The Evil Dead doesn’t have much of a plot. Compared to something really plot-heavy like Moneyball or The Avengers (the latter being absolutely stuffed wall-to-wall with twists and betrayals and drama), The Evil Dead doesn’t really seem like it has much going on.
What happens during the movie’s hour-and-a-half runtime?
Five college students travel to a cabin out in the woods. They intend to stay there while on vacation. They discover a cursed book, accidentally recite an incantation, and summon a few demonic spirits. These spirits attack them, posses them. They fight back. Most of them die. The End.
That’s really it. Of course, there’s some other stuff scattered around the film. At one point, they try to start a car so that they can drive back to town, but that doesn’t work out. A few of the characters are dating, so there’s a little drama there. But the vast majority of the movie is just violence and gore and tension as these twenty-somethings fight a losing battle against a number of hateful demons. If you don’t believe me, here’s a chunk of the movie’s plot summary from Wikipedia: “Shelly becomes a Deadite (possessed) and scratches Scott's face. Scott throws her into the fireplace, briefly burning Shelly's face. As she attacks him again, Scott bisects part of her wrist with a knife and then she bites off her own mangled hand. Scott stabs her in the back with a Sumerian dagger, apparently killing her. When she reanimates, Scott dismembers her with an axe and buries the remains. […] When Ash checks on Linda, he is horrified to find that she has become possessed. She attacks him, but he stabs her with a Sumerian dagger. Unwilling to dismember her, he buries her instead. She revives and attacks him, forcing him to decapitate her with a shovel.” I think you get the point.
So if this movie isn’t plot-drive… What is it? It certainly isn’t character-driven. While the protagonist Ash Williams is an icon of the horror genre, that has less to do with his portrayal in this movie and more to do with the subsequent films. Besides Ash, most of the characters are shallow and built on clichés. They also all want the same basic thing: they just want to survive. There aren’t any tangled motivations, alliances, or crisscrossing desires. Everything about the characters points outward. So, again, what is this movie doing?
The Evil Dead is often categorized into the genre ‘splatter’, which hints to one of the movie’s main draws: it constantly tries to shock and horrify you with outrageous amounts of blood and gore. Limbs are torn off, skin melts away, and faces decompose into leather. The visual spectacle of it all is likely why you and most Evil Dead fans paid for a ticket (or pulled it up on Netflix). The over-the-top, macabre, visceral explorations of the human anatomy ignite a simultaneous guttural revulsion and fascination within the viewer. And it’s all done with practical effects, so the ungodly sights occurring in that isolated cabin are strangely mesmerizing (although I did a fair amount of looking away).
It’s also just cool. Similar to the cult classic The Thing, the special effects used in The Evil Dead are both impressive and hokey. They bring out your inner sci-fi/horror film nerd.
The Evil Dead’s lack of plot makes it a good example of a movie that wasn’t really anything until it was committed to film. While the ‘book of the dead’ is a cool aspect of the fiction and some of the more memorable scares were certainly conceived with the script, this movie is memorable for what director Sam Raimi was able to with his camera and some fake body parts.
None of this is an insult to The Evil Dead, which I think is a great movie. I just want to use it to point out how far interesting, creative visuals can take a movie. In the case of Sam Raimi’s breakout hit, direction took it from 0 to 100.