The Evil Dead (1983)
Directed by Sam Raimi
In 1979, a group of college students find a Sumerian Book of the Dead in an old wilderness cabin they've rented for a weekend getaway.
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4 films that influenced The Evil Dead
What critics say influenced The Evil Dead
The filmmakers admit to deriving a large degree of inspiration from Tobe Hooper's 1974 ripsnorter, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre .
Indeed, much like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from 1974, one of the few American horror movies that is genuinely greater in its artistry and bleaker in its brutality, the most important point about The Evil Dead is that its superficially dubious screenplay matters nothing at all, compared to the extraordinary filmmaking prowess on display: even if we allow that The Evil Dead is poorly-written (and I'm not so sure that's the case), it works because of Raimi's incredibly bright directing, which still doesn't feel stale after three decades of copycats have sucked all the freshness out of cinematic tricks that were, in 1981, hugely radical.
It ranks more closely with the 1970s classics The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween than it does with the sillier strain of more modern horror films.
"The Evil Dead", is a first film that easily surpasses other notorious horror debuts such " The Last House on the Left " or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre".
Even "Psycho" and "Halloween" didn't do it for me.
Yes, it's a great little horror indie that took a little inspiration from The Exorcist, but marked its own territory while dazzling the genre fans, spawning a great sequel, and introducing the world to one Bruce Campbell.
Instead, they play mind games on Ash, and in this, the best part of a very good movie, The Evil Dead becomes the closest thing English-language cinema has produced to the nuttier, supernatural strains of Italian horror, though it's unlikely that Raimi was thinking in these terms: the films his debut most resembles, Lucio Fulci's Hell Trilogy beginning with City of the Living Dead , weren't available in the U.S. until after The Evil Dead has finished shooting.
The film is intelligent, scary, and funny, never underestimating or belittling its audience and providing what is possibly the most influential American independent since George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
It's equal parts Three Stooges and Night of the Living Dead .