At first glance, I thought that Evil Dead was going to be an amateur horror/exploitation film, like the kind The Cinema Snob warns about week after week. But as the film went on, I kept noticing disparities. Sure, the camera moves are very amateurish (there were a few shots when I could almost hear Sam Raimi mimicking airplane noises as he moved through the forest) and there are countless gaffes in continuity, but the visuals, audio and editing are all crystal clear. The makeup and special effects are clearly no-budget, but the care that went into them is staggering. The acting isn’t exactly Oscar material, but it’s not completely devoid of talent, either. The characters all have their stupid moments and I didn’t find any of them to be particularly memorable except for Ash, but none of them are one-dimensional stereotypes or horny jerks just asking to be killed off (besides, horror stories are built on stupid decisions).

Then at some early point — roughly when the poster for The Hills Have Eyes appeared — it finally hit me: Raimi and company knew exactly what movie they were making. It’s like Raimi and some of his friends saw a few too many zombie B-movies and said “Let’s make one of our own!” They wouldn’t have been the first and they sure weren’t the last, but this movie is unique in that it shows a lot of clear talent hiding under the masquerade of shlock.

For example, I noticed that Raimi uses swinging pendulums as a subtle motif. The impartial motion and resulting rhythmic noise are very effective psychologically. The effect is doubled when the pendulum stops of its own volition. Very clever. The movie also features several inventive applications of fake blood, not to mention such novel set pieces as the rape by plant life. All of this in addition to the jump scares, false alarms and other such horror movie standards.

Then we have the zombies. Let’s be honest here: One of the big reasons why zombies are so ubiquitous in pop culture is because they’re easy to do. Anyone can make a zombie quickly and do it on a budget, as proven by countless amateur horror movies such as this one. Indeed, the makeup jobs on these zombies look totally cheap, but the stand-in body parts are surprisingly detailed. They look hokey to quite a degree, yet they work.

Moreover, these zombies are totally unique in their application. In fact, they’re less like the grunting, shuffling, primal Romero creations and more Linda Blair from The Exorcist. These zombies are tricky, potty-mouthed fuckers and that adds a whole new layer of emotional torment on top of the “your best friends have turned into demons and you have to kill them” scenario.

The movie grew on me increasingly as it went on, but it didn’t really floor me until the third act. The whole movie had been pretty crazy by that point, but after Linda gets killed off, the movie quickly goes from craziness to bugfuck insanity. This is where I kept flashing back to Drag Me to Hell while marveling at the madness that begot that movie. The effects and slight of hand were omnipresent. The use of blood was more disturbing than ever. The imagery was frightening. I kept going through possibilities in my head: Has he died and gone to hell? Is this what turning into a Deadite is like? Is the house somehow possessed?

All of this culminates into the final disintegration effect, which was worth the price of admission all its own. Never had I ever expected to see such an intricate and lengthy stop-motion effect in a no-budget independent feature. The effects were extraordinary, the use of bodily fluids was sufficiently disgusting and the imagery was terrifying. I know I’ve been saying all of that about the entire movie, but that climactic scene was a tremendous payoff.

The Evil Dead is a fascinating movie. It’s campy as all heck and there are countless flaws in the story and presentation, but so much of what makes this movie work is in the fact that it’s not a professionally made film. The cheese factor adds to its self-awareness and subtle parody of those films that inspired it. It falls way short of mainstream standards but excels in every possible way as a B-movie. The movie is better made than it had any right to be and its easy to see how this movie launched Sam Raimi’s career. Put simply, Evil Dead is arguably the best shlock out there.