Hacker Cinema
The Evil Dead
1983 · Film · 85 min
Part of Evil Dead Collection
Directed by Sam Raimi
In 1979, a group of college students find a Sumerian Book of the Dead in an old wilderness cabin they've rented for a weekend getaway.
4 positive11 neutralfrom 15 commenters
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16 comments on Hacker News
Nolan made "The Odyssey". It was his vision.
Hitchcock made "Psycho".
Miyazaki made "Princess Mononoke".
While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces.
You can tell when that doesn't happen. You can tell when the producers exercise outsized control. Or when the studio controls the editing table. And it's not like that's ever kept a secret - people talk about this openly and loudly when it happens.
Musk built his empire, and even if he bought his way in, he still used his unique methodology to turn it into what it is today. "Founder Mode", if you will. Same thing with Steve Jobs.
All of this hand-wringing about who painted the shed in "The Evil Dead" doesn't matter. It's Sam Raimi's. Everyone else on set dances to the beat of his drum.
Software can (and will) be like that too.
Game design, company formation, product development, you name it.
I'm not entirely sure that the blog is totally correct in this part. I've always been fascinated by censorship (especially when it comes to movies/entertainment) and have seen/read a bunch of stuff about vhs in the 80's. Here in the UK we had a term, 'video nasties' for a bunch of horror films that were banned (Evil Dead being a very prominent example). Anyway, the general concensus I've always been under after watching/reading all the documentaries about that stuff is that the reason why the porn industry used vhs and ultimately won the format war was because the prudish japanese execs at the sony would not alow 'smut' on their precious new format and if the industry could not license the use of that format then they had to use vhs. The porn industry didn't choose vhs over betamax, vhs was the only option available to it.
Yeah, I tend to agree. It's disturbing how badly certain groups of people just destroy so much of what they touch.
Almost everyone on HN has witnessed something similar happen in our spheres. We've all seen the marketing dept, accounting dept, and VC chodes band together and push the engineers into the background. They forget the engineers are the people who made the magic happen for the product in the first place. And then, before we know it, the equivalent of a private equity enshitification is happening and its either stripped to nothing of substance or it just coasts along and does the absolute bare minimum to survive. All the heart of the product gone. I know it sounds dramatic, but they kill its soul. I think almost everyone here has seen this happen directly to our own things or to other products.
It looks like they're trying their best to do the same thing to movie studios. Investment firms are buying up studios across the board. Marketers, ad companies, and investors will do their best to suck all of the soul out of movies the same way they're doing it to our field. Pushing the movie makers into the background just like they do to engineers.
The difference from my perspective and the reason I'm not too concerned is this: the tech industry is relatively young and up until recently many of us (myself included) have found ourselves worshiping at the VC/investor's alters. We find ourselves buying into their hype.
Artists on the other hand see the VC/investor's slop alters and see that alter demanding they make a shitty product. In typical artist fasion, they take a long look at that alter, unzip their pants, laugh, and piss on that alter.
While artists have long since learned what happens when you worship at those alters, we in the tech field are just finding out. They've known this since before our industry was even born.
I think this is why we've seen so many phases where movies/music makers, if they have to, they'll just make cheap movies. A good cheaply made movie is still better than a high budget slop shit movie. People show up for good movies, even cheap ones. People forgive the low budget quality if its great.
At the end of the day this is why I'm not too concerned about the future of movies. I have no doubt great movies will still be made. Some of my favorite movies were made outside those people's alters, cheap af. I mean, who doesn't love Halloween or Evil Dead or Clerks!? All of them were made cheap af.
Always remember, Clerks was made by a dude while working as a convenience store clerk. A convenience clerk made it using his credit cards. He had basically no budget.
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
It was supposed to be an acting vehicle for a football player. It's so camp.
But it also has Max von Sydow in it, and Brian Blessed is every bit as over the top as he is in season 1 of Black Adder.
It occupies much the same genre as Big Trouble in Little China and the Evil Dead movies. If you're looking for something deep, you're in the wrong place.
It did, but I would argue that Army of Darkness is just as great as Evil Dead 2, and substantially better than the first Evil Dead, so we at least got three classic movies instead of two.
Though, I guess you could argue that Evil Dead 2 is much more of a "comedy slapstick remake" of the first one than a sequel.
"Klaatu barada nikto" is a code phrase from The Day the Earth Stood Still to stop the homicidal antagonists from killing you.
It's doubly famous because Sam Raimi recycled it in "Army of Darkness" as an incantation to dispel the curse of the Necronomicon (book of the dead, portrayed as the arch book of black magic in any number of stories), which our hapless anti-hero Ash fucks up and thus unleashes the armies of the dead on a roughly medieval and wholly unprepared world.
If you like campy horror movies, there is so much camp in Army of Darkness that there's barely any room for the horror. It is technically a sequel but it works as a standalone movie. I watched it years before I finally sat down and watched The Evil Dead.
> Did mixed races no exist at the time of the stories writing?
Not really, Asimov was born in 100% white Russia and then moved to USA during the 1920s where segregation was still a thing.
> Did the robot characters who looked human but were from a completely different world view connecting not exist?
Of course there were different worlds with different cultures, rites, traditions, religions and even food (or martial arts), but their look is not taken into great account. Asimov was a biochemist after all, not an anthropologist.
I agree that actualization of a work of fiction it is not bending objective facts, my impression though is that content platforms are more following than leading, they are giving the public what the public will consume, which is dull, it is like giving kids candies or cake because we already know they'll eat them.
