Anyone who knows me or reads my reviews will know I’m not the “how dare they?” type that some are when it comes to remakes, especially horror ones – heck, I even have a place in my heart for Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake (I have a review of that but not Hitchcock’s original; just like I’m posting this while there’s only one of my old “barely a” reviews from 2004 of the original on the site, which I guess says it all…). So I’ve been pretty excited about this one for as long as it’s been rumoured, to say nothing of more recently as the buzz started coming in.

For a movie that’s been hyped as the “most terrifying film you will ever experience”, Evil Dead starts boldly slow. After a kind of unnecessary flashback (which sort of reminded me of the opening scene of Exorcist II now I think about it) establishing the “history” of the book that will cause all the trouble (surely just the sight of the flesh-bound tome is enough to tell you all you need to know?), there’s even more kind of unnecessary contrivance to get to the meat we’re all here for. Though a girl going cold turkey is a pretty good excuse for her and a bunch of her friends to hole up in an old cabin in the woods for a while – no matter what condition it’s in upon arrival – it’s evident from the start here how thin the characters are. The brains (brainy enough to have a good stab at interpreting the contents of the evil book, but not strong enough to resist the many warnings scrawled within its pages), the brawn, the blond, etc – I actually found myself wondering how many, shall we say, less informed viewers will see this and think it’s maybe somehow ripped off or at least related to last year’s Cabin in the Woods.

Much has been said of this movie’s more “serious” approach compared to the original which people remember as being as funny as it was scary and I’ve found myself agreeing with the bemused likes of Robert Florence on Twitter who wrote, “I don’t get these reviews that criticise the new Evil Dead for not being as ‘fun’ or ‘funny’ as the original. They’re thinking of ED2 right?” In an interview on Mark Kermode’s Radio 5 film show, the film’s director Fede Alvarez claimed that Sam Raimi had said he always intended for the original to be plain scary while Kermode countered quoting Raimi from an earlier interview of his where Raimi said he always intended for it to be “the three stooges with blood and guts for custard pies”. I think what we need to do is wonder why Raimi made the much more genuinely funny Evil Dead 2 more of a remake itself than a sequel and I believe it’s likely, like any artist, Raimi was striving for a very particular tone that was an exact degree to one side of the line between comedy and horror – two genres that have always been intertwined (another horror legend Wes Craven has often stated he directs “scares” with much the same attention to timing as the greatest comedy minds) – and he felt after the first movie and given more resources that it was worth another shot.

None of this changes the fact that the first movie, on its surface, is more scary and nasty than it is funny. The laughs come (for me, at least – and I’ve watched it twice in the past couple of years – and again, tonight, just to check – with no diminishment of its impact) because its pace, the sheer barrage of horror, is just so relentless, particularly in the last half hour, and that’s the one thing that this new rendition is frequently lacking. There are so many places where the action slows or stops completely for more discussion and explanation of what’s going on – enough, at least, that my mind wandered, and I began mentally composing this review. Which is great because I didn’t want this to be another movie I fail to write about, but of course doesn’t speak well for the movie.

But I’ll be honest, what I really wanted from this movie was what I’d heard about in recent weeks – a number of horror directors/fans on Twitter have raved about how gory the movie is, and when those people are raving about such things, it’s hard not to get one’s hopes up. On this count, at least, and it’s really the only count that matters, Evil Dead does not disappoint. Almost all varieties of squeamishness are catered for, including my own which is pretty niche in the genre. My personal squirm inducer? Needles, craft knives, small, seemingly innocuous things. One of the horror films that always gets to me is the original 1981 Halloween II – in that movie, set in a hospital, people are variously killed by syringes, scalpels, one person simply slips in blood on the floor and bangs his head badly on the floor (oddly the worst one for me, completely non-violent, just awfully unfortunate and sad). Here, you get almost all those things (the scalpel replaced with the aforementioned craft knife) in just one scene – with a girl cutting her own face off as an aperitif. All of this, as has been mentioned often in promotional interviews, is done with practical effects, not computer effects, and this is probably this movie’s killer move. To make one of my wild comparisons, the practical gore here works in a similar way as the live singing did in Les Misérables (whatever my personal feelings about that movie are). Though live singing – especially as thorough as they did on Les Mis – had rarely been done before, practical effects are almost as rare these days so they come as just as pleasant a surprise. Couple this with some fantastically claustrophobic set and sound design and it’s really hard not to recommend this one despite its relative emptiness, and it’s one I’ll probably watch again more often than needed. There’s plenty of homage to the original to keep the fans happy (and stick around till after the credits to be real happy) and it bodes well for the future of mainstream horror.