10 Most Amazing Practical Movie Effects Of The 2010s

7. The Entire Movie (Evil Dead)

The Evil Dead
Tristar Pictures

"The Entire Movie" might seem like a bit of a cop-out, but we're being deadly serious. According to director Fede Alvarez (via io9), nothing in his 2013 reboot of The Evil Dead was CGI.

"We didn't do any CGI in the movie. There's no CGI in the movie. Everything you will see is real, which was really demanding. This was a very long shoot, 70 days of shooting at night. There's a reason people use CGI, it's cheaper and faster, I hate that. We researched a lot of magic tricks and illusion tricks. [Like] how you would make someone's arm disappear."

This means that Mia cutting her tongue, the raining blood sequence, the arm amputation (both of them), the nightmarish Deadite effects and the glass-to-the-face scene were all done practically, thanks to the aid of some magnificent makeup and costuming work - as well as several illusions.

Particularly impressive is the blood-soaked ending, which was accomplished by having several cannons shoot fake blood into the sky so it rained down upon actress Jane Levy.

Evil Dead 2013 behind the scenes ending fake blood cannon
TriStar Pictures/YouTube: SnoutyPig

How much fake blood? A reported 50,000 gallons. For comparison, Sam Raimi's original The Evil Dead used roughly 200-300 gallons for the entire movie.

More so than in any other genre, noticeable CGI in horror movies is pretty distracting. If you notice something that clearly isn't real - even for a split second - it immediately removes you from the movie, reminds you there's no real danger, and diminishes the impact of the scares.

But Evil Dead didn't have this problem at all, and that's probably why it's one of the most effective modern horror flicks ever produced.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!