The Evil Dead

This early work by a young Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell was filmed inventively on a shoe-string budget and put both of them on the map for cult horror fans. I generally don't consider myself a fan of the genre outside the occasional zombie or science fiction-themed movie, but I liked some of the more mainstream work by both enough to check it out. The film suffers a bit from things like the poor acting by the cast of unknowns, but it's genuinely spooky in places and the inventiveness of the effects combined with the increasingly manic tone made it a very entertaining use of 80 minutes.

If you don't know, Ash Williams is a college student I guess who goes into the woods to stay in a cabin with his his friend, their girlfriends, and his sister. In the cabin they find a strange book and a tape recorder of a man speaking about his findings on it, which unfortunately awakens some dark spirits that are able to animate the woods themselves, possess people, and chase them around in POV shots that never let us know what they're actually running from. The actual logic of what causes the book to take over people is a little vague, since they seem to be able to affect anyone who's been injured by them, but are content to merely horrify a beaten-up Ash the entire time.

As the movie goes on, all of Ash's friends turn into these monsters who torment and attack him, and you can see his sanity slowly drip away as he has to fight off his former loved ones and hack them to pieces to prevent them from continually returning. As soon as things go bad they get pretty gruesome, and that rarely lets up as he is continually drenched in blood and supernatural gore by the monsters. There's a scene near the end where Ash is pacing around with a shotgun they found, and the camera is used pretty inventively to convey how his world has been completely torn apart by an unbelievable, nightmarish evening. It's one of the more brilliant scenes ever done with just a camera and one guy, and it leads to the final splatter-fest, which would have been more effective without the choppy stop-motion animation but still ended up working. The sequels ended up skewing more towards humor than horror, but The Evil Dead is the beginning of a unique and entertaining series to be sure.