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| Evil Dead Rise |
To outsiders, horror films can seem as if they’re all the same, but if you have any kind of interest in the filmmaking process, it’s difficult to overlook the importance of the original The Evil Dead, which came out of nowhere in 1981 with a barrage of new filmmaking techniques and an unforgettable central character. Its combination of spectacular gore, playful use of occult lore and vicious yet jubilatory black humour has fed into a franchise which just keeps on delivering, and despite its absence from the big screen for almost a decade (during which time the series Ash Vs. Evil Dead proved a hit on Netflix), fans were eager for more when Evil Dead Rise arrived, enjoying a high profile première at SXSW. Four months on from that, it’s about to be released on DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD, so I got together with director Lee Cronin for a discussion which ranged from his early experiences of deadites, though Ancient Sumerian means of dispelling them, to the special place which snippets of Irish folklore have found in his films.
“It goes way, way back,” he says, describing his relationship with the franchise. “My dad showed me Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 in a back to back watchfest when I was about eight. So he was a fan of the first one and maybe at that point hadn't seen the second one. It would have been out maybe about three or four years at that point, so it was probably early Nineties. I was instantly taken by the movies for their scariness, their energy and their playfulness, and they always then held a very special place for me in terms of my cinematic influences.”
So how did he get to the point of being able to make one himself?
“Struggle and strife.” He laughs. “I was never really a remake film person and I wasn't always drawn to them. Not that Evil Dead Rise is necessarily a remake or reboot – I do think it's its own thing. When they did reboot Evil Dead in 2013, which I got to bring my dad to see in the cinema and we both adored it, I remember – and at that point, I was still making short films and really looking at how to kick my career into gear – I was thinking ‘Damn, I'd love the opportunity to make an Evil Dead movie.’
“After my début feature film The Hole In The Ground came out, I got to meet with Sam Raimi, but around the same time I also signed with my agents and they asked me a question: ‘Is there any franchise out there you’d like to work in or do something with?’ I said ‘I would love to make either an Evil Dead movie or a Nightmare On Elm Street movie, both of those things I’m very passionate about.’ And within a matter of days, I was meeting Sam Raimi and we were talking about all kinds of movies, and that led to me bringing up the conversation, whether he wanted to do more, and he was like, ‘Why? Would you be interested?’ I said ‘I'd be very interested.’ On we marched and here we are a few years later with the movie.”
He certainly seems to have captured the visual style of the previous films.
“I was incredibly conscious of it. There are certain things, obviously, like the force’s point of view. I like to think that Sam, as a filmmaker, would have had an influence on who I am as a filmmaker, as has Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Kubrick as well, anyway. For me it's actually, your influences when you're younger, and the things that you watch over and over again, they become like your film school. So for me, I move the camera that way whether I'm making an Evil Dead movie or not. It's kind of it's my own style. It's my version, it's kind of second nature.”
Ash is such a big character and so much a part of the franchise that it’s difficult to make an Evil Dead film without him. How did Lee resolve that problem and develop (no spoilers) another character who could succeed him in picking up the chainsaw?
“Yeah, it's definitely challenging. I think for me what all the characters and especially the survivor in the movie needed was to have a little bit more emotional heft, that makes sense. I’m not taking anything away in any way, shape or form from what an amazing cinematic character Ash is, but you don't really get to know a lot about him as a person. What they do have in common is that they're imperfect heroes.
“When Ash arrives at the cabin in Evil Dead, he doesn't know how to fire a gun or how to chop off his arm. He doesn't know any of these things as a person. And that carries over a little bit. So she has some of that same clumsiness, almost. She's biting back, she's falling over, she's like any normal human. She's not equipped to face these extraordinary things. But I think what drives her is also just that metaphorical value in the movie. She finds that drive to actually stand up and stop running away from things that she's scared of, and I think that earns her the right to pick up the chainsaw at the end of the movie.”
Also essential to any Evil Dead film is the Necronomicon.
