Alternate Takes 05.30.09: Evil Dead

Posted by Shawn S. Lealos on 05.30.2009

It's been almost thirty years since Sam Raimi last made a horror film. On the heels of his return to horror, Alternate Takes looks back at the start of the man's career and his groundbreaking work on the original Evil Dead.



This week offers two major theatrical releases, the first being Pixar's newest film Up and the second, a more genre oriented flick as Sam Raimi directs his first true horror film in over 20 years with Drag Me to Hell. There are also a couple of smaller releases as Rian Johnson's sophomore effort The Brothers Bloom spreads to more theaters and 2008's Oscar winning foreign film Departures gets a limited release. Living in good old Oklahoma, I won't get the chance to see The Brothers Bloom this weekend as it has not reached here yet but, if you live in one of the cities that is showing it, I urge you to seek it out and give it your support. Johnson's first film Brick was a masterpiece of originality and, while I don't know if The Brothers Bloom will reach the level of that debut, I do expect it to be a great flick. As for Departures, the award winner's limited release will only include Chicago, New York City and San Francisco this weekend.







All four of this week's releases deserve your attention. The two major releases are important for different reasons. Up is a story that seems a bit different for Pixar, but the company has proven they can take the strangest idea (Wall-E) and make it wonderful. What makes this release extra special is the fact it is being released in glorious 3D. I have gone on ad-nauseum about how much I love this technology in the world of animation. There are a lot of people, including this site's own Jeremy Thomas, who hates the format and calls it a gimmick.

I consider the addition of 3D a wonderful thing. It was tested on A Nightmare Before Christmas which has been released at Halloween over the last few years to record turnouts. 3D is not a gimmick anymore. To hate 3D for giving the world of the animated film more depth then you could ever dream is akin to hating CGI for making drawn cartoons almost obsolete. The technology has moved on. The movies are still released in 2D as well since most theaters can't afford to update their technology. You also will be watching the movies in 2D on your TVs at home because the movies that were released in 3D can still only do the cheap red and blue glasses on your TV. Those do suck.

But the new 3D technology, miles past those crappy glasses you used to watch Freddy and Jason jump out of the screen at you, allows a beautiful experience that is breathtaking. In Coraline, leaves fall from a tree clearly in front of the house in the background. Even the title sequences, with the words standing clearly in front of the background image, are incredible. I sat in awe during the trailers for the new Ice Age movie as they played before both Coraline and Monsters vs. Aliens in its 3D format. I then saw the same trailer before Wolverine in 2D and was very disappointed. That's when I realized how spoiled I am to 3D animated films. When I see Up this weekend, it will only be in 3D. I can't wait to see what Pixar accomplishes with this wonderful new technology.

But enough of that, as I covered the advent of 3D technology in my Week 45 column. This week I want to look at a very talented director and the man who inspired me to become a filmmaker - Sam Raimi

DRAG ME TO HELL Written and Directed by Sam Raimi The Evil Dead (1981) Crimewave (1985) Evil Dead II (1987) Darkman (1990) Army of Darkness (1992) The Quick and the Dead (1995) A Simple Plan (1998) For Love of the Game (1999) The Gift (2000) Spider-Man (2002) Spider-Man 2 (2004) Spider-Man 3 (2007) Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Sam Raimi, the fourth of five children, was born in 1959 in Royal Oak, Michigan. Raimi had a love of television and movies as a child. One of his earliest film memories came watching Fantastic Voyage (1966) on one of the many trips to the theater with his family. Thanks to a combination of his older brother's propensity for magic tricks and his father's home movies, he became interested in making movies of his own. When he saw some of his father's home movies cut together out of order, he knew there was the possibility to use this technology, manipulating time to tell his stories.

"The magical qualities of film, being able to capture time and replay it, in an altered reality," Raimi said, "you can play it faster, or slower, or in an order you choose, you can reassemble time, with the added enhancement of the sound of the moment, years ago, being replayed. I was living in a time warp. I thought that this magic was something I had to be involved with, that I had to consume myself with it."

Early Raimi films were comedies, created thanks to the influence of the Three Stooges and Jerry Lewis. Raimi met Bruce Campbell through a drama course in high school and discovered they were both making Super-8 movies. This was also when Raimi met Scott Spiegel in biology class and they became friends when Spiegel realized his original opinion of Raimi - a poseur with pretensions to acting - was unfounded.

"We all went to groovy Groves High School," Spiegel remembers, "and we were all making movies separately. It all kind of blended somehow that way: you make movies, we make movies - great! By that time, I think Bruce and I were the most advanced filmmakers, but Sam was the one with the sound Super-8 camera."

