Tagline: The ültimate experience in grueling terror.
The Evil Dead movie storyline. In the fall of 1979, Sam Raimi and his merry band headed into the woods of rural Tennessee to make a movie. They emerged with a roller coaster of a film packed with shocks, gore, and wild humor, a film that remains a benchmark for the genre.
Ash (cult favorite Bruce Campbell) and four friends arrive at a backwoods cabin for a vacation, where they find a tape recorder containing incantations from an ancient book of the dead. When they play the tape, evil forces are unleashed, and one by one the friends are possessed. Wouldn’t you know it, the only way to kill a “deadite” is by total bodily dismemberment, and soon the blood starts to fly.
Raimi injects tremendous energy into this simple plot, using the claustrophobic set, disorienting camera angles, and even the graininess of the film stock itself to create an atmosphere of dread, punctuated by a relentless series of jump-out-of-your-seat shocks.
The Evil Dead lacks the more highly developed sense of the absurd that distinguish later entries in the series–Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness–but it is still much more than a gore movie. It marks the appearance of one of the most original and visually exciting directors of his generation, and it stands as a monument to the triumph of imagination over budget.
The Evil Dead is a 1981 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Sam Raimi and executive produced by Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who also stars alongside Ellen Sandweiss and Betsy Baker. The film focuses on five college students vacationing in an isolated cabin in a remote wooded area. After they find an audiotape that releases a legion of demons and spirits, members of the group suffer from demonic possession, leading to increasingly gory mayhem.
Raimi and the cast produced the short film Within the Woods as a “prototype” to build the interest of potential investors, which secured Raimi US$90,000 to produce The Evil Dead. The film was shot on location in a remote cabin located in Morristown, Tennessee, in a difficult filming process that proved extremely uncomfortable for the majority of the cast and crew.
Tne Evil Dead (1983)
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly, Philip A. Gillis, Dorothy Tapert, Cheryl Guttridge, Barbara Carey, David Horton, Wendall Thomas
Screenplay by: Sam Raimi
Cinematography by: Tim Philo
Film Editing by: Edna Ruth Paul
Art Department: Steve Frankel
Makeup Department: Tom Sullivan, Bruce Campbell
Music by: Joseph LoDuca
MPAA Rating: NC-17 for substantial graphic horror violence and gore.
Distributed by: New Line Cinema
Release Date: October 15, 1981
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