Evil Dead 1981 vs Evil Dead 2013: Which Horror Classic Is Better?
By
Robin B. Devlin
Before heading off into the middle of nowhere with four attractive friends to spend summer in a log cabin in the woods was essentially a death sentence to all but the purest of your party, back before horror got all clever, self-aware, and meta; there was a cabin, a book, and a spooky old recording that called forth Sumerian demons from the pits of hell to wreak havoc upon this mortal realm.
Between these Deadites and the rest of us stood one man, a man with a chin… Ash Fucking Williams!
With a new entry into The Evil Dead franchise due to hit cinemas, and a bold new direction being taken by not overtly linking it to the other movies, it’s time to take a look back to at just what made the first one so damn tasty, and while we are it, examine its generation Z offspring.
Evil Dead 1981
The story of the original Evil Dead is simple: Bruce and four of his Michigan State University friends drive out to a cabin in Tennessee. We get a lovely tense moment as they cross a rickety bridge (It’s a good job they won’t want to leave in a hurry!) Our young heroes settle in: Ash and his girlfriend, Linda; his sister, Cheryl; their friend, Scott; and Scott’s girlfriend, Shelly.
Cheryl curls up with a pad and starts sketching the clock. The clock seizes up, and a faint, creepy voice calls out, “Join us…” Her hand turns pale and starts acting all possessed, and she draws a picture of a book with a demonic face. Now, does she mention this? NOPE!
A little later, the friends are gathered around, and the cellar door flies open, and our intrepid heroes, Ash and Scott, venture into the dark, finding an old book and a tape with creepy Latin chanting. The book is The Naturom Demonto (fun fact: the literal translation is ‘I demolish nature’) and is basically a variation on the Book of the Dead (it would go on to be rebranded as The Necronomicon), the tape recorder has incantations, read aloud by the cabin’s former occupant; archaeologist Raymond Knowby. .
Cheryl gets spooked and yells for Scott to switch off the tape as a branch shatter one of the windows. Pissed off, she goes out for a walk, investigating a strange noise. What follows is one of the most harrowing and infamous scenes in 80s cinema as the poor girl is assaulted and raped by the trees, possessed by the evil spirits
She gets back to the cabin, beaten, bruised, and screaming bloody murder. Ash tries to calm her down and agrees to drive her back into town, but quelle surprise, the bridge has been demolished. Cheryl knows this means that they are now trapped with a literal demonic entity, leaving Team Michigan U pretty fucked.
With no other option, they go back to the cabin, Ash plays more of the tape and finds out the only way to kill the entity is to horribly dismember the host. Linda and Shelly play with a deck of cards, Cheryl start to call out the cards correctly, one by one, her voice growing more and more distorted and she starts to levitate, just in case you had any doubts, these dead aren’t Good, nor are they neutral, their evil dead baby and they are pissed, in a voice that never fails to shovel ice cubes into my paints, “Why have you disturbed our sleep; awakened us from our ancient slumber?
You will die! Like the others before you, one by one, we will take you.” And then stabs Linda in her ankle with a freaking pencil, in the most gut-churningly visceral effects put to film, tosses Ash aside like a rag doll and gets slammed into the cellar by Scott, who locks her inside. Things do not go well from here for team Michigan U. The group start to fall to pieces with Scott in favour of just peacing out; it’s all a bit much for Shelly, who goes for a lie down, but what’s that at the window? Surprise Motherfucker! There is a demon out there who wants to bring her over to team Deadite.
Newly gross and corpsified she tries to take chunks out of Scott with a dirty grate dagger that the archaeologist had stashed, Scott grapples with her and she ends up head first in the fire then stabs her in the back with the dagger, she kicks and it mocks Ash for pulling her from the flames, but Scott has a big axe, and well… when all you have is a hammer.
Scott has had it with these monkey-fighting Deadites in this Monday-to-Friday cabin and gets the hell out of dodge, but it looks like the trees aren’t what you would call ‘preferential offenders’ and he comes back bloody and traumatised and dies in Ash’s arms, warning that the trees will not let them escape.
