Evil Dead Rise is a fantastic film according to the reception of the general public. Surprisingly good. You wouldn’t immediately expect a 40-year-old franchise to produce a film that manages to feel fresh and new. Usually, if one of these things returns, it is fallen into oblivion.
But what exactly makes the film such a relief? What sets it apart from the crowd and does it teach the other films a thing or two? Let’s discuss the three main elements that make this movie so great.
Camera work
This is a small one, maybe compared to the other two. But this movie is so visually interesting to watch that you get that sense of unease just watching the camera move quickly and erratically. Evil Dead has always had something of a wild fantasy when it comes to this category. This new title is no exception and knows how to pull some new trickslike carefully keeping the focus on the foreground while the threat in the background slowly comes into view.
But as with this trick, sometimes the horror is something you should look for. Many of this film’s frames feel like something Kubrick would do when he puts on the camera and paints a beautiful blood-stained picture of absolute carnage that has no clear focal point. There are so many details in shots like the hallway that tell you a story without you ever seeing the fight that took place.
pacing
This is a slow movie relatively speaking. It follows what you might call musical tempo, where something happens, they make it resonate with you, and about 15 minutes later it’s time for another song. However, the pressure keeps building up, keeping the film intense until the very end.
Compare it to Jordan Peele’s Us, where creepy scenes are completely subverted by NWA’s ‘Fuck the Police’ or the very popular It, with various horror scenes interspersed with jokes or New Kids on the Block. If you think back to classic horror movies of yesteryear The shining or Texas Chainsaw Massacrepart of what made them really scary was that they slowly smother you more and more to the point where it feels like you can’t breathe.
The tension never stops and creativity flourishes. Really was the only movie that managed to do this in a long time Heir apparent. Just a movie that built on itself and gradually turned up the pressure and didn’t let up for a minute.
Evil Dead Rise nails this, where things go from bad to worse, and the setting won’t let you breathe. But in more ways than just the fright, as the apartment environment becomes less and less of a safe zone. As the evil grows stronger, they are forced to lock the hallway door, retreat from the locked side room, and leave the apartment all together for the relative safety of the very strange and desolate parking garage before finally escaping through the gate.
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Possibly the film’s best win. When did horror movies get so serious? Evil death 2013 featured deadites vibrating madly and making weird clicking noises. Gone is the playfully menacing tone the franchise is known for, traded in for zombies that feel more like a generic evil than something that would keep you up at night.
If you’ve ever seen a cat attack something, you know there’s a certain terrifying and carnal ferocity to a predator that takes absolute pleasure in torturing their food before deciding it’s game over.
It manages to balance those grimacing gory sequences with this dark humor that serves to ramp up the tension rather than diminish it altogether. Villains are all about presence. Someone who can command a terrifying personality. What could be better than a villain who feels he has won and likes to enjoy the moment to the last.
Evil Dead II could have killed Ash fairly quickly, but the force instead delights in slowly stripping him of everything, just as this movie drags on the spread of the demons, giving scenes of nightmarish ink bleeds and demons filling a hallway with laughter.
Other aspects of this film help to make it stand out in the genre, such as the creativity in some of the body horror elements. To get up dare to ask what would happen if you just made human soup? It delivers a body horror horror of spare body parts and flesh unseen since something along the lines of Brian Yuzna’s Society or maybe his badass Hellboy knock off Faust.
Thing is, they didn’t just do a Cryptkeeper knockoff like Vecna from Season 4 of Stranger things. She created a crazy, mutant looking contraption with the arms and heads of the humans taken so far to serve as a grim reminder of their fate. But more important than this is the fact that it was inventive and original, something horror movies need to survive and thrive.
Nightmare on Elm Street is a series that kept the entertainment factor high through the use of wild imagery and memorable personalities. Sometimes you have to wonder if The evil death would have been remembered at all if it weren’t for the crazy Dutch angles and demonic POV shots, all culminating in a very weird cult film. If you want to keep things interesting, stay weird.