The Evil Dead series uses a classic horror setup. In the first two films, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) and his friends go to a cabin in the woods for a weekend of partying and reading aloud from an ancient evil book (“Legend has it it was written by the Dark Ones, Necromicon Ex Mortis.”) In Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, they summon Kandarian demons who promptly possess them. While the first film is a more serious take, the second goes bonkers. It’s part slasher, part possession film, part pro wrestling match, part Lovecraftian horror, and excellent.
Director Sam Raimi didn’t invent point of view shots. In Hitchcock, in Carpenter, in the groundbreaking Peeping Tom, and in nearly every film of the slasher boom, the camera stalked. It plodded, giving viewers a glimpse of what a killer saw as they closed in on their victim. In 1987, Raimi hitched a rocket to his camera (figuratively) to show what the world looked like to the Kandarian demons. It zooms miles in a second, breaking down doors, chasing down cars, and sending poor Ash halfway across the damn forest without missing a single branch. It was frenetic, revolutionary.
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