“What I tried to really firmly nail down in Evil Dead Rise was that - and this is specifically stated, you know - there are these three books. It’s touched on, obviously, in Army Of Darkness, in quite a fun way. So there's three books that are out there, and to me, this is one of those books. And obviously, I've slightly reinterpreted how it looks, which I think is plausible and okay, but if you actually look at it, it takes some of that influence, like the teeth came from the book that bites Ash. And then in terms of the actual look of the book, one of the key things I wanted is that there's no white space, there's no skin coloured space, everything is covered in text and detail by a very, very psychopathic person back in the past.
“There's a lot of there's a lot of touches of personality that are similar to the previous book, but also I brought in slightly more stark images. As I said, it's more text, and these almost ravings of a madman. And then also the little Celtic torches and things like that. To me, the book is almost like a guide and a reference to the evil things that can happen when the force engages, like an interpretation of things that have happened before and can happen again.”
I noticed the Celtic touches, I say, and the fact that there were quite a lot of Irish people involved in making the film.
“Yeah, definitely in post production. In terms of shooting, we actually filmed the movie iin Auckland, so it was just me and my first assistant director, Daire Glynn from The Hole In The Ground. And then in post production, there’s a lot of great Irish talent, and my producers are here in Ireland. But yeah, there’s a few little touches in there. It’s not forced, it’s just things I find interesting. There’s great lore in Ireland, you know, dark stories that I think can go up against the Evil Dead lore and both work together.”
I explain that I have an interest in ancient lore myself, and that I recently came across a means of getting rid of Ancient Sumerian ghosts. (This doesn’t come with a guarantee, so don’t try it at home, readers – at least not if you have a more reliable chainsaw handy.) It involves selecting your finest drinking vessel, filling it up with donkey urine, and offering it to the possessed person as if it were wine. Upon drinking it, the writers claims, the evil spirit will often be so shocked that it will lose control of the body and return to the land of the dead.
“I’m down with that,” says Lee. “That feels a lot like some of the things you can do with with changelings as well. In changeling lore there’s ways of that ways of of tricking them into eating or drinking things that they're not comfortable with.”
He’s intrigued, he says, by the similarities sometimes found in lore from different places I ask how lore influences his filmmaking more widely, and with particular reference to /Ghost Train, the short film he made in 2013 which is included on the Blu-ray release of Evil Dead Rise.
“I think sometimes lore comes later for me because I usually end up finding a set of emotional circumstances first of all,” he says. “Even with Ghost Train, I had a dream about my best friend from when I was younger, and he was scared. And that was the starting point. I don't think I necessarily think about the lore particularly – I kind of invented my own, I suppose, in that case. But equally, with The Hole In The Ground, it was about a relationship between the mother and son, and mistrust. In the initial draft of The Hole In The Ground, the mistrust was because of experiences which the mother had when she was a kid, which made her a closed-off individual to her son, and it was more of a drama.
“That actually happened with Ghost Train as well. The first draft didn't actually have as much horror in it at all, it was a little bit more driven by the characters and the circumstances, more like mystical leaning than anything else. Evil Dead Rise was different, I went in knowing that was going to be horror. I'm not sort of person that picks up a book of lore and goes, ‘Okay, I'll put a pin in that and use it.’ There’s things that I know, there's things that I like, and then I try and pick and choose and remix. It's like, you know, you never hear the word changeling in The Hole In The Ground, even though it is a changeling story.”
In both those films as well, he’s working with children. People are often especially nervous about watching children in horror, and the age of some of the characters in Evil Dead Rise is bound to make viewers uncomfortable.
“Of my three short films and my two features, I guess there’s kids in two of the shorts and both of the features, so four out of five of the films I’ve done since I knew what I wanted to do as a filmmaker have got kids in, and I've only ever had really good experiences. The goal in the casting process is understanding who the performer is, what the parents are like, what their skill sets are. And there is obviously great peril. I'm kind of a child of Amblin, so I've watched a lot of movies that, you know, Poltergeist or The Goonies, even The Shining’s got a kid in it. The movies that I'm quite often attracted to have these these younger performers and they’re playing these characters that are in danger. And it is a brilliant way of unsettling an audience. People have spoken in interviews about how they knew there were kids in Evil Dead Rise, but they didn't realise what would happen to them, and when you go there and the threat level becomes really high, I think it makes for something quite interesting.”
