Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead: A Horror Masterpiece That Aged Perfectly

Nearly half a century later, Sam Raimi’s first ever movie — the 1981 indie horror classic The Evil Dead — is still his masterpiece, and it hasn’t aged a day. Since he first broke out with The Evil Dead, Raimi has graduated from low-budget horror filmmaking to big-budget blockbuster filmmaking. He made three Spider-Man movies for Sony, an Oz movie for Disney, and the Raimi-est Doctor Strange film imaginable for Marvel Studios.

But before all that, Raimi scraped together a shoestring budget, brought a group of friends out to a cabin in the woods, and made the little horror movie that could. Produced for almost no money with handcrafted special effects and 16mm film, The Evil Dead was an unlikely candidate to spawn a long-running Hollywood franchise. And yet, all these years later, the Evil Dead franchise continues to thrive.

Over the years, we’ve gotten an Evil Dead movie set in the Middle Ages, an Evil Dead movie set in a possessed apartment building, and even an Evil Dead TV show. But none of that would’ve been possible if it hadn’t been for a plucky young filmmaker with a uniquely gruesome vision of the horror genre and just enough cash to bring that vision to life.

The Evil Dead Is Just As Hilarious & Horrifying Today

With The Evil Dead, Raimi pioneered a whole new approach to horror cinema that would come to be defined as “splatstick.” Raimi essentially set out to make a series of Three Stooges sketches featuring demons, chainsaws, and bloodshed. He took the mind-bending terror of a movie like The Exorcist and approached it as a live-action cartoon.

Along with fellow 1981 release An American Werewolf in London, The Evil Dead legitimized the horror-comedy hybrid genre. Before they came along, comedy had only mixed with horror when Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein’s monster. Studios felt that horror and comedy were at odds with each other, and that an audience couldn’t laugh and be terrified at the same time.

But The Evil Dead and An American Werewolf in London proved that horror and comedy are perfect bedfellows. They’re both built around the element of surprise. Whether you’re trying to make your audience laugh or scream, the intent is the same: catch them off-guard and elicit a genuine reaction. Laughter and terror work in tandem in a strange way.

The respite of a big laugh and the uneasiness of a fright go hand-in-hand. The laughter alleviates the tension after a scare, and gives you a false sense of comfort that allows the next scare to take you by surprise. Raimi perfected this blend in The Evil Dead (and would go on to take it even further in the bigger-budgeted sequel).

The Evil Dead weaves masterfully in and out of zany humor and deeply disturbing horror imagery. The campy, over-the-top goofiness of Bruce Campbell’s performance is an endless source of amusement, but Cheryl’s transformation into a deadite is truly unnerving, and every jump scare — every demonic P.O.V. shot, every smashed window, every inanimate object’s sudden possession — lands spectacularly.

The Evil Dead’s anarchic mix of horror and hilarity is what made it stand out when it arrived on the midnight movie circuit in the early ‘80s. But unlike a lot of its early-‘80s brethren, The Evil Dead is still just as horrifying (and just as hilarious) today. It’s still the ultimate scary movie, and Raimi’s magnum opus.

The Evil Dead Is One Of The Cornerstones Of Independent Horror Cinema

Along with Eraserhead, Carnival of Souls, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Evil Dead is one of the defining cornerstones of independent horror cinema. It inspired a generation of young filmmakers to pick up a camera and make their own horror movies. It was the horror equivalent of Stranger Than Paradise or She’s Gotta Have It; it was the movie that opened up the floodgates.

Now, thanks to studios like A24 and Blumhouse, low-budget indie films make up a big chunk of the horror market. But it took the ingenuity of directors like Raimi and John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper and David Lynch to show the world what was possible, and how cheaply you could produce a horror movie while keeping your crazy cinematic vision intact.

The Evil Dead's Homemade Special Effects Have A Timeless Charm

When you watch The Evil Dead — especially today, with all the technological advancements we’ve been numbed to — it does have an unmistakably amateurish quality. You can tell it’s being made by a very small crew with very little money and very little experience on a movie set. But that’s all a part of its charm.

The amateur home-movie feel is a big part of what makes The Evil Dead so enjoyable. You can feel the passion of a bunch of horror fans making their own horror movie. You can feel the creativity of a bunch of young, hungry, struggling artists, going out and doing it on their own, sticky with homemade fake blood.

The beauty of The Evil Dead’s handcrafted special effects is in their timelessness. The old-school makeup effects, designed by the great Tom Sullivan, have aged like a fine wine. Whereas the visual effects of big-budget studio movies from the ‘80s only look worse and worse as they’re upgraded to higher resolutions, The Evil Dead’s prosthetic deadite makeup looks even better in 4K than it did on 16mm.

The Evil Dead Franchise Is At An All-Time High

A lot of long-running horror franchises are either dead in the water, like Texas Chainsaw or A Nightmare on Elm Street, or they’ve been run into the ground, like Scream or Halloween. But the Evil Dead franchise is at an all-time high.

It’s been on a winning streak for the past couple of movies, as it’s morphed into a sort of anthology series. Since moving past Ash’s story, Raimi and the rights holders have been letting exciting new directors come in and take a crack at a standalone movie with the uniquely gonzo, gore-soaked, cartoonish Evil Dead tone.

So far, we’ve seen Fede Álvarez and Lee Cronin’s distinctive, idiosyncratic takes on an Evil Dead movie, and they’ve each brought their own style and personality to Raimi’s world while recapturing the chaotic, blood-soaked magic of his original trilogy. On July 24, we’re getting Evil Dead Burn from Infested director Sébastien Vaniček, and after that, we’re getting Evil Dead Wrath from The Last Stop in Yuma County’s Francis Galluppi.

We’re even getting an Evil Dead animated series. Raimi took a big swing with The Evil Dead, and 45 years later, it’s still paying off.