Theatre of Blood: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II

Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) is a cinematic resurrection of the director’s earlier film Evil Dead (1981). It can be dangerous territory when an artist is given license to go back and adapt their own work but in re-appropriating his own film, Raimi, much more Georges Méliès than John Carpenter, reclaims an originality within the genre during a time of over-used horror movie conventions.

Evil Dead II defies many clichés prevalent in late 1980s horror cinema. The film’s sincere, albeit black, humor is quite opposite to schtick found in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Rather than be used to make the audience feel comfortable with the excess of gore, humor here adds intellectual charm to the battle against the dead. There is no “final girl” and there isn’t rampant teenage sex or a monster out for revenge. Uniquely, Evil Dead II possesses a theatrical quality that, while lacking much cohesive narrative, takes the viewer on a cinematic magic trip.

Within this journey are two main characters: Ash and the cabin. In the decade of Michael, Jason, and Freddy, Bruce Campbell (who, let’s face it, is a god) manifested a sexy leading character that seamlessly transitions from freaked-out boyfriend to level-headed bad-ass. Campbell is so good we don’t even question it when Ash lobs off his undead lady-friend’s head with a shovel, puts it in a vice, and slices it with a chainsaw. Poor thing, we love him.

Just as provocative is the character of the house. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard speaks of the home as a haunting site of composite time, “Past, present, and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another.” ¹ A horror and gothic genre staple, the transformation of the tranquil, protective, and restorative space of the home into a site of tactile terror obliterates any notions of domestic safety. This cabin in the woods becomes a locus horribilis (the place of horror) where benign everyday objects such as shelves, chairs, cellars, and lamps become demonically charged. Nowhere and nothing is safe.

The surrounding atmospheric backdrop functions like a lavish theatrical design, making good use of the available technology the time. Surprisingly, the visuals and sound in Evil Dead II are still unique. The lush lighting, the vibrant blood, and the misty woods evoke a dream world based within our own recognizable world. The bridge, a conduit between these worlds, cuts two particularly striking scenes: firstly upon the couple’s arrival amidst the setting sun and secondly when its destruction signifies to Ash that he won’t be able to escape the nightmare. But it’s that sound, that humming/vibrating/motor sound, which audibly produces intense fright. Heard when the point-of-view of the camera (simultaneously the director, the monster, the audience, and the lens) leads the way, this sonic wave provides the main entrance into the terror.

Because of the affective qualities Raimi creates, Evil Dead has the distinction of being named the “Number One Video Nasty” (a proud moniker to be sure) by the housewife who led the film censorship crusade to British MPs in the 1980s, Mary Whitehouse. Also distributed by Palace Pictures, a production and distribution company that gravitated towards “questionable” material, Evil Dead II inherited this legacy and, with its release, re-ignited debates on the representation of violence in both film and the media. Concurrently in the United States, the music industry was feeling a similar heat with the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC determined a rating system for explicit lyrics and content within a wide range of musicians: from Bob Denver to Judas Priest to the Dead Kennedys.

Much of the censorship debate surrounding Evil Dead II was tied to the accessibility suddenly afforded to viewers because of the VCR. The VCR and subsequent proliferation of neighborhood video stores brought about the freedom to watch movies alone, in the comfort of one’s own home. Away from the cinema-sphere, this singular device altered the way the public viewed, consumed, and processed films, an evolvement that continues with technological advancement. Along with this shift came new forms of censorship. The United Kingdom in particular vehemently fought a “moral regulation” in regards to questionable films (i.e. movies of a sexual or violent nature) in what is now infamously dubbed “the video nasty.” Stemming from a cultural fear in the UK that these types of films would proliferate violence and that their impact was made even more profoundly when viewing at home, came the Video Recordings Act (VRA) in 1985, legislation that still effects how movies are shown and distributed in the country today.

The release of home video into the world had another significant effect that looked inwards: it changed how movies were perceived, not only by viewers who now had control over their experience (fast-forward, pause, rewind), but also filmmakers now had an acute awareness and understanding of horror film construction. Horror cinema’s cultural, political, and societal implications, along with its overabundance of aesthetics, was readily dissectible, digestible, and regurgitated. In her essay Bringing It All Back Home: Horror Cinema and Video Culture Linda Badley says, “On (and as) video, which rendered it re-viewable and renewable, the genre reinvented itself as meta-horror. It became its own cultural critic and historian, producing a wave of hip, self-aware, post-modern splatterpunk”. And while this “meta-horror” was interesting for awhile, producing classics like Evil Dead II, it can definitely be seen as the beginning of the decline of the horror film in the past two decades, at least in American horror cinema post Wes Craven’s Scream (1996).

Indeed, Evil Dead II is one filmic reminder that American horror cinema today is in a bit of a crisis. Resident cynic Steffen Hantke says, “As one subgeneric cycle followed another with ever-increasing rapidity, the genre on the whole was in decline”. ² Nearly twenty-five years after its release, it’s apparent that Sam Raimi created an enduringly special film that breaks beyond any trope associated with the 1980s.…and he did it twice.

1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. 6.