A Film Canon

The first and strongest film in Sam Raimi's zombie trilogy, The Evil Dead depicts a group of five teenagers who spend the night at a remote rural cabin, during which they awaken a supernatural maleficence. This narrative simplicity opens up room for considerable stylistic ingenuity and experimentation - especially Raimi's decision to shoot from the perspective of this maleficence, meaning that he can make its agency felt from the opening scene, without disturbing the sense of atmosphere or slow build, as well as equating it, at some level, with the entire look and feel of the film. This quickly segues into a POV shot from the perspective of the woods, as Raimi considers how a tracking-shot might embody all the movements of that American Gothic space - trees falling, smoke drifting, wind blowing, as well as the more abject, perverse movements usually invisible to the human eye, but here sped up to the point of visibility; tendrils and branches intertwining, slime and stagnation spreading, and, finally, the whole universe of asexual and dehumanised reproduction, as if to remind us that trees and other plants are, in some strange way, as sentient and pleasure-loving as us - a vision of vegetative horror, that transforms the concluding, clay-animated gore into a more lurid, fast-forwarded version of natural decomposition, and provides a much more memorable fusion of sex and death than the exploitative segments. It's an aesthetic that uncannily draws out the intrusive limitations of human sense-perception, as Raimi prefaces critical moments with tight, contained shots of terrified eyes, and transforms the house's windows into so many sensory thresholds - little more than a series of disadvantage-points from the inside, but simultaneously available to the swirling circumillbience outside. Even the emergence of the actual zombies - and corresponding movement towards the horror-comedy of the two sequels - doesn't quite replace or reify this atmosphere, partly because the zombies are, for all their gory viciousness, still on a spectrum with Romero's, not quite possessed of the human dexterity and agency that might squarely and conveniently locate them as antagonists, and certainly not equal to the hyper-fluidity that finally overcomes lone survivor Ash (Bruce Campbell). Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which it humorously quotes, it's a tribute to low-budget horror; or, rather, the extent to which a limited budget can force a director into creative and enduring atmospheric possibilities, in much the same way as the Val Lewton horror cycle, whose trademark vision of inky night passage Raimi's abstracted, almost pixellated blacks often recall; "Did something within the woods do this to you?" "No, it was the woods themselves!"