The Evil Dead (1981)

directed by Sam Raimi

Danielle Gutierrez

I get a TikTok in a group chat one day. I watch in my browser as @sydneyvolpe outlines the use of AI-generated artwork in Late Night with the Devil. Chatter ensues about indie horror and working artists.

A few of my responses in the thread:

No one’s scrappy anymore and it pisses me off

Why do we think I love Evil Dead so much, those movies stick with the ethos of the original in terms of moviemaking

Calling it now I’m going to pitch this

*

No one’s going to deny that making art—making things—is hard.

Like a lot of creative people, I’ve had moments where I’ve wanted to rip my hair out or throw my laptop across the room, willing the words to come. Creative inspiration comes in fits and starts, often arriving at the exact wrong time.

But no one creates because it’s easy. One of the great joys of art is being able to witness the magic that mere mortals can conjure. I dated a musician once and as someone who once impulsively bought a banjo and just as quickly gave up, it was such a beautiful thing to be able to listen to a track he recorded and think, I don’t know how you thought up all these sounds but I’m so glad you did.

I watch TikTok creators cut into cakes that look like Nikes and sculpt tiny sandwich earrings out of clay because it’s really fucking cool that someone did that. I stare at speckly abstract paintings because, How did they know when it was done? I watch bloopers and behind the scenes footage because they’re more relatable than what makes it into the movies. Shortcuts steal that from us. Imagine how boring it would be to see on-set featurettes that are just some dude training a computer program.

*

Now, I enjoyed Late Night with the Devil. There’s great makeup and practical effects, implying the genuine craft, love and care that went into a horror film running on an indie budget. But more than showing the “power of gen AI” or however they’re hawking it these days, Late Night with the Devil and its AI exploratory does the opposite.

Aside from it being ethically questionable, the images look…bad. Look closely and you’re reminded that AI still doesn’t know how to draw hands. And despite the efforts to smooth the edges of the creative process, the AI clearly never grasped the concept of a jack-o-lantern. It shows where taking the “faster,” more “productive,” more “efficient” route leads us—somewhere between slippery slopes and the uncanny valley. It highlights the reality that our lived experiences, our creative passions, our inefficiencies are what make our art worthwhile. I can’t generate a retro title card within seconds. But at least I know how to carve a damn pumpkin.

There’s an interview that Sam Raimi, increasingly my favorite director, did maybe 30 years ago. It’s a great feature on the making of the notoriously, belovedly scrappy Evil Dead films. He talks about the creative problem-solving they needed to do to accommodate their low budget early on—the handcrafted effects, the ramshackle camera rigs like the famous “Ram-O Cam.” He calls it all “just common sense.”

The host then asks, “So do you think, as you move into a bigger budget, that you might lose some of your common sense?” Almost without hesitation, a baby-faced Raimi responds, “Yeah, I think that that happens.”

I don’t doubt that Raimi, Bruce Campbell, Scott Spiegel and the rest of their early filmmaking crew would’ve preferred a massive sum of cash to make The Evil Dead. They wouldn’t have had to cold call rich guys in Detroit for money, or resort to whatever was in stock at the local hardware store for hair and makeup. But had that happened, I don’t think we would have Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy as it exists today. By way of a rare kind of friendship, we get to bear witness to the beginnings of a rare kind of creativity.

*

I rewatch all five Evil Dead movies, plus the first episode of Ash vs Evil Dead in the span of 24 hours. I take notes on each one, deep thoughts like “Goos are full of love,” “Little Bruces :)” and “Curled up bridge—HOW?” I listen to the audiobook of Bruce Campbell’s memoir If Chins Could Kill over the course of several long walks, noting down chapters to refer to in my physical copy later. The Google Doc runs six pages.

*

When I watch the first Evil Dead, I see art covered in fingerprints. Whether by no-budget necessity or pure passion, I see a bunch of men and women raking together every ounce of creative scrap within them, producing something inherently alive in the form of the undead.

The effects in The Evil Dead aren’t looking to mimic some sort of pristine reality—what’s the fun in that? It looks like people made a horror movie in the woods.

I see that Deadite makeup is rubbed off in patches here and there, spider veins are clearly drawn on skin with some kind of surely ill-advised marker. The tried and true recipe for fake blood was apparently a combination of Karo syrup, food coloring and coffee creamer. Also in their VFX arsenal dating back to the Super-8 days: black latex paint (bile), milk (also bile), duct tape (for attaching things to other things, like knives to chests) and canned cherry pie filling (guts). 

These are the building blocks that would change lives and build careers. Ordinary objects, designed to paint houses or make pies, transformed to make us feel something else entirely. Often it’s horror, but always it’s awe. It’s the kind of art that asks us to suspend our disbelief, all expectations about horror or moviemaking, and be part of something messy and human and alive.

I want the world to be like this, I think as I watch. It’s Ash in the basement, accidentally, sloppily becoming a hero.

Blood drips out of a light socket, into a light bulb, onto the lens of a projector. It covers Bruce Campbell’s laughably pretty face, turning everything a dark, syrupy red. The projector sparks, its own makeshift horror film sputtering. It explodes.

