The Evil Dead (1981) on Netflix
Five friends rent a remote Tennessee cabin, where they find a Sumerian Book of the Dead and a tape of incantations. Ash Williams and the others have awakened a demonic force.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.3/10257,090 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
Five friends go to a cabin in the woods for a vacation. They discover a volume called "The Book of the Dead" and a tape recorder belonging to a professor, who also owns the cabin. One of them plays back what is recorded on the tape-- which just happens to be Candarian resurrection passages translated from the Necronomicon (Book of the Dead) by the professor, which unleashes an evil force from the woods. The people start turning into evil deadites, and the others soon learn from the tape that the only way to kill a person who is turned into a deadite is by total body dismemberment. People are dying left and right; one girl early in the film looses control and runs off into the woods, only to be raped by the trees.
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Cast
- Dorothy Tapertas Fake Shemp
- Barbara Careyas Fake Shemp
- David Hortonas Fake Shemp
- Wendall Thomasas Fake Shemp
- Don Longas Fake Shemp
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Evil Dead (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Bruce Campbell was cast as lead Ash Williams largely because, as the film's producer alongside Robert Tapert, he was the only actor guaranteed to stay for the entire low-budget shoot.
- During the grueling shoot, actress Betsy Baker had her eyelashes torn off while a face-mask prosthetic was removed, and the actors could only wear the thick glass contact lenses used for the demons' eyes for about 15 minutes at a time because their eyes could not breathe.
- Conditions on the remote Tennessee shoot got so extreme near the end that the crew burned nearly every piece of furniture in the cabin to stay warm, since by then only exterior shots remained to be filmed.
- Effects artist Tom Sullivan built the film's fake blood from the standard corn-syrup-and-food-coloring recipe but added coffee as an extra ingredient to get the look he wanted.
- To fake a Steadicam on no budget, director Sam Raimi and his crew mounted a camera to a plank of wood and had two operators sprint through the swamp with it, a rig they nicknamed the "shaky cam," with Raimi himself running the makeshift rig through the woods for the demon's point-of-view shots.
- The remote cabin used for filming in Morristown, Tennessee was burned down by its owners in 1982 after they grew tired of fans trespassing on the property, though the chimney still stands and visitors take stones from it.
- In Britain the film was cut by 49 seconds to get an X certificate for cinemas, then branded a "video nasty" and formally banned on home video when the Video Recordings Act passed in 1984.
