Editorials
10 Facts About The New ‘Evil Dead’!!!
Last summer I spent two days in Auckland, New Zealand to check out the set of TriStar and FilmDistrict’s upcoming Evil Dead remake. I’m not going to mince words here, I have never walked away from a set this confident and hopeful that a movie will turn out well. With a lot of these visits you get the feeling that people are just fort of putting on their best face to meet you, and you’re not entirely convinced of their commitment to making a great movie.
Not here. Fede Alvarez is not f*cking around. Neither is producer Rob Tapert. Nor are Robert Gillies (the production designer) or Roger Murray (the prosthetics and props maker). The film’s DP, Aaron Morton, isn’t f*cking around either when it comes to getting those crazy roving tree shots we love so much. And the cast? Enduring all of the prosthetics, pain and hundreds of gallons of blood? Not f*cking around. I’m not talking about a bunch of disinterested dilettantes talking about “how much they love the project.” I’m talking about seeing the bloody proof of it firsthand. I’m not just talking about the scenes we witnessed, but the messy aftermath of everything they’d been shooting up until that point. You just can’t fake a production like this for two days while press is around.
Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Elizabeth Blackmore, Lou Taylor Pucci and Jessica Lucas star in the much anticipated remake of the 1981 cult-hit horror film. It hits theaters on April 12th, 2013. Be sure to read PART ONE and PART TWO for a more in depth analysis on this visit.
Then head inside for a bonus 10 Facts About The New ‘Evil Dead’
1. THERE IS VERY LITTLE – IF ANY – CGI
Everything I saw onset backed up claims by Alvarez that there would be no CGI in the film. I didn’t see any green screens and I saw tons of evidence of well executed practical gags. Even if they wind up using a little bit of it in the film, it’s probably just for small stuff like wire removal etc…
2. THEY ARE WORRIED ABOUT GETTING AN NC-17
Per producer Rob Tapert, “I have always been exceedingly concerned about [getting an NC-17]. The woman who guided ‘The Grudge’ through to get a PG-13 assured us that ‘oh no, nothing in this is gonna get you an NC-17.’ I keep bumping up against that self-mutilation thing. And because they swing so much as to what they decide on a weekly basis is an NC-17 or an R or a PG-13, I just don’t know. But FilmDistrict, who bought this…they all said, ‘we want this the hardest R you guys can give us…’”
3. THAT VOMIT IN THE TRAILER IS REAL
Jane Levy recounts filming it, “At one point I vomit all over somebody. A lot of vomit. Like, a sh*t-ton of fluid. I had a tube practically down my throat, and I’m on top of this girl and vomiting all over her. When you actually do something like that – I don’t think I can actually describe the sensation – but I actually went to the corner and cried. I’m really sensitive. But I felt like I was really drowning my friend Jessica, it felt so bad. I was shaking.” Of course it’s not actual vomit, I just know that some of you were thinking it was a CG effect based on the trailer. It isn’t.
4. YES, IT WILL HAVE THOSE DEMONIC POV SHOTS
DP Aaron Morgan on working to create the effect, “In the original there’s a lot of stuff where things are careening in and careening out of control. And we wanted to get to that point. So I wanted to start to infer that with our camera movements so there’s a lot of rolling. And there’s a lot of really fast movement through trees.”
5. THEY USED TWO CABINS
A real one in Woodhill Forest and a more destroyable one on a soundstage.
6. SAM’S CLASSIC MAKES AN APPEARANCE
A few feet away from the cabin in Woodhill Forest sits a dilapidated recreation of “The Classic” – Sam Raimi’s 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88. It’s rusty, covered in pine needles and moss.
7. THE NECRONOMICON IS NO LONGER CALLED THE NECRONOMICON
It’s called the “Naturan Demanto” – which is how it is referred to in the recording they listen to in the original film. Three of the books have been made for the production. Due to copyright issues with the original artist, the book has been significantly redesigned. Instead of a dried face, the binding is now assembled with large chunks of stitched-together flesh.
8. THE TRAILER HASN’T SPOILED EVERYTHING
There’s still so much you haven’t seen. I’m truly excited to see how it plays out onscreen myself.
9. THEY USED 50,000 GALLONS OF BLOOD IN ONE DAY
Alverez comments “I know we ordered a truck the other day that was… 50,000 gallons? Just for one scene! The violence is over the top. The showdown, that’s right there behind the wall [referring to the storyboards] you can see there is raining blood. So you can imagine that it’s gonna get to quite an outrageous, over the top, chainsaw action, raining blood…it just goes crazy, right.”
10. THE DEADITES LOOK DIFFERENT
And scarier in my opinion. This film is much darker than the original and it’s designed to scare people who have been watching horror movies for the past 30 years. The revamped approach to the makeup matches that aesthetic. The pronounced jaw and ocular cavities are gone, allowing for a more haunting visage for whomever is unlucky enough to be possessed.
Want more? Check out PART ONE and PART TWO of my set visit for a more complete look at the film.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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