There is no real surprise, no Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead or Carpenter's The Thing/Assault on Precint 13/They live, no Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, everything is so canonical and completely unimaginative. There is no space left for provocative, out of the box, even offensive, creation (unless it is sexually defining for minorities, like a dildo, homosexual intercourse, etc. something that wouldn't even shock my 82 years old dad)
In a way they are segmenting the market based on the idea they wanna project of themselves:
- Netflix: social activists involved in identity politics, teenagers (with superpower or supernatural powers), binge watchers, kids and some old show to entertain their parents too (all of Star Trek for example, the only reason I still use Netflix)
- Prime Video: crime aficionados, intelligent comedy (it better be British), superheroes with a twist, people like me who already pay for amazon prime and are not young anymore
- Apple TV: fancy, grandiose, epic stories, that unfortunately lack in writing and results are mixed. For people who love a great cast in a show.
- HBO: actual quality content, for people who love to pay for quality content.
True, to the extent that any 90 minutes of smartphone footage uploaded to youtube is technically "a movie". In order to be "a movie" in the sense that Evil Dead or Primer are movies, I would say you need a bit more than that.
There are many examples of making a film on a budget of almost nothing. Clerks, Evil Dead, the Sweding movement, most all of Tik Tok…
You can make a compelling story via flip book.
More Bruce Campbell Oregon trivia: Bruce the actor, from Evil Dead and various and sundry other 'B' movies and TV shows like Burn Notice also lives in Oregon, near Ashland.
The original trilogy had mediocre acting but had one-liners that were on par with Evil Dead. I think that's what made it a cult classic.
None of the other movies will be remembered for their one-liners, but from what I can tell that's not what Disney is trying to do anyway. They're selling characters, not movies.
Same. 29. I think it's just that we grew up with the internet, and although we haven't 'seen it all,' we've picked the low-hanging fruit.
When I was a kid, the first time I walked into a video store, it blew my mind. I spent every weekend for years binge-watching 3, 4, 5 rented movies. Now, I haven't actually watched a movie in years. I think that although there are new movies coming out, the patterns are fundamentally the same and so movies have gotten boring. After you've seen Apocalypse Now, Evil Dead, and Blade Runner, the Wire, Caddyshack, Oldboy, No Country, Night of the Living Dead, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and on-and-on-and-on, you've seen damn near most of the plot variations that can conceivably be constructed. So, new stuff just looks the same as the old stuff and it's not so exciting.
Same with the internet. I discovered 90% of what I still think is cool by the time I was 13. I picked the low-hanging fruit. So, now I'm at the point where I go deep on things. It's not sexy, but it is pretty rewarding. Used to think Magic-1 was awesome, well now Ben Eater's 8-bit-kit is half-assembled on a table in my living room. Used to think rock climbing was cool, but now I have to put in weekend after weekend at JTree moving over granite. Used to think Fravia was cool, well now it's time to construct my own web-crawlers. Used to think metalcasting and the Lindsay Catalog was fascinating, but now it's time to build actual internal combustion engines from scratch. Used to listen to the old Defcon DVDs on a pre-iPod mp3 player, but the time came to actually work through Erickson's AOE.
I think it's a natural evolution of life. When you're young you make a shallow pass and find what really resonates with you. When you get older, you spend more time digging down deep into those things and it's not as exciting as it once was, but there is a satisfaction from getting good at those things.
An alternate approach is to try viewing the internet through the lens of cannabis. I've had many nights in life where smoking some pot and watching YouTube has segued into a late-night coding session implementing something fun in Python that's been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. Pot has a way of helping you see things you've seen a million times in a completely new light. Some people love it, some people hate it. YMMV.
Most people seem to hit this point in life and just have kids to keep stuff interesting when things start to get boring. They take up a lot of time, teach you a lot of stuff, and suck up a ton of time.
It wasn’t always this way. Films like Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, and pretty much the entire Hitchcock collection were some of the most iconic films of their times.
In my opinion, the popularity of the late 70s to 80s slasher films (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St, Texas Chainsaw Massacre to name a few), combined with studios’ ever-shrinking tolerance for risk, resulted in a particularly bland few decades of mainstream horror, with the well-known Saw franchise and, to a lesser extent, the somewhat satirical Final Destination series as typical examples of the era. Personally, I’m partial to the Evil Dead films, Army of Darkness most of all. Groovy.
Horror can be excellent when done well, and pathetic when done poorly. It is easy to go for cheap scares and bloody massacre scenes. There is a lot to dislike about modern horror films that can turn off audiences looking for more than jump scares and blood splatter. If I hadn’t dated a girl in college who was super into the horror genre, I would have never gotten into it.
Horror is best when it floods you with an emotional high that lasts long after the initial shock. For a most masterful example, try playing Silent Hill 2, if you dare.
With a crew size of 1 for a film with lots of moving shots, maybe not.
Time to bring back the 2x4 steadycam from Evil Dead.
Quality, again, doesn't signal value to the consumer.
The three Evil Dead films have grossed ~38 mil profit (IIRC). The first film cost $375,000 to make, but pulled in ~2.5 mil on its initial release and has now made considerably more, about $30 mil by last figures (2006). Essentially it made ~80 times its budget, compared to the ~10 times Titanic has made.
Consider that The Shawshank Redemption barely made over double its budget, but is the #1 IMDB movie with nearly half-a-million votes. Titanic, by comparison, doesn't even appear on the top 250 by a considerable margin (lowest rated is 8.0, Titanic has a 7.3, the bottom 51 movies are all 8.0, assuming the same trend of ~50 titles per .1 (doubtful) it wouldn't even hit the top 500).
If the producers knew Shawshank would be the best made movie ever, they would undoubtedly have charge more for admission than Titanic, which would likely have made it tank.