The first major film Sam made after enrolling in Michigan State was The Happy Valley Kid, a comedy about a pathetic nerd who arrives at college only to be tormented by everyone he meets. They showed it on campus, charging an admission, and it ran four times a week to half to two-third filled houses for almost fourteen weeks. This planted the impression in Raimi's mind he could actually make a film for profit and maybe have it seen in real cinemas.

In 1979, to try to woo investors for a new horror movie Raimi wanted to make called Book of the Dead, he filmed Within the Woods, his first horror movie. At a cost of $1,600 the film was shot over a 6-day period. For the film Raimi hired a professional make-up effects man to prepare moulds and on-set makeup and rented a professional lighting kit for the first time. Raimi also experimented with camera speeds, sound distortion and inventive ways of camera movement.

When Within the Woods was finished, Rob Tapert arranged for it to be shown before The Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight shows on a few consecutive nights in Detroit. It was well received and one reviewer actually praised it as a film that provides "more chills, thrills and squeamish giggles than ... Prophecy and The Amityville Horror combined." The reviewer noted the influences of Raimi include such films as Night of the Living Dead, Carrie, Psycho, Taxi Driver and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and said he looked forward to seeing Raimi get a chance to make a more extended feature film.

The young filmmakers donned suits, carried briefcases and met with prospective investors, presenting their prospectus, and occasionally showed Within the Woods to raise $85,000 of the $150,000 they wanted to make their feature length debut. They received permission from the investors to begin production of the movie short of the full amount and began casting the movie they staked their future on - Book of the Dead.

**

Fans know the film Book of the Dead by another name as it was changed to The Evil Dead for its release.

"When we first took it out to be sold," actor Bruce Campbell remembers, "our agent, a fine man by the name of Irvin Shapiro said ‘fellas, people are gonna think they have to read for 90 minutes if you call it Book of the Dead. Call it The Evil Dead. We thought it was the dumbest title we ever heard but what do we know?"

The filmmakers, with money in hand, began auditions for the available roles. Bruce Campbell was cast as Ash, the lead of the film, and Ellen Sandweiss, a veteran of Raimi pictures, including Within the Woods was cast as his sister Cheryl. Teresa Seyferth and Rich DeManincor, both SAG actors, were cast in the film's other two roles. Because SAG requires a minimum pay scale that this particular film couldn't afford, the two actors used pseudonyms to hide their true identities. It didn't work because both were recognized and fined.

The crew budgeted day-to-day expenses for the film the best they could, considering their lack of funds. They paid actors $100 a week, production assistants/crew members got $40 per week, and the partners allotted themselves $35 a week, primarily as expenses but most of that went back into the movie. With a cast, crew, script and $85,000, they set out for Tennessee to shoot their movie.

The Evil Dead is a low budget splatter horror film filled to the brim with humor and inventive camera tricks making it come across as much bigger than the modest budget would have you believe.

The movie opens with "The Force" moving fluidly through a swamp, heading to a winding road where a group of four college students are driving to a weekend getaway at an old cabin. To achieve this without the use of a Steadicam, Raimi sat in an inflatable raft with the camera taped to his hands while Campbell pushed him through the water. When The Force begins to move through the woods, closing in on the kids, it is achieved by bolting the camera to a two-by-four with a wide angled lens and running really quickly. This technique is used throughout the entire movie including the climax.

"Sam showed more savvy during the making of The Evil Dead than I had ever seen before," said Campbell. "I didn't know where he was getting all this nonsense, but it was finally his chance to use every trick he had learned to that point, and he just kept laying it on. Everything became a tricky shot, and his cameraman, Tim Philo, was up to it. We all kicked around a bunch of ideas on how to shoot some stuff, and that's how we got the idea for the ‘Shaky-Cam'. That's a two-by-four with a guy on either end to stabilize it, the camera in the middle; you could go over bushes and logs, it was an incredibly versatile thing."

The trip led the kids to a cabin in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't the cabin they had originally planned to shoot at because the owners pulled out of the agreement at the last minute. They hooked up with a local who was able to find them the perfect location, with one problem. It was haunted. The Tennessee cabin dated back to the Civil War. When the builder was laying in the last brick a bolt of lightning struck and killed him. The cabin rests between mountains of ore and draws a lot of lightning to the area.

