Sin #31: Cabin Fever

You know the drill. A group of teenagers go venturing into the woods and find a creepy and terrifying force against them; it might be a serial killer, a strange disease or even demons from hell. Most of these movies are terribly lame and become mere excuses for showing horrible acts of violence or gratuitous nudity and sex.

There is, however, a movie that is genuinely creepy and startlingly original.

It’s Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead”, which might be the mother of the “cabin in the woods” subgenre. In a remarkable debut, Raimi takes a tiny budget and creates sequences that are absurd, scary and simply a lot of fun. Not only did it rejuvenate the horror genre but it also turned Bruce Campbell into a star (Ash is now an iconic hero). The success of the movie spawned an equally inventive sequel which was a little bit less “serious” (using quotations since the first one had a sequence where a woman gets raped by a tree). There was a third installment that also featured Ash but was tonally different from the previous pictures (it was more action adventure with a splash of comedy and less successful as a whole).

So, what’s “The Evil Dead” about?

In the first adventure, some friends go to a cabin in the woods for a vacation. In the abandoned shack they find a weird book that happens to be the Necronomicon or book of the dead. After reading a few passages they summon a series of demons which possesses each one in the group. Only Ash survives (except for an open ending that suggests that Ash might also be possessed).

In the second installment the daughter of the man who owned the cabin goes for a visit and once again the demons are summoned. It appears that Ash might be in trouble since the demons like messing with him (leading to a hilarious sequence where he cuts his hand, and the hand makes fun of him). In the original movie there was no apparent way to end the mayhem, while in the second one it appears that one can vanish the evil to another dimension leading to the events of “Army of Darkness”.

Raimi is a talented and eclectic director that has tackled several genres with various degrees of success (his Spiderman films are hit-and-miss, although his best movie remains the dark and engrossing “A Simple Plan” about a group of men who find a bag full of money after a plane crash). Last year he tried to recreate a little bit of the Evil Dead spirit with “Drag Me to Hell”, which is a goofy and funny horror/comedy.

But no spirit can reclaim the power of the Evil Dead movies; they’re just too much darn fun.