(Image courtesy of New Line Cinema)I have avoided reviewing “Donnie Darko” throughout this whole semester. The movie is undoubtedly incredible, but I've tried to stay away from reviewing movies that i've already seen. During the week of Halloween, I gave in and watched “Donnie Darko” for the third or fourth time and figured out a way to incorporate the film into one of these reviews.
In the movie, Donnie and Gretchen go to a theater to see “The Evil Dead.” I hadn't seen that film before, but I was pretty sure that it was on the list of cult films. Later that night, I checked, and sure enough, there it was. Excited at the prospect of being able to mention “Donnie Darko,” I decided to throw it onto my list of movies to watch.
Next week, see a cult film (take the quiz here!) universe merge with the "good beer; bad movie" universe. The results will be fun.
As I mentioned repeatedly in my "Hocus Pocus" review, I’m not a huge fan of horror movies, but I decided to suck up my fear of nightmares and approach “The Evil Dead” with both arms (metaphorically) swinging.
My initial response to the film was “ew.”
The film, centered around five friends who unleash a terrible evil at a Tennessee cabin, features many sequences that reminded me of David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” — blood spewing from dying bodies and close-up shots to capture all the carnage — so many scenes were hard to sit through.
Toward the end of the film, as bodies lay strewn across the floor of the cabin, I actually had an unwelcome flashback to Lynch’s bloody horror film. The constant flow of blood and a thick pus-like substance coming from the necks of the possessed college students was highly reminiscent of Henry’s mutilation of his child in “Eraserhead.” Tom Sullivan, who worked on the effects for “The Evil Dead,” employed stop-motion animation in this scene as the characters’ flesh bubbles and melts, leaving behind only bones. Though the scene was grotesque, the animation was enough to keep my eyes glued to the screen, figuratively of course.
Aside from the stop-motion, I was very interested in the camera work. With an estimated budget of about $350,000, the crew of “The Evil Dead” didn't have very much to work with. Steadicams and camera dollies were among the technical items that had to be sacrificed, so experimental filming was a large part of the project. The crew mounted cameras on pieces of wood, meant to steady the picture. In the scenes that featured the invisible evil force, cameramen ran through the woods and around a swamp with this makeshift Steadicam to capture footage. For the final scene of the film, in which the force rushes straight for Ashley (Bruce Campbell), a crew-member rode a bike through the cabin with the camera mounted on it.
The film also relied heavily on Dutch-angled shots. In this technique, the camera is turned on a slight angle so that vertical and horizontal lines within a shot are not parallel to the bottom of the frame. This approach to filming was used to show a psychological uneasiness in the characters on the screen and to build suspense. Throughout “The Evil Dead,” Dutch-angles are used in combination with low-angled shots, to show one character standing over another’s body. Director Sam Raimi and his crew do an amazing job of displaying emotion within these shots.
Heading into this review, I worried about losing sleep, wondering when some unknown evil would find its way into my room. Afterward, I was more grossed out than scared. After two weeks of focusing on bloody horror films, I hope to move on to films that will make me a little less queasy.
Tell the reporter about your David Lynch flashbacks at wruof@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @willruof
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