THE EVIL DEAD ESSAY
Part II: Evil Dead 2 "Dead by Dawn"

This film was more of a success than the first, enjoying a major theatrical release, though its success was minor compared to that of the other major films of that year. By this time, such horror series as "Friday the 13th" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" had become part of pop culture, and Raimi had a clearer target to shoot at, though he was friends with "Elm Street" creator Wes Craven. The later films, made by other directors, deviated from Craven's original plans, and Raimi found them ripe for the mocking. "Evil Dead 2" begins with a tiny remake of the original film. Instead of a bunch of friends, there is only Ash and his girlfriend, Linda.

Ash replays the tape and calls the Evil Camera which kills Linda, who Ash must then fight and beheads. After this, Ash buries her and plants a large wooden cross over the grave, the only real Catholic symbolism in the entire series (Ash buried Linda the same way in the previous film and will bury his evil twin in the same manner in "Army of Darkness"). For the record, this cross never prevents the buried from returning as Deadites. Whether Raimi was making a point about religion, consciously or unconsciously, or simply using a prop will probably never be known for certain. Returning from the previous film (beside Ash and Linda) are the Evil Camera, Linda's locket (which saves Ash from Deadite-hood later in the film), the bone knife (now a wicked-looking sharpened human spine), the Necronomicon, and the audio tape that resurrects the "Candarian demons."

The film truly begins when Ash is struck by the Evil Camera. As mentioned above, the Evil Camera pushes Ash in front of it, smashing through trees and spinning Ash around like he was strapped to a millstone until it finally slams him into a tree and drops him into a pool of mud. This hilarious sequence illustrates Raimi's intention to make it clear from the beginning that this film is going to be played at least partly for laughs. When he rises from the mud, Ash is now transformed into a frightening Deadite. With the coming of dawn, however, he is saved from this horrible suffering, and he passes out in the muck as the fog--and scary sounds--recede from the film. The film here follows the age-old archetype that with the coming of light, darkness is extinguished; just as Freddy and Jason only strike at night, in dreams or reality, Deadites can only attack during the dark hours. However, Raimi doesn't allow Ash very much time for peace--unconscious, poor Ash sleeps the entire day away, and the first thing that happens to him when he awakes is that the haunted cabin grows eyes and asks him to "Join us."

Terrified, Ash flees in his cream '73 Oldsmobile Delta 88 (one of Raimi's occasional references to the decade he grew up in) and flees to the bridge that leads to the cabin. This is a massive bridge, a metal and concrete construction that should have cost millions of dollars and, apparently, leads to a single old cabin in the woods. The professor who owned that cabin must have been a rich man. This massive bridge, to Ash's dismay, is ripped to pieces, and Ash cannot get across. The Evil Camera comes for him, and Ash flees in the car until he crashes into a tree and goes flying through the windshield, slamming into the tree. Here is a good place to talk about Ash's resilience. Rather than have a bunch of victims as he did in "The Evil Dead", Raimi chooses to use only Ash as the single major victim/hero in both of the sequels. Ash accordingly receives the equivalent beating of a dozen victims, usually to hilarious effect; the audience laughs as Ash gapes at yet another monster or suffers yet another wound or indignity (this is a good place to recall that Raimi is a Three Stooges fan). This accident only scratches the surface of the things Ash endures. Ash's reaction to the accident is typical of all such incidents; within seconds, he gets up and continues to flee from the Evil Camera, with no apparent side effects from being thrown through a window and bashed into a tree for the second time in twenty-four hours.

This is also a good place to discuss the classic horror film "clean-up" effect. Though his car is smashed into a tree, it appears at the end of the film and in "Army of Darkness", and its hood is fine. In horror films (and in many other films), these continuity errors are played for laughs. But Raimi takes it beyond the normal tongue-in-cheek use of the technique; characters are repeatedly doused with blood in this film, particularly Ash, who is, in one scene, struck with three geysers of blood.

After the blood stops flowing, Ash's shirt just looks wet, and it's dry in less than two scenes. This occurred in "The Evil Dead", too. Certainly, actor Bruce Campbell (Ash) didn't want to go around through an entire movie with a bloody, wet red shirt. Since this is a horror movie, and a particularly comic one at that, Raimi can get away with this. After the accident, Ash continues to flee from the Evil Camera and this is the section where he hides from it in the cabin. By jumping into the cellar, Ash dodges the Evil Camera, which looks around a minute for Ash, then flees backwards into the forest with a diminishing roar. This action completely takes away the menace of the Evil Camera, which doesn't recover its dignity until its vicious attack on Ash in the windmill in "Army of Darkness". After this, Ash falls asleep in the cabin and wakes to a strange dance by his dead girlfriend, who is already half-rotten. After what is nearly an erotic dance in a very obvious stop-animation sequence, Linda attacks Ash through the boarded-up window , pulling his head repeatedly into the boards as she laughs. Then, in a gruesome sequence, her head rolls off its body. This sudden switch from comedy to horror is common to lots of campy horror films; the Evil Dead films, and in particular this film, use this effect over and over.