Meanwhile, Linda is host to a demon, and she attacks Ash, who didn’t go to all the trouble of getting this kick ass knife for no reason and stabs her with it. Ash can’t bring himself to cut her into bits, though, so he plants her instead, and one reanimation and swift shovel decapitation later, Ash runs back to the cabin.
Inside the cabin, we find that Cheryl has plans that don’t involve being locked in a mouldy old cellar. She attacks Ash and tests his shotgun; it works, and he blows her jaw off. Ash is in full lockdown mode and starts to barricade the door. While he is doing this, Scott resurrects and starts to attack him.
As they struggle, they knock the creepy ass book on the floor, close to the fireplace. The pair continue to fight until Ash knocks Deadite Scott down momentarily, but no rest for the awesome as Deadite-Cheryl Kool-Aids throws the barricade, knocking Ash to the floor.
Team Deadite have the chin on the floor, and he hooks the Naturom Demonto, throwing it into the flames, the dead freeze and collapse, decomposing in a gloriously disgusting stop motion sequence that traumatised the hell out of me when I saw it for the first time.
Ash makes it to dawn, and as he is limping away from the cabin, an unseen demon rushes up behind him for a final scare.
Evil Dead 2013
We open on a lone girl, desperately running through the woods, her breath ragged, she is apprehended by a pair of sinister hillbillies.
Things don’t get any better for her as she comes around in a dingy cellar with a bag over her head while an old crone recites incantations from a spooky, evil-looking book. I mean, who hasn’t been there? Am I right?
The girl starts to plead for her life, and her father steps forward. She begs him for help, but Daddy isn’t playing.
We find out that the girl, while possessed, killed her mother. The demonic spirit takes over in the single best ‘Boo, I’m possessed!’ takes I have seen in a long time.
Daddy dearest immolates her, and just to be sure, blows her head apart like a rotten cantaloupe.
Three years later… We meet David and Natalie, who arrive at an isolated cabin with their very good boy ‘Grandpa’, the pair are here for Mia, David’s estranged younger sister.
Mia, who is introduced sitting on the hood of a sweet 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale, has decided to kick her Heroin habit and has come to the middle of nowhere to do it. Not a bad plan. Also, with team detox are Mia’s friends: Olivia, a nurse and therefore very useful, and Eric, a schoolteacher and as much use as a bottle of Nightall at a rave.
Withdrawal hits Mia hard; she starts to freak out about an overwhelming stench of rotting meat. The others don’t notice the smell, so they just put it down to her drug-addled brain messing with her. Until David finds the fruit cellar and finds it to be absolutely stuffed with kitty corpses, a dirty grate big shot gun and a spooky old book. Eric, being one of the biggest bell ends in modern horror, not only cuts the barbed wire around the book, but also ignores the warnings – written in fucking blood – and then starts to read from it.
Awakening the evil in the woods. Prick. Mia, in full-on withdrawal, starts to see visions of a demonic version of herself in the woods and starts to beg the group to leave. Thinking that they are being good friends, they say no and tell her to sweat it out. Mia, sick of this shit, just steals Eric’s car and crashes into a pond when she swerves to avoid a gross demonic doppelganger.
She is chased through the forest by the unseen malicious force deeper into the woods. Mia trips and is bound by bramble vines while Evil-Mia vomits up a vine that enters her body, possessing her.
David looks for his dog and can’t find him, searching around he finds that Grandpa is now in doggie heaven, beaten to death with a hammer. He goes to confront Mia, who is in the shower. He sees that she is showering in boiling hot water, cooking herself alive, and loads her into the car to drive her to the hospital, but a rainstorm has washed the road out.
Back to the cabin with them, then. Mia, full on possessed now, fires the shotgun at David, tells them that they are all going to die tonight and pins Olivia to the ground, vomiting about a swimming pool’s worth of red gunk over her before Eric manages to lock her in the cellar.
Later in the evening, Eric finds Olivia busy on a crafting project in the shower, just cutting her face to bits, when he tries to stop her, she starts to viciously attack him with a hypodermic needle.
