Cult Corner: ‘The Evil Dead’ Just Won’t Die

When we talk about streaming culture, we’re usually enthusing about what’s new, but one of the best things about streaming is how it’s made old and obscure cult hits available to a new generation. Presenting Cult Corner: your weekly look into hidden gems and long-lost curiosities that you can find on streaming.

Technically speaking, you could argue that Sam Raimi‘s The Evil Dead has transcended cult status and become an important part of mainstream entertainment history. It’s given birth to a popular film trilogy, a lauded remake, and Starz is producing a pulpy television spin-off, Ash vs. Evil Dead, that will debut later this year. However, we’re including it in Cult Corner because it carries all the hallmarks of a true cult classic. It was filmed under difficult conditions on a shoestring budget, wasn’t immediately popular stateside, and only found its audience through word-of-mouth.

The Evil Dead is kind of your classic American horror flick. A group of Midwestern college kids spend a night in a creepy cabin in the woods. They accidentally awake an evil force which begins to possess them one-by-one. In the end, only one of the kids, the reluctant hero Ash (Bruce Campbell) survives. Of course, we know that he’ll live from the very beginning. How? Because he breaks the fourth wall to let us know he’s special.

The film repeatedly skirts this line between trying to be a sincere slasher and a tongue-in-cheek take on the genre. It never quite gets to the satirical levels of modern flicks like Cabin in the Woods, but it’s clear that Raimi is beginning to explore this tone.

I’m ashamed to admit that I only saw The Evil Dead this past year. For a long time, I was so staunchly anti-horror, that I steered away from this classic slasher thriller. The upshot of this is that I’ve already seen Cabin in the Woods and I’ve grown up in a post-Scream horror world. So, I’m used to films that poke fun at the horror genre and clichés don’t frighten me. The original Evil Dead is so entrenched in a deep American horror tradition that it was sometimes difficult for me to take the scary stuff seriously. I mean…

And yet, the film might be one of the first horror films of its time to illustrate a sense of self-awareness. By embracing this attitude, Evil Dead evolved into one of the most fun, most campy, and most influential horror franchises ever. So, watching the first one in 2015 is as much as a delight as it is a curiosity.

The film doesn’t realize it, but it’s straddling two traditions. There’s the campy, self-aware style that’s in vogue now, and the gothic tradition that uses horror as an allegory for psychological issues. In this way, The Evil Dead can be seen as an exploration for how to overcome grief. Ash can only fight the Sumerian spirits back when he finally accepts that his girlfriend and sister really are gone. He wants to save them, but they’ve already been claimed by the titular evil dead. In life, we often struggle to let people and memories go, but in order to move forward, we’ve got to accept that the past is past, and our future is worth fighting for. [Watch The Evil Dead]

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[Gifs: Renaissance Pictures]