The next scene is another fine example of a series of switches from comedy to horror. After the head rolls off, Ash wakes up in the chair he fell asleep in, screaming. Then, in the switch to comedy, he attempts to get out of his chair; as he screams and contorts his face in ways that would now be compared to Jim Carrey, the audience is at first disturbed, then laughs as it realizes he's really just "spazzing out." Then, Linda's head falls into Ash's lap. Screaming, he attempts to throw it away, but it bites his hand. Back to comedy--Ash bashes the head on different objects about the room, trying to get it to let go, as the head responds with cries of "Ow!" Ash finally gets the head loose by locking it in a vice, and we switch back to horror--even a little Biblical terror--as the Deadite Linda head tells Ash that her soul "suffers." Ash, in the first of the one-liners that will appear in this film and run rampant through "Army of Darkness", tells this already-dead, disembodied head, "You're going down!" Planning to use a chainsaw to chop up the head, Ash finds it missing, and switching back to comedy, a ridiculously fake-looking headless Linda runs in bearing the roaring chainsaw. Ash smites the thing simply back whacking the chainsaw and sending it back on the attacker, which saws itself down the middle. Then, Ash uses the chainsaw to chop up Linda's head in this whole sequence, Raimi more or less sticks to the generic campy horror film formula. The effects of this scene, however, are where Raimi again mocks the genre.

In most horror films, and even in the Evil Dead films, possession is a common occurrence--some human is possessed by an evil spirit that begins to attack other humans. But Raimi took a new twist on the old formula; instead of Ash getting possessed by a Deadite spirit (though he does becoming one twice, he escapes both times), Ash's hand becomes possessed after Linda's bite. To Ash's horror, his hand begins attempting to beat him up, and in a hilarious Stooges-like sequence Ash tries to scald his hand, which responds by repeatedly bashing plates over Ash's head and attempting to punch him, eventually managing to flip Ash completely over.

Bruce Campbell's acting skill must be praised here; not for a second does the viewer disbelieve the hand is now a malevolent entity apart from Ash, tossing him around with reckless abandon.

The hand knocks Ash unconscious with a plate and then pulls Ash's body over to a cleaver, with obvious intentions. Ash wakes at the last minute and plunges a knife through the hand, uttering "Who's laughing now?" through gasps of utter pain. He then sees no other option and saws the hand off with the chainsaw. After covering his bloody stump (never mind the fact he should be half-dead from blood loss), Ash places a metal bucket over the hand, with the novel A Farewell to Arms shamelessly placed on top. The use of the odd item is a standard part of horror films. The chainsaw, the bloody axe, the tire iron, the cleaver, the kitchen knife, claws; no true horror film antagonist uses a gun--that's boring. Anybody can kill with a gun. But to see these items, which are more often found around the house than a gun, used as weapons of gory death, the viewer is far more frightened. Seeing a possessed man grab a gun and shoot a victim isn't as scary as seeing him hack the victim to pieces with an axe that looks just like the one crazy uncle Bob keeps in the woodshed. The use of the odd item as a weapon of death creates a greater sense of possibility than a gun or some other neat, standard killing tool. Naturally, Raimi couldn't leave well enough alone. Rather than have Ash simply use the chainsaw, he has Ash attach the chainsaw where his hand used to be.

This scene, which uses a series of quick cuts to display the process of making an attachment, ends with Ash sawing the barrel off the shotgun he's found and then, looking at his new weapons, in another reference to the '70s, saying simply, "Groovy."

Another sequence of the film makes fun of the excess of gore horror movies had embraced following the years after "The Evil Dead". When Ash is shooting at his rogue hand (which escapes the bucket and generally wreaks havoc through the rest of the film like the Addams Family's Thing gone bad), he finally strikes it and is rewarded with an absolute blast of blood. For nearly a minute a hydrant-like torrent of blood erupts from the hole in the wall and drenches the poor Ash (Raimi makes no attempt to hide the dripping around the hole that gives away the camera angle--the blood is actually being poured from the ceiling and filmed at a side angle). After this ends, of course, Ash's shirt is practically dry, and no blood is evident on it. This torrent of blood will also appear in "Army of Darkness"

Another common aspect of horror films is the accidental kill. A hero, intending to kill a monster, ends up striking and generally killing a friend. In "Evil Dead 2", this occurs after the daughter of the professor returns to the cabin with her boyfriend and two local hicks, one male and one female, in tow. The daughter, a preppy stereotype along with her boyfriend, accidentally stabs the male hick while intending to stab an again-possessed Ash. The instrument of stabbing is the nasty-looking bone knife. Overall, the aspect of the film that is most evident is the Stooge-like slapstick and simple inherent strangeness. In one bizarre scene, everything in the house, beginning with a mounted deer head, begins to laugh. Ash eventually cracks up as well, laughing and dancing strangely, his face contorting with insane glee in a moment that seems out of context with the rest of the film. In another scene, when the "ghost" of the dead professor is trying to get into "reality" (Ash makes an incredibly good guess about that, regular guy Ash, when one would think the scientist's daughter would come up with that), there is a crazy sequence with a series of odd noises and camera twists that is anything but scary, unlike the bizarre angles near the end of the first film that only increased the suspense as Ash faced two Deadites.

And remember how Moe always pulled Larry's hair out? In "Evil Dead 2", a Deadite attacks a woman by biting a piece of her hair off and eating it, nearly choking on it in the process. Unlike the sensitive teen of the first film, the Ash of this film is a tough-talking twenty-something who just won't take crap from the Deadites. Such assertive heroes are quite rare in horror films; usually, the battle is won through the help of several people, all of whom are terrified throughout the entire situation. Ash handles his foes with confidence, as when he whistles at an evil Deadite and says, "Let's go." The only point where Ash seems truly frightened is at the end, when a huge head enters the cabin. With huge hands of tree branches that recall the hand of King Kong in the '30's film, this monster turns Ash's hair white. It vanishes when the dying preppy girl reads the incantations that send it away, and it and Ash, as well as Ash's car, are sucked into a vortex that plop the poor Ash down in the middle of medieval England, where Ash is surrounded by knights believing he can save them from the Deadites.

PART III: "ARMY OF DARKNESS"