It’s a truly tense and claustrophobic scene, and the visceral thumps of Eric bludgeoning her to death are haunting. Meanwhile, Mia gets Natalie into the cellar and bites a chunk out of her before slicing her own tongue with a box cutter and forcing herself onto Natalie. David comes to the rescue and shoves Mia back into the cellar.
Exposition time! Eric (prick) says that the scary-obviously-cursed book he had been reading from speaks of a “Taker of Souls” who has to collect five souls, like screaming little Pokémon, which will give birth to the Abomination. While the world’s worst teacher is giving us demonology 101 Natalie’s arm becomes possessed and she has to cut it off with a freaking electric carving knife.
Eric says that Mia must be “Purified’ (and it’s nice to see the Spanish Inquisition’s PR team still getting work.) by live burial, dismemberment or, purification classic, burning her alive. As they are talking, Natalie, fresh with a raging case of being possessed, attacks the pair of them with a nail gun. David has had it and blasts her other arm off, and Natalie returns to normal, in just enough time to bleed out.
With no better ideas presenting themselves, David starts to pour petrol around the cabin, but has a real ‘lightbulb’ moment and decides to bury her instead, digging a gave but when he goes into the cellar to get her, she brawls with him and kills Eric (still a prick, just a dead prick). David sedates and buries Mia, and in a real stroke of genius, uses a homemade defibrillator to revive her, but it doesn’t work.
David covers her over. He goes back into the cabin when he hears Mia behind him, alive. David makes a grab for the keys, but, Surprise motherfucker! Eric’s (prick) possessed corpse makes a grab for him, David locks Mia out to keep her safe and blasts the petrol can with the gun, killing them both in the blast and starting a festive fire.
David, however, makes five, and it starts to rain blood like something out of Revelations. Mia is attacked by ‘The Abomination’, who, in reality, just looks like a sickly demonic version of herself. Mia is out of new ideas, so she falls back on the classic material and severs ‘Demon-Mia’s legs with a chainsaw. It hits back, flipping David’s jeep over, pinning her left arm.
It’s a stressful, high-pressure situation, and she grabs a chainsaw, cutting off her left hand to free herself and cutting the Abomination’s head in two. The rain abates, and completely exhausted, Mia limps off in search of help, as we see the Naturom Demonto intact and closing itself.
Summery
On the whole, I’d say Evil Dead 2013 is a better movie, but I prefer Evil Dead 1981. It was dumb, and the production seemed to be under some kind of a pharaoh’s curse, but it had heart damnit! And some of the things that were done in ED81 because of budget restrictions actually made the film better. The plot of ED81 is basically the default layout when you choose to ‘Write a horror movie’ with your screenwriting software, but at the time, it wasn’t as hammy.
I saw ED81 when I was W-a-y too young, and I’m not going to lie, the bit where Deadite Linda is possessed and tries to stab Ash with those creepy dead eyes… yeah, I needed the light on for a while. The practical effects in ED81 were good not only despite the limited budget, but I honestly don’t think that even if it had a budget of millions, they could have made it look any better.
The effects in ED2013 are stomach churning, but that’s part of the problem; anybody can fill a Super Soaker with fake blood and go to town, but I winced far harder at scenes from the original than I did at the more grounded 2013 version. It looked slicker, yes, but not better.
The 2013 version achieves the impossible; it pays credit to the original with a few nudges and winks, it actually makes the formula make sense, there is a bloody good reason for them to be so isolated, Mia is out there to get clean, rather than just ‘we’re here so a horror movie can happen’.
The Evil Dead is one of the best-made horror films I have seen, and the original is one of the formative movies I remember from my childhood, thinking, ‘This is how a film should be!’
I’m really, really looking forward to Evil Dead Rise in April, although there is no way it will live up to the expectations of its fan base (among whom I proudly count myself), but even a bad Evil Dead is better than a good Creepy-smiling-demon movie.
Peace, Love, Corn syrup
-RBD
