Editorials
[Butcher Block] The Low Budget Guts and Gore of ‘The Evil Dead’
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the finale of “Ash vs. Evil Dead” aired, bringing Ash full circle to where we left him 25 years ago. Well, where we left him in the alternate ending favored by Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell anyway. Regardless of its conclusion, the three-season run on Starz was a gift to fans that managed to seamless weave in original trilogy mythologies and characters while branching out into fun new directions. Above all, it gave fans so much glorious splatstick humor and gore. With the loss of the series still raw, it only seems appropriate to revisit the film that started it all and set the precedent for the torture poor Ashley Joanna Williams/Bruce Campbell would endure for the decades that followed.
The Evil Dead, one of horror’s most beloved classics, has been extensively documented in the decades since release. Much has already been said about Raimi’s determination and ingenuity in production, spearheading production at the young age of 20. That this was a fierce passion project between Raimi, Campbell, and all the friends and family they roped into helping with production. Raimi’s philosophy of torturing his actors in order to capture their pain and anger, believing that it would translate into horror as well. Or even Campbell’s injuries on set due to the sheer physicality his role required. To say the film was a career-launching project for Raimi, Campbell, and producer Rob Tapert is now well known. What’s not as thoroughly discussed, however, are the major contributions by the film’s makeup and effects artist Tom Sullivan.
Sullivan met Raimi through Michigan State University, where his girlfriend was attending at the same time as the budding director. Sullivan and Raimi hit it off immediately over a shared love of stop-motion animation, special effects, and puppetry. The common interests made Sullivan a perfect fit for Raimi’s ambitious endeavor.
With a minuscule budget, estimated around $350,000-400,000, very little of that was designated for special effects. Most of the supplies for the special effects came from hobby stores, hardware stores, and even grocery stores with corn syrup, food coloring, and coffee being major staples for fake blood production. The gruesome melting finale also makes use of Madagascar cockroaches, some mashed up some live, that the team took from the college, snakes, marshmallows, and even oatmeal. Props and prosthetics were often crafted in Raimi’s parents’ garage; stuffing real meat in a fake arm for the scene in which Shelly gets her hand cut off was likely a sight for the neighbors. The bloodbath finale, featuring a stop-motion animated meltdown of Claymation decomposition took three and a half months for Sullivan and his team to complete.
Sullivan is also responsible for designing the Book of the Dead. Raimi’s script described it as having animal skin binding, but Sullivan felt it should look downright evil and drew inspiration from the human skin book covers told in legends of Ilsa, the She Wolf of the SS. So the now iconic staple of the series can be attributed to Sullivan’s input.
Sullivan and Raimi went at the viscera and gore without much thought to what the MPAA might rate the final film, though Sullivan did alter the color of the vomit and bodily fluids the possessed spewed to indicate that they weren’t quite human anymore. But between the amount of demon gore and the blood-soaked deaths and injuries, the MPAA had issues with the content. Considered the most violent film at the time, it earned the moniker “number one nasty” for its status as both a Video Nasty and a top-selling release. The Evil Dead remained banned in many countries for decades for its excessive gore.
The makeup and effects employed on The Evil Dead aren’t game-changing, and by today’s standards, they’re a bit dated. Yet, Sullivan and team did a fantastic job unleashing Raimi’s no holds barred vision of gory punishment inflicted upon the poor souls that entered that fateful cabin in the woods. The demon’s guts are gross, even more so knowing the mashed-up bits that contributed to them. The sheer volume of blood and entrails is not only admirable for its meager budget but for setting the bar high in a fun series that followed.
It’s been 75 years since The Thing From Another World first warned us to “watch the skies”, and filmgoers have done just that by showing up to multiple instances of extraterrestrial contact on the big screen. This makes sense, as a recent CBS news poll estimated that 63% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets, and the ongoing disclosure movement aims to raise that number with each passing day.
