciated and recognised by certain journalists and critics. However, despite the planning and hard work of the Renaissance team, The Evil Dead...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Evil Dead and Me
• 1. How to Be ‘Ferociously Original’: Production, Promotion, Initial Reception
• 2. Personality, Authenticity and Illicitness: The Afterlife of The Evil Dead
• 3. ‘The Ultimate Experience in Gruelling Terror’: Analysing The Evil Dead
• 4. The Evil Dead’s Status as a Cult Film
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index