10 Horror Films That Will Make You Nostalgic For The 1980s
2. The Evil Dead
Love it or loathe it, but The Evil Dead is the horror genre's equivalent of The Velvet Underground - about a thousand people saw it on release, but they all went out and shot their own zombie films.
No fan of the genre, Sam Raimi chose horror because not only were those movies popular, they could be made cheaply and quickly. When checking out the competition at local Drive-ins, he noticed that audiences would sound their horns or flash their lights during the slow, talky parts of the movie. His motto became “The gore the merrier.”
Described in its own credits as “the ultimate experience in gruelling terror”, The Evil Dead lives up to its director’s motto, and then some. You will not find a better synopsis than the one written by Joe Bob Briggs: “Five teenagers become spam-in-a-cabin when they head for the woods and start turning into flesh-eating zombies. Asks a lot of moral questions like: ‘If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do? Carve her into itty-bitty pieces or look the other way?’ One girl gets raped by the woods. Not in the woods. By the woods. The only way to kill zombies: total dismemberment.”