With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day leaving many genre fans hungry for more alien footage (preferably of the spooky variety), today I’d like to share a list recommending six underrated alien invasion thrillers for your viewing pleasure. After all, regardless of whether or not you believe that we’re alone in the universe, it can be fun to dream about the worst-case scenario if our cosmic neighbors ever decide to visit.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be focusing on lesser-known invasion stories rather than the popular extraterrestrials of franchises like Alien and Close Encounters of the Third (or even Fourth) Kind. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own alien favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling movie.
While it won’t be featured in this article, I’d highly recommend checking out Dean Alioto’s UFO Abduction/The McPherson Tape if you’re up for some ufology-inspired found footage thrills.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. The Arrival (1996)
Not to be confused with Denis Villeneuve’s Academy Award-winning Amy Adams vehicle about learning to communicate peacefully with extraterrestrial life, David Twohy’s The Arrival is a much more straightforward (but no less entertaining) genre romp where Charlie Sheen faces a global conspiracy involving hostile alien invaders.
It’s not exactly up there with Close Encounters or even Independence Day, but Twohy’s conspiratorial thriller plays out like an exceptionally fun episode of The X-Files that I’d recommend to sci-fi/horror fans who don’t mind a little bit of wonky CGI and 90s excess alongside their alien thrills.
5. Extraterrestrial (2014)
The Vicious Brothers made a name for themselves with the success of 2011’s Grave Encounters, but that was far from the Canadian duo’s only collaboration. And while it’s not exactly a fan favorite, I always point out 2014’s Extraterrestrial as one of their most underrated projects simply because I agree with the filmmakers’ opinion that there aren’t enough ‘cool alien abduction movies’ out there.
Admittedly, the majority of the picture functions like a run-of-the-mill creature feature with paper-thin characters and familiar horror tropes, but I’d argue that the cosmically-terrifying final act elevates the experience to new and memorable heights. The movie also boasts great performances by both Michael Ironside and Emily Perkins – a combination that more than makes up for the occasionally janky CGI.
4. Alien Raiders (2008)
Director Ben Rock has gone on record lamenting how his John-Carpenter-inspired creature feature was forcefully renamed from Supermarket to the painfully obvious Alien Raiders (a change which likely resulted in many potential viewers skipping out on the experience), but the new title doesn’t change the fact that this single-location thriller is something of a hidden gem.
Taking place entirely within a supermarket, Alien Raiders tells the story of an ensemble of customers and employees who are taken hostage by a group of armed men looking for something far more dangerous than an easy payout. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but I’d highly recommend this criminally underseen flick to fans of John Carpenter and the Resident Evil games.
3. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
You’d think that a Ridley-Scott-produced retelling of one of the most infamous real-life UFO sightings of all time would have a bigger following, but I rarely see Justin Barber’s Found Footage period piece brought up during discussions about extraterrestrial-focused horror movies.
This is a huge shame, as Phoenix Forgotten is just as spooky as it is convincing, with this well-researched dive into the Phoenix Lights incident benefiting from surprisingly believable special effects as well as an appropriately horrific finale.
2. Communion (1989)
I wouldn’t blame you for disregarding Whitley Strieber’s controversial book about his alleged close encounter as sensationalist slop, but I’d argue that Phillipe Mora’s 1989 adaptation of these events is much better than the source material. After all, the movie works as a standalone piece of speculative fiction while also benefiting from an incredible performance by the one and only Christopher Walken!
Mora’s take on Communion may not be particularly scary, but the film is still an unforgettable character study regardless of whether or not the abduction really happened. Not only that, but the flick also paved the way for plenty of future sci-fi stories where the extraterrestrial invaders aren’t as evil as they initially appear.
1. Altered (2006)
Originally envisioned as a Sam Raimi-style horror-comedy titled Probed, Eduardo Sánchez (of The Blair Witch Project fame) eventually realized that it would be much more interesting to turn the film into a serious exploration of the emotional aftermath of a traumatic abduction incident.
That’s how we got Altered, a clever inversion of the standard abduction narrative that follows a group of troubled friends as they capture and experiment on an alien in order to enact revenge for their own abduction years prior.
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