Nato And Remy’s Last Stand: Why Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead Bitch-Slapped Horror

Remy: With gasps and shudders and clenched fists curled up tight in the pockets of my hoody, the Evil Dead remake reminded me in one blinding flash why I adore the horror genre. It’s down right scary, unsettling, relentless, and brutal. It’s also engaging, interesting, incredibly well shot, and perfectly executed (I’ll take “poor word play” for 100, Alex). Alvarez’s film was a painstakingly crafted love letter to the original and fans of the original, and it also did something most people might have missed if they left early: it bridged the original series with the new series in an attempt to combine them both further down the road. How f*cking awesome is that? So now, for your reading pleasure, Matt and I will discuss some of the things that really stood out to us regarding this awesome reboot. Awesome and reboot are two words we never use next to each other, so you should be aware how big a moment this is for horror.

Nato: Wow, no mentions of phallic objects or being a masked murderer, I’m not really sure what to say now – except I agree with Remy 100% of the way. Evil Dead beat me senseless with scares, thrills, excitement, and gore, all the while giving an emphatic middle finger to the entire mainstream horror genre. Yeah, that’s about right.

With that said, join Remy and I as we dissect Fede Alvarez’s film and list a few of the many reasons why this remake/reboot may have just changed the current horror game.

HUZZAH, let us all rejoice for a moment over Evil Dead‘s jaw-dropping practical effects.

Make no mistakes about it, bad CGI has become the bane of horror. Animated blood splashing from animated creatures makes me feel like I am watching a rated R Pixar movie, but the Evil Dead remake was like “f**k that noise, we want all our effects to be practical.” Yes, you read that correctly. Outside of the “burning” scene at the start, and the “vine slug”, all the effects in this movie were done with fake blood and prosthetics. While that may not sound too impressive, to see the movie in action proves otherwise. It is visceral, realistic, and in your face. It even left me with a few moments where I was wondering how they did it – flabbergasted and amazed.

The face slicing scene, for example. How the hell was I seeing her teeth from inside her cheek? Sssh, don’t tell me, it was pure magic. But the practical effects alone took the movie from awesome to, in my opinion, the new horror benchmark all other horror films (and their effects) will be measured against.

I need to say something about this because it has been bothering me. Any person who tells you Evil Dead is “torture porn” must not have any solid idea what the genre means. “Torture porn”, as whack as that term is, is based and steeped in reality. People bound or gagged and being tortured by another person.

Certain people hate films like that because they are vile and gross at times, but Evil Dead is NOT that. It is a group of people who slowly get possessed, one by one, by a demon, and that demon will do anything it can to kill anyone around it, including, and especially, the host. There is NO basis of reality here, and at no point is anyone being tortured. Just because people are slicing off their faces and getting nail guns to the eye does not make it torture porn. It is simply a very violent, gritty, grimy, visceral horror film. All they did was remove the campiness of the original, and now people call it torture porn. Wrong. Those are just people who are having trouble coping with the violence on screen, so they are name-calling at the film to take the emphasis off the fact that their tender minds could not handle it.