Quentin Tarantino explains his love for ‘The Evil Dead’
The Evil Dead is widely considered one of the greatest horror films of all time and is certainly one of the biggest success stories of a film with a paltry budget making an impressive financial return. The 1981 Sam Raimi-directed movie has drawn acclaim from across the globe and also caught the eye of a young horror-fanatic Quentin Tarantino.
In a conversation with fellow horror-lover Eli Roth, Tarantino remembered the first time he saw Raimi’s film. “I’m sure I saw it the day it was released. I’m sure I saw it that Friday,” he said. “I was waiting for it because I read the Fangoria cover that had Ash with the chainsaw on it and Stephen King [saying] ‘I have just seen the scariest movie of this decade’ or whatever.”
There was much media frenzy surrounding the horror film, particularly in the famous horror and cult film magazine. Tarantino continued, “There would be, you know, movies like The House That Dripped Blood that would get coverage in Fangoria, but they wouldn’t go apeshit. This they went apeshit over. I read an interview with Raimi and Tapert before I even saw the movie.”
If Tarantino’s love and enthusiasm for the first Evil Dead film weren’t strong enough, then his admiration of the 1987 sequel certainly is. The film is also considered a re-make of sort of the original, and for Tarantino, it serves as one of “the best movies” made in his lifetime.
He noted, “The crazy way they shot it and all this stuff we had never seen before. If you’re a movie-mad guy in your early twenties and you see Evil Dead 2, and you see that shooting style, it’s like, what’s the point of ever shooting any movie not like that? OK, a new shooting style has been developed, and everything else looks old-fashioned by comparison. Every single thing just seems old-fashioned and dated unless you’re doing that.”
It wasn’t just the shooting style that made Evil Dead so interesting for Tarantino, though; it was also the fact that it still looked relatively “cheap”, so it required a certain level of “intelligence” to look beyond that. “There was something about Evil Dead that made it particularly cool. It was that you had to get it,” Tarantino argued. “Not everyone could get it”.
“It was cheap, you had to not just be able to look beyond that, but you had to embrace it,” he added. “And also it is scary, but there is a weird sense of humour that, if you’re not in line with it, you’re going to think, ‘Oh, that’s just a piece of junk’. So you had to get Evil Dead 2. If you were smart enough to get it, ‘Oh, it’s the greatest thing ever.’”
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