My teenage years coincided nicely with the introduction of home video players in the UK and, in those heady days of the early 1980s - before the "video nasties" campaigns run by the newspapers - pretty much anything was available to anyone, no questions asked. The joy of that, for me, was that I spent a lot of my formative years watching stuff that I really shouldn't have been allowed to see and I worked my way through a lot of very poor-quality Italian zombie movies as well as the occasional gem from Lucio Fulci although, try as I might, I could never quite get the hang of Dario Argento. That was all a bit too... overwrought for me!
Anyway, one day in 1981 or 1982, I rented a copy of The Evil Dead from the local video store. As I recall, this was prior to the introduction of laws requiring the classification of video cassettes along the same lines as cinema films, so there was no problem with a fifteen or sixteen year old Smithers renting out a movie like that. I skived off school one bright and sunny (and I can't emphasize the bright and sunny bit enough) afternoon and settled down to watch it.
It's no exaggeration, really, to say that The Evil Dead terrified me. No film since - with the possible exceptions of The Blair Witch Project and some parts of Paranormal Activity - have even come close to scaring me as badly. I was in the house on my own that bright and sunny (did I mention that?) afternoon and was convinced that I heard noises upstairs and so went to investigate - with a knife from the kitchen, I was that scared.
I was reminded of that today as I watched Fede Alvarez's remake Evil Dead. It was a dull and rainy afternoon and, whilst not quite skiving, I was having a day off work to recover from a bit of an infection. I was interested to see what it was like and how much to stood up to my memories of the original - which I've never actually been able to rewatch!
My overwhelming impression was of being underwhelmed. The whole thing seemed pointless: it didn't add anything to the original and, as far as I could tell, actually subtracted from it. Whereas Raimi's original had wit, imagination and vision, Alvarez's remake (reimagining? reinterpretation?) lacked any of those things. It just seemed to have been remade because now it's possible to do things in special effects that it wasn't possible to do thirty years ago.
Is Evil Dead and scarier or effective than The Evil Dead? Or, to ask that question another way, is The Evil Dead any less scary for having been made thirty years ago? Do viewers look at it now and think to themselves that it's so antiquated and the effects so poor that it prevents them being involved?
A few years ago, I had to study Terence Fisher's 1958 Dracula, starring Christopher Lee. Do audiences now look at The Evil Dead in the same way I looked at Dracula? As a museum piece - amusing and interesting but in no way as scary as contemporary audiences believed it to be? Is that why it was remade?
Or was it remade, as I cynically suspect, because this was the most efficient way to get a whole new bunch of cinema-goers to part with their money. No need to invest in any creativity, no need to think of anything new - just repeat something that's worked in the past.
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