Originally... Sam Raimi's low-budget horror flick is considered to be somewhat of a masterclass in cheap, indie filmmaking. Made with an extremely small amount of money and utilising the talents of close friends and relatives, The Evil Dead remains a genuinely terrifying and spooky exercise in classic horror - not to mention its gory as hell and there's a tree rape. So What Changed? Raimi obviously found something inherently amusing about his debut feature, because for his second, Evil Dead II, he decided to indue a bit of lazy retconning and give the whole flick a strangely comical vibe. Though undeniably a frightening film in places, Raimi re-wrote Bruce Campbell's confused hero Ash as a kind of "goofy bad-ass" and gave him corny one-liners (like "Swallow this!" upon blasting a demon with a sawn-off shotgun). Essentially Evil Dead became a bizarre comedy of grotesque manners, something that the third flick - which transported Ash back in time to the medieval era - continued to do in droves. Did It Pay Off? Absolutely. The second and third Evil Dead flicks have garnered a cult following, with many movie fans agreeing that Evil Dead II is the best horror/comedy flick ever made.