To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Next up, the 2013 remake of Evil Dead…
Before you jump on the comment bandwagon, today’s Countdown to Halloween is not a bashing of remakes. As many across the Internet landscape have pointed out, there is a lot of good that can come from telling an established story from a different perspective – John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Croenberg’s The Fly are the two examples that get brought up the most. The problem with remakes is not that they exist, it’s that they’re often lazy, unimaginative and boring.
But this one was produced by the original creators – so surely it can’t be that bad right?
Before we get into that, let’s address one of the other problems with remakes: the art of one-uping the original.
Take for example the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, to date possibly the worst modern remake to be produced by the Hollywood system. It’s a movie that takes scenes and moments from the original and then attempts to do them again, but more bombastic. Be it the simple act of Freddy dragging his claws across the wall to create bigger sparks that Robert Englund did or throwing Tina’s replacement around the room in in a huge CGI blood fest, the remake feels the need to try and one-up Wes Craven’s iconic slasher at every turn like a petty and jealous ex-lover. What’s frustrating about this is when a remake retells an iconic moment but does it without realising why the original did it in the first place.
Take for example the scene in which Freddy comes out of the wall while Nancy is sleeping. In the original movie, the purpose of the scene is to show that Krueger can be stopped by the power of belief, as noted that once Nancy places the cross back up on the wall, he can no longer get to her and instead goes after Tina. In the remake, it’s a scene of CGI garbage that is used simply to attempt a jump scare. Director Samuel Bayer clearly saw that scene in the original movie, felt like it should be in his version but didn’t understand why Craven did it the way he did.
This, is the central problem of Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead.
It’s a movie that often replicates scenes from the original movie but takes them to the next level in a game of one-up manship but doesn’t always work. The tree rape scene for example (which Sam Raimi regrets having in his own movie) is played up to be more horrific, violent and uncomfortable and yet doesn’t quite have the impact of the 1981 version. The scene in which one of the female cast members cuts off her arm is played up as a Saw or Hostel type gorenography bloodbath, unlike the scene it’s remaking (one of the more iconic scenes of Evil Dead 2) which is basically there to be a wacky Three Stooges-esque prat-falling stunt show with a Farewell to Arms joke told as the punchline. It’s scenes like this that make you question whether Fede Alverez, like Samuel Bayer, understood the movie he was remaking in the first place or whether he just wanted to make a movie that “improved” the original.
But a movie should be judged on its own merits and not constantly compared to the film it’s re-doing. And in that case, Fede Alverez’s Evil Dead is an… okay movie. An okay movie with some infuriating character moments.
Certain elements of the movie work really well and the reason for the teenagers to go to the cabin in the woods is one of the more original and inspired choices to made in this genre. Rather than going down the obvious and cliched “party” route, our teenage protagonists are taking their friend out into the middle of nowhere to help her battler her drug addiction, figuring she’ll get cleaner easier if she can’t get to her habit. The only problem with this story device however is that it never amounts to anything more than simply being a mcguffin. It’s used as a tool to get them to Point A, but it never serves as a catalyst for them move forward to Point B or C. Instead, that is saved for what is probably the movie’s biggest flaw.
As an audience, we should be able to get behind our protagonists and want to see them survive. We should never see them as nothing more than cannon fodder as that way we can’t engage with them enough for their deaths to have an impact. A simple of way of ensuring this is to not make them incompetent fools, which is what Evil Dead does.
As a final comparison to the original movie, the Deadite spirits were unleashed upon our unsuspecting heroes through a chance accident. Ash innocently plays the recorded findings which reads aloud from the Necronomicon that then unleashes their doom – it was curiosity that killed the cat. The remake however sees one of the teenagers find the book (which is wrapped in barbwire) and then, against its explicit instructions, reads aloud from it as well as write down the scripture which then releases the evil spirits – it’s idiocy that killed the idiot. Every bad thing that happens to the “heroes” of Evil Dead is of their own doing which makes it incredibly difficult to want them to make it through the night when they have done nothing to deserve survival.
Fede Alverez’s Evil Dead is far from being the worst remake ever committed to cinema and, on its own two feet away from its predecessor, is a fairly decent little horror romp. It is incredibly flawed and horribly average at times, but there is a certain amount to enjoy about it – especially if you’re a blood hound who likes their movies dripping in claret. It pails in comparison to the original because it was trying to be a bigger version of it rather than being its own movie – a pitfall most horror remakes fall into.
A better example of a remake of The Evil Dead is Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods – which we’ll get to tomorrow…
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published October 13, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