After the man died, the place was considered haunted and remained vacant for almost forty years. "Around 1925, a family that was very poor didn't care about the haunted house story anymore," Raimi said, "and three generations of women - a mother, her daughter and the grandmother - moved in because they had no place to go. The first night they were in this place, the little girl woke up to another lightning storm and ran screaming into her mother's room, and then her grandmother's. By coincidence, both had died of natural causes the same night. So this little girl ran screaming out into the rain; searchers found her at a nearby farmhouse about half a day later, in a state of shock; she never really recovered from that."

Raimi finishes this story by explaining that after shooting the film, the cabin was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Campbell disagrees with this, calling it all a horrible lie, and states the cabin was accidentally burned down when some drunken revelers accidentally set fire to the place.

The attention of the kids is drawn to a cellar door that is being banged on, so they send both guys into the cellar to take a look around. This is where they find the Necronomicon, or the Book of the Dead. It is interesting to note that this cellar was not in the cabin in Tennessee, but was instead back in Michigan. To pull off this effect, they dug a four foot hole under the door to make it look like it went to an underground cellar and then shot the scenes downstairs later in Michigan. There is also an interesting moment where Campbell is walking through the cellar, passes a post and suddenly has a slightly different hairdo. This is because they reshot some scenes months later in a third location - a garage posing as the cellar - independent filmmaking at its grassroots levels.

Not everything was peaches and cream and not all cast or crew members were willing to fight as hard as Raimi and Campbell to finish this movie. The shoot, originally scheduled to take place over six weeks, was dragging on, from October into December. Most of the cast and crew needed to get back to their real lives and were on the verge of revolt.

"I was sitting on the steps in the house, and upstairs were Sam, Bruce and Rob." said Josh Becker, the light and sound technician. "They're discussing how they can take this tiny amount of money they have and somehow spread it out so they can shoot for another couple of weeks. Meanwhile, downstairs, it's like the camera tilts down and I can see the case and crew. They're all going, ‘So, you're driving the van? Can I ride back with you to Michigan?' ‘No, no, you go in this car, and you'll go in that car.' And then you tilt back up, where Bruce, Sam and Rob are saying, ‘Okay, I think we've got this worked out, we'll just offer them thirty dollars a week, and we can shoot for three more weeks.' They come downstairs, passing me on the step, and present their proposition. ‘You'll get the rest from profits, because we need to shoot for three more weeks.' Everybody said ‘What? We're leaving tomorrow morning.' And they did. So, suddenly, five of us then shot for the next five weeks."

The only actor left was Bruce Campbell.

"He is right about everyone leaving," Campbell said, "but in a way, it didn't matter to us. We'd been abandoned on It's Murder and every Super-8 movie we made, and that's the absolute truth."

Regardless of the mutiny, Raimi finished his movie.

**

The filmmakers were having difficulties finding a buyer for the movie. New Line offered to buy Worldwide rights but offered no money up front and both Raimi and Campbell, who pretty much worked for free the entire shoot, were broke. They finally got lucky and attached themselves to Irvin Shapiro who offered them critical advice. They took The Evil Dead to European film festivals where it was greeted with enthusiasm. It was at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982 that Stephen King first saw the movie.

"It blew me away," King said. "Totally. Blew me right through the back doors, through the lobby and into the street, figuratively speaking. I was registering with like one peripheral corner of my mind that there was a lot of shit going on in the picture that was so amateurish that you could hardly believe you were seeing it on the big screen. There was a matte of the full moon that looked like a postage stamp on a letter, if you imagine the screen as an envelope. But at the same time, even that they would try to put those shots in there with what they had was amazing."

In his review for Twilight Zone magazine, King stated "That [Sam Raimi] is a genius is yet unproven; that he has made the most ferociously original horror film in 1982 seems to me beyond doubt... The film begins and ends with crazily exhilarating shots that make you want to leap up, cheering." This review grabbed the attention of Fangoria which turned horror fans on to the new movie.

Palace Pictures purchased the British rights at the American Film Market in 1982, the film's first sale. In 1983, it was the highest-rented video in the UK. It opened first in Scotland and was a huge success both financially and critically. It played to enthused audiences for over a year until 1984 when Scotland Yard called the movie obscenely bloody and arrested Nik Powell of Palace Pictures for violating England's Obscenity Publications Act. The judge dismissed the case, releasing Powell with an apology but this incident began the UK's Video Nasties era and the film was banned in various countries across Europe.

It met more problems in the United States when New Line distributed the film and was given the dreaded X-Rating by the MPAA. Because the X-Rating usually referred to hardcore porn (with obvious exceptions such as A Clockwork Orange and Midnight Cowboy), many newspapers refused to carry advertising for such items and that meant less customers. There was also a problem with cinemas that refused to carry X-Rated films. New Line took an interesting stance and chose to release the movie without a rating at all.