*

I sit in a hotel lobby in Pasadena, old-fashioned in hand. Perpetually in my Hemingway phase, I sip my drink and adjust my cocktail napkin—like a real writer. The ending usually comes to me first. I hop on YouTube as a refresher and for inspiration, click around. Evil Dead 2 opening credits… Army of Darkness boomstick scene… Evil Dead Rise on-set featurette… Spider-Man 2 visual effects breakdown… J. Jonah Jameson compilation… Something titled “Do These Snacks Actually Taste Like Pizza?”... I snap out of it, close the accumulating tabs. Time for bed, I guess.

*

As teens, Raimi & Co. bonded over their love of The Three Stooges, and devoted time to perfecting their greatest hits, often in Super-8 films. (“Sam’s house had the best stairs to fall down,” Campbell says in his memoir.) In many ways, we can thank our friends Moe, Curly, Larry, and Shemp for The Evil Dead.

There’s a purity to slapstick—dare I say: an honesty. It’s all out there for us on display. No form of comedy is more barebones, few forms of art are more human—literally. It’s rooted in the idea of looking and laughing at all the hilarious things the human body can do. What I personally find funnier is the impulse to entertain this way.

It is so goddamn funny to me, nevermind impressive, that people think up, rehearse. and otherwise work really hard on these things, like learning how to fall down without breaking your neck, or in the case of Evil Dead II: figuring out how to launch an eyeball, nerve-ending and all, into an actor’s mouth. (The trick, it turns out, is to have the actor play it in reverse.) And there’s a purity to that, too.

By the time Evil Dead II came around, there was a tad more money to play with, courtesy of Dino de Laurentiis. And “play” they did.

More so than the first, this is the movie where Ash gets absolutely thrashed around. He turns his hand into a chainsaw, smashes plates on his own head, falls out of a rocking chair, submerges his head in a filthy pond and does a Buster Keaton-style pratfall after slipping on some mixture of blood and bile. And not unlike Sam Raimi, I get a kick out of seeing Bruce Campbell fall down. It’s an inspiring act. I could only wish to create something this pure.

Actually, Bruce Campbell’s work here is kind of one of the great performances. He did his own stunts—instant payoff of all those teenaged practice runs. It has the effect of watching a guy play a one-man symphony, rub his belly, pat his head, cook a five-course meal, and juggle blowtorches all at the same time.

In low moments I’ll just throw on the sequence where Ash plays cat-and-mouse with his own severed hand, gets nearly drowned by a fountain of blood, then goes into a maniacal laughing fit as the entire room mocks him. Somewhere on New York Magazine’s highbrow/lowbrow Approval Matrix is me reading A Farewell to Arms because of this sequence. It’s just boom, bang, boom—a relentless display of creativity. You cannot believe the shit you’re seeing. I don’t know how they did this, but I’m so glad they did.

*

Having hit an hours-long wall, I’ve given up writing for the day. Too tired to do my nightly stretches, I do the brush-teeth, wash-face routine. I flip on LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” having heard it in a movie trailer earlier that day. It’s a song about tension, between loving and hating the very place you call home, an ode to what brings you life and agony in equal measure.

I listen. Stillness. I swing open the door to my room, feel the rise and fall of keys on my keyboard. I write. It’s close.

*

If the vibe of The Evil Dead was “It’s crazy that they made this,” the vibe of Army of Darkness is “It’s crazy that they made this.”

On one hand, it’s one of those wonderful Hollywood miracles in that Universal put millions toward a sequel that features stop-motion skeletons and the line “Well, hello, Mr. Fancypants” in a medieval setting. It’s all bigger, to be sure. There are so many horses, so many extras, so many lo-fi Jason and the Argonauts-style Deadites because they captured the classic feel Raimi was going for. That flimsy skeleton in the Late Night with the Devil has nothing on these guys.

Of course, getting the movie made wasn’t without its Working with a Studio Giant compromises. The production nearly ran out of money, sequences needed to be cut as a result, Hollywood execs requested a different ending. Still, they could’ve done anything for round three, and they basically made a Looney Tune. When the crew wasn’t trying to keep order of the production deep in the Mojave Desert, I’d like to think they were giggling all the way to the bank.

I think back to Raimi’s line about “common sense.” I haven’t seen Raimi’s maligned Oz the Great and Powerful, but I have seen his middling latest, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And what I see is a filmmaker with a good brain, caught up in Hollywood’s tired churn. He still has it, “it” being his trademark visual flourish and the impulse to bully his childhood friend and personal ragdoll Bruce. But look closely and you still see the fingerprints, albeit mostly in flashes this time. A screaming lampshade in the key of Evil Dead II, or Doctor Strange as a zombie, fighting to make a mark as the endless multiverse closes in.

Look close enough and you may even see shades of when somewhere in Michigan, a bunch of kids ran around with Super-8 cameras, pretending to poke each others’ eyes out. The days that ran on fun and sweat and unbridled creativity. Days uninterested in hiding the seams.

Danielle Gutierrez is a writer and marketing manager. She is based in Los Angeles, where she haunts local rep theaters, reads at coffee shops and reviews horror films for Downright Creepy. You can find her on Letterboxd and Twitter @dmariegutierrez.