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Creatively Bankrupt?: THE EVIL DEAD (1981) vs EVIL DEAD (2013)

Zombie-like, horror franchises tend to claw their way back to life through the unholy magic of "the remake." By analyzing one such remake next to the original, what do we learn about how stories work?

By Littlewit PhilipsPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 11 min read
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Creatively Bankrupt?: THE EVIL DEAD (1981) vs EVIL DEAD (2013)
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

In 1930, a technological revolution exploded through Hollywood with an audible bang: sound. Universal Studios, seeing the implications of this new addition to the medium, remade earlier films to incorporate this shocking new artistic device. Even though The Cat and the Canary had only come out three years before, Universal remade it as The Cat Creeps, and the horror-movie remake entered the world.

By Anika Mikkelson on Unsplash

Whenever a new technology radically reshapes the way we tell stories, there's an impulse see what classic tales can't be modernized with these new tools. Horror movies have been depending on special-effects technology ever since Georges Méliès introduced the world to The Devil's Castle, so it's not surprising that this genre is particularly prone to this cycle.

Sometimes remakes are actually parallel adaptations (if two directors decide to adapt the novel Carrie they're both more informed by Stephen King than each other), but in some cases an original horror movie receives this treatment. It could be, like The Ring, that the movie exists in adaptation across language or geography. Or, as in the case of today's topic, it could just be an adaptation across time and creative team.

Hollywood's rationale appears to be: if it worked once, who is to say that it can't work again?

By De'Andre Bush on Unsplash

Unsurprisingly, these remakes often result in fans asking the same series of questions: why? It's not like we lost access to the original, so why did they need to try to make it again? What did they think they were going to add?

Previously, I've compared Escape Room and Escape Room for an analysis of movies that share names and premises but are not creatively related. Then I looked at Aftermath and Things Heard & Seen to examine movies that came out at about the same time with extremely similar premises. So it only makes sense to cap off this little project with final comparison.

It's Time for The Evil Dead

Was there any legitimate reason why The Evil Dead (1981) had to become Evil Dead (2013)? Is there anything we can learn about stories as a whole by analyzing these movies side-by-side?

I have an advantage here: having never seen The Evil Dead movies before, I'm entering into this discussion without nostalgia. I don't have a knee-jerk reaction against this particular horror remake, and I just want to answer that basic question: do these movies say anything that differentiates them? And further, is this remake just a soulless cash grab?

The Evil Dead (1981)

The Evil Dead poster, complete with the Stephen King endorsement that might have saved the movie's life.

By this point, the story behind The Evil Dead is a legend in its own right. After scraping together investments, 19-year-old Sam Raimi and his crew made a movie so shocking that it couldn't receive an R rating. It was banned by many theaters and some countries, but it found an audience and became a cult classic.

Did this movie have any obvious shortcomings? After all, if the movie was literally perfect, the remake has a very different challenge ahead of it.

There's no question that The Evil Dead had an outsized impact on horror cinema. This movie is still being parodied and imitated in the modern era with movies like Cabin in the Woods (2011) taking direct inspiration from it.

That said, the movie bares obvious marks from its amateurish conception: a lot of the performances are unpolished. The camerawork is slightly off. And the script feels... uneven.

There's no kind way to put this: about a quarter of the way through the movie, one character is sexually attacked by the forest. It is grotesque, and you don't even have to take my word for it. Writer-director Sam Raimi later called the scene "unnecessarily gratuitous and a little too brutal."

Asked whether he regretted including that scene, he didn't dodge the issue: "I do. I do. (...) My goal is not to offend people. It is to entertain, thrill, scare... make them laugh, but not to offend them."

Still, whether or not an older, wiser, Marvel-entertainment-approved Raimi regrets the scene, the fact remains: 19-year-old chose to include it, and it's still there, casting its shadow over the movie as a whole.

Evil Dead (2013)

Evil Dead poster, notably lacking an endorsement from Stephen King

Since The Evil Dead (1981) was flawed, Evil Dead (2013) actually has room for improvement. Forty years have passed. Technology has changed. And horror movies have distinctly entered an era of irony and self-awareness. After all, by the time Evil Dead (2013) entered theaters, audiences had already experienced Cabin in the Woods (2011), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Scream (1996), and Zombieland (2009).

Even the direct follow-up to the original, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987), introduced comedy elements to the franchise, setting up the absurd Army of Darkness (1992).

So, how did Evil Dead (2013) decide to update the original?

Well, technologically these movies are miles apart, and the modern remake bares no evidence of an amateurish production. Even after adjusting for inflation, the budget for this movie is over ten times larger than the budget for the original, and it shows.

The actors all feel like actors. The special effects are polished. And, as the director liked to brag, where the original only used a few hundred gallons of blood, this movie marinated the set in over 70,000 gallons of red goo.

And the sexual-violence? Not entirely removed, but trimmed to an R-rating appropriate level.

Even so, the movie lacks anything like the self-awareness of the movies listed about. Evil Dead plays its premise entirely straight. If anything, it takes itself even more seriously than its beyond-R predecessor, leading to feeling like it wasn't quite sure what to do as a remake except update the visuals.

And in the process, it's differences manage to lose things from the original...

Why Is this Happening?

Overhwlemed and exhausted, Ash (Bruce Campbell) screams, "Oh, you bastards... why are you torturing me like this? Why?"

The evil dead giggle in response.

One of the elements that modern, self-aware horror movies love to mock is the moralizing component of earlier films. We see this in The Final Girls (2015), Cabin in the Woods (2011), and plenty of others. The idea is that classic horror movies present a puritanical view of young people (and particularly young women) and sex: if you have sex, you die. If you remain pure, you can become a final girl and live.