They broke even financially six years later.

**

Raimi went on to direct his next picture, Crimewave, a very difficult and trying film taken out of his hands by the studios.

"I can't look at it," Raimi said. "It's so painful. The experience was just awful. Bruce Campbell was supposed to star. A month, two months before, the studio said, ‘No, he's not starring in it.' My composer was removed - Joe LoDuca, who did the Evil Dead movies. They didn't let me do a director's cut. They fired my editor about two weeks in, after we'd done shooting, and they brought the film out of Detroit to Los Angeles. They had their own editor cut it, they had their own components. It was just a mess."

Raimi had to be happy to return to the Evil Dead franchise after that and made Evil Dead II, a movie considered by many critics to be one of the greatest horror flicks of all time. It has a 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is ranked #19 on Entertainment Weekly's top cult movies of all time and #49 on Empire's Top 500 Movies of All Time. Empire points out the reasons it has remained so popular over time includes Sam Raimi ("young, brilliant and bursting at the seams"), Bruce Campbell ("half-Stooge, half-Rambo"), a disregard for convention, the high gore factor, it being "goofily hilarious", and including an ending that rivals that of Planet of the Apes.

I have to add to Empire's list the entire sequence where Ash fights his own hand, which I chronicled in this week's Movie Zone Top 5 list.

Next up for Raimi was his own superhero movie, Darkman, starring Liam Neeson. Unlike the Evil Dead films, Darkman was developed by the studios, which meant Raimi had to clear everything he planned on doing with the studio before getting the green light. Regardless of those restrictions, Rob Tapert called the shoot "a joyride, that's what you live for, that period of time when you're actually doing something creative."

"The style is very different on this picture," Raimi said. "My main goal is to create real characters in something of a fantastic situation. I'm trying to keep the camera movement to a realistic level, as opposed to a wild level, where I take on the point of view of spirits, or unnatural, or supernatural things. I'm trying to make this take place in the real world."

He followed Darkman with Army of Darkness, the third and final chapter in the Evil Dead trilogy. Army of Darkness was more a medieval, fantasy comedy instead of the straight horror of his first two films in the series. It would be the last fans would see of Raimi shooting the horror style they had grown to admire. He followed the conclusion to the trilogy with more traditional pictures including baseball flick For Love of the Game, western The Quick and the Dead, gothic film The Gift and the wonderfully under looked A Simple Plan.

Then his life changed forever when he was offered the chance to direct Spider-Man. He almost lost the opportunity when he read in Variety that the studio had offered the job to another director (David Fincher) and Raimi resigned himself to the fact he would probably never get another chance to make a big budget picture.

"I told myself that whole day that it was just as well because I really wouldn't know how to make that movie anyways," Raimi told Empire magazine in a recent interview. "I was glad to be making movies and I just assumed that's who I was, that they'd figured out that I could never make those movies. They never approached me. I just assumed that after 20 years that that was not my thing, you know... I thought it was an elite club. And they never had a property that I really loved... Spider-Man happened to be a character close to my heart that was also a big studio property. The two had never crossed before."

Following three Spider-Man movies, Raimi suddenly finds himself in a unique position where he can do anything he wants. Well, almost anything. He lost out on directing The Hobbit to Guillermo del Toro, but admits he understands the decision and is excited to see how del Toro shoots the story. Instead, it is time for Raimi to go back home. He has run a studio called Ghost House since 2004 and produced movies such as The Grudge, Boogeyman and 30 Days of Night.

"I had written Drag Me to Hell with my brother Ivan some time ago," Raimi said, "and I was trying to get my friend, Jeff Lynch, to direct this movie. But I couldn't get all the money that I thought I wanted the director to have for the movie. Basically, I could get a certain amount of money with him directing, but I would have had to cut sequences out of the script. I thought, ‘That's not why I'm into this because I don't want to jam something into this budget just so it can be made. That defeats the whole purpose of why we started this company, it's about having fun.'"

Joe Drake, one of the partners at Ghost House, mentioned if Raimi directed the film they could get the money to make the film. Raimi considered this and decided it would finally give him the chance to get back into horror.

"I really liked the script," Raimi said. "It's not a particularly super-intelligent piece, it's just a goofy spook house ride. But I thought it would be great for me, it was just the break I needed."

Almost thirty years after the release of his breakthrough horror film The Evil Dead, I have seen his latest horror film and I guarantee this is exactly what his fans have been waiting for.

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