The original The Evil Dead ignores that idea entirely. Here we have five perfectly nice teens who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Cheryl is attacked in the film's gratuitous forest sequence, she has violated no social norms or moral codes. The movie never hints that she brought this on herself. The evil dead giggle at Ash's demand because there is no rationale guiding their cruelty, which adds to the film's horror. This isn't a cautionary tale warning about the danger of premarital sex. This is the story of some people trapped in a mindless situation.

By Valentin Salja on Unsplash

Strangely, this is one of the elements that the remake chooses to change. Where the original five kids are just five kids on a vacation, the new five are actually here for an intervention. One of their number is actually a drug addict trying to kick her habit. She is wrestling with internal demons before the evil dead even begin their show.

Also, she is the replacement for Cheryl, and she runs away from the house in part because she can't handle withdrawal. None of the other characters trust her because she is struggling with addiction, which directly leads to her becoming infested with the forest's evil.

If Ash were to ask why this is happening in the remake, the audience could feel that his question might have an answer.

Order of Events

Both movies feature an evil book that the characters should not read. The remake makes it pretty clear: the text has been annotated by a later writer who specifically instructs people from the future not to read the book. Of course, he reads it anyways. He even reads it aloud for good measure! And then evil is unleashed.

By Kristina Flour on Unsplash

However, the original isn't quite so clear on the origin of evil.

While much of the remake contains sequences analogous to moments from the original, one sequence is completely ignored: shortly after arriving at the cabin, before the evil book is uncovered, Cheryl sits down and attempts to draw a clock. Only as she is drawing, something takes control of her hand and scratches a crude drawing on the page.

The remake depicts five people who will be punished for their mistakes. They shouldn't have read the book, they shouldn't have done drugs, they shouldn't have neglected their family obligations. The original offers no such comfort. Evil was here, and evil was awake, without the kids doing anything to disturb it.

The Introduction of Technology

Watching the original, you cannot help but notice that it feels cheap in a lot of ways. The actors don't feel like actors, and the camera feels like it's being carried around by a 19-year-old who is pointing it at his friends. By the time of the remake, that element is completely lost. This is a polished movie, and all of the cast members have experience being on screen.

By Rosie Sun on Unsplash

Unfortunately, even this isn't a point purely in the favor of the remake.

Yes, there is the regrettably gratuitous sequence in the original film, and yes, the remake does trim this down. In that arena, the remake actually adjusts for the original's flaws.

However, because of the amateurish elements of the original, the movie takes on the vibe of watching a home video, and it gains a horrible sort of plausibility. Obviously the special effects haven't aged perfectly, and there are plenty of times where the movie is transparently fake. Still, this doesn't bare the tool-marks we've come to recognize from Hollywood films, which leaves it feeling unique and distinct. You can't really imagine watching this movie in theaters. It still has that feeling of a VHS tape, discovered without its label so that it plays out with a feeling that's equally dreadful and mysterious.

And again, I say this without nostalgia. Until undertaking this experiment, I'd never seen either of these movies.

Watching The Evil Dead (1981) plays a lot of the same notes as The Blair Witch Project (1999), another micro-budget horror movie that gained an aura of verisimilitude just because of how it felt completely unlike a Hollywood production. Or think about the franchise-spawning Paranormal Activity (2007) which harassed that same feeling of otherness. These weren't Hollywood movies, so they don't feel obligated to follow the same rules as Hollywood movies.

Evil Dead (2013) feels like any other horror movie in existence.

"That is Not Dead...

...which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die." -The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft

By Evgeniia Selishcheva on Unsplash

As a genre, horror is obsessed not just with death but also with the possibility of an evil return from that other side. Zombies and vampires claw their way back from the dead, Pet Sematary says that "sometimes dead is better," and Lovecraft warns us in his evil book (an evil book that was a primary inspiration for The Evil Dead's evil book) that death and extended sleep can appear to be one and the same.

Ever since The Evil Dead established itself as a new franchise in the world of horror, it's repeatedly appeared to be dead. It got banned, its sequel had production issues, and decades passed without new instalments in the franchise. It's become a joke, and it's been rebooted, and once again a remake is on the horizon.

And yet, while other instalments have brought bigger budgets and better technology than the original, have any of them supplanted it?

No.

The original is a deeply flawed movie, but it also manages to feel special and unique. By placing evil outside of the moralistic realm of consequence, The Evil Dead presented a horror that couldn't be defended against. If you want to be the final girl in a different horror flick, you just have to keep your clothes on. The Evil Dead operated with the disturbing idea that there was no cause, and because there was no cause, there is no protection against it either.

The remake chose to ignore that in favor of something far more typical.

So What?

Comparing these movies side-by-side, one thing becomes clear: while the new creative team had access to money and technology, and they had a clear desire to recreate the thrill of the original movie, they never really understood what made it work.

Stephen King called the original "ferociously original," but the best that can be said about the remake is that it is substantially more typical of a Hollywood production. There will always be innovators in the realm of horror who manage to bring something to the table that we've never experienced before, but if this comparison teaches us one lesson it is this:

That innovation won't come from traditional Hollywood. After all, they're too busy trying to reanimate the dead.

Thank you for reading my series of movie comparisons. If you liked these posts and you want to see more from me in the future, please remember to subscribe.

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About the Creator

Littlewit Philips

Short stories, movie reviews, and media essays.

Terribly fond of things that go bump in the night.

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