The Evil Dead

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong.

And today we have a very special spooky episode

in honor of Halloween.

I don't know how spooky it actually is.

No, it's spooky.

Okay, okay, great, great.

I mean, it's fun.

It's fun.

Chris, what are we talking about today?

Thank you, Lizzie.

As always, Chris Winterbauer joined by Lizzie Bassett.

And today we're discussing the 1981 or 1982 or 1983, depending on where you're talking about it was released, but we will get to that.

Splatterfest, The Evil Dead.

So, Lizzie, obviously, seminal low-budget horror film that cemented, although did not really originate, the whole cabin in the woods trope for generations to come.

Okay, I was wondering about that.

Yeah, Lizzie, had you ever seen The Evil Dead before?

You know, Chris, I had not.

I had a very good friend in college who was really obsessed with Army of Darkness, which I believe is the third one.

It is.

It's incredible.

It's like, it's such a fun, funny, over-the-top movie.

So I've actually seen that movie a ton of times.

And for some reason, he never made me watch The Evil Dead or Evil Dead 2.

This was a bit of a surprise just because I was so used to the tone of Army of Darkness.

And like while it's here in little bits and pieces.

It's not that here.

It's, I mean, there's like moments of it.

Yeah.

But yeah, I was very surprised by this movie.

It really is.

It's a goofest.

It's just everyone is so gooey.

No one has any bones.

They're just smushing left and right and not in the sexy way.

And

it was something else.

Yeah, I had seen Evil Dead a number of times and I loved the franchise.

Similarly, I kind of grew up on Army of Darkness.

It's great.

I was part of this.

Yeah, I was part of this rotating trope of like Willow, Army of Darkness, the Dark Crystal movies that I really loved as a child.

And the Evil Dead was always and kind of remains my least favorite of the original trilogy.

I like Evil Dead 2 more than The Evil Dead.

It's basically a requel the first one.

And so I always kind of admired the original more than enjoyed it.

And I kind of felt the same way upon re-watching it.

I think this one feels a bit more mean-spirited than the later installments do to me.

It's just not as funny, for sure.

Like, well, it doesn't have the same self-awareness that you get later on.

There are glimmers of it, but it takes itself far more seriously than I expected.

Yeah, I think a lot of the humor comes later, but I think there are winks, as we'll see.

And this is very much Sam Raimi's experimental phase, which we'll talk about.

Of course, guys, there is a deep, loyal cult following to this film.

We do enjoy it.

And I have to say, the chutzpah to make it, as we'll learn today, or borderline psychopathy to get it done is crazy.

I love the camera work.

The practical effects are super fun.

I really enjoyed it.

Yeah.

And Bruce Campbell, who in his introductory shot looks like a Yassified Lloyd Christmas from Dumb and Dumber, is amazing.

He fully has a dumb and dumber bullpet in this movie.

And he's such a handsome man.

And when it first he showed up, I was like, oh my gosh,

what happened?

Yeah, it's a bad haircut.

He hadn't really grown into the chin yet, as we'll describe.

No, yeah, the chin definitely was wearing him in this movie.

Absolutely.

All right.

Before we dive in, a quick note, guys, this episode was made possible by our supporters on Patreon.

I want to call that out, especially because of the way this movie was financed.

Not only did you guys give us the financial freedom to make this podcast, you also chose this movie in our most recent poll.

So, thank you for voting.

If you're listening and you are interested in voting in our next poll, which is a holiday-themed poll and may feature the greatest Christmas movie of all time, diehard.

You can join our Patreon, head to www.patreon.com/slash whatwentwrong podcast to learn more.

You can also get an ad-free RSS feed or a shout-out at the end of this episode.

And Lizzie will be doing some really horrifying shout-outs at the end of this episode.

So stick around for that.

I was trying to think of what a good like Christmas noise would be, like the Halloween laughs.

And I realized there's no spooky Christmas laugh that I could bring in during that.

And I can't make jingle bells with my mouth.

So I apologize.

Well, if Die Hard wins, you'll have to grace us with your best Hans Gruber impersonation for our full-stop shout-outs.

No problem.

I actually have a pretty good German accent, so we'll see how that goes.

One more disclaimer, guys, before we dive in.

There is possibly more information available on this film than almost any film that I have looked into.

I encourage all of you to check out the incredible resources available, including Bruce Campbell's book, If Chins Could Kill, Evil Dead by Kate Egan, Rush's by Josh Becker, which includes his diaries from the shoot.

You can also find his diaries online, the 2009 DVD commentary on the film, the archive sites bookofthedead.ws and evildeadarchives.com, along with many, many more interviews, documentaries, etc.

This could have been a 10-part episode.

Instead, I hope that it can serve as a primer, an introduction to the world of the Evild Dead for you.

And if you want to go down this rabbit hole, again, I encourage you to check out any of those resources I just mentioned.

All right, on to the details.

The Evil Dead is a 1981 horror comedy film written and directed by Wundekind, more or less first-time director Sam Raimi, lensed by Tim Philo, with special effects by Tom Sullivan, who received a great deal of uncredited assistance from Bart Pierce, who officially did the optical effects for the film, and produced by Rob Tappert.

It was eventually distributed in the United States by New Line Cinema for its theatrical run.

Thorne EMI handled VHS in the United States, and it was distributed in the UK by Palace Pictures.

We'll get to all of that fun stuff later.

It, of course, stars Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard de Manincourt, Betsy Baker, and Teresa Tilley.

As the IMDb logline says, five friends travel to a cabin in the woods where they unknowingly release flesh-possessing demons.

And that is the whole movie.

That's it, yeah, nailed it.

The story of Evil Dead's winding, pothole-laden, multi-year, truly treacherous road to the silver screen begins not in ancient Sumeria or the mountains of Tennessee, but instead the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan.

It was there that Sam Raimi, the kindest, funniest, most charming little sociopath in a suit you've ever seen, was born into a conservative Jewish family in 1959 at the same hospital as Bruce Campbell.

Wow.

Yep, childhood friends.

Are they the same age?

Almost.

Campbell, I believe, is a hair older.

Oh, okay.

So as Campbell said, from a young age, it was obvious that Raimi was destined to be a magician, not a director.

Campbell was actually his assistant at some of his shows.

Now, I think that kind of makes sense, as we'll talk about in this episode.

It seems like he is a showman, right, with the way that he makes his films more than anything.

And I did read, but could not confirm that his interest in magic may have stemmed from his older brother, Sander, who performed tricks for Sam when he was little.

And Sander tragically drowned in a swimming accident in 1970 when he was 15 and Sam Raimi was only 11.

Oh no.

And it seems like this was a really formative time for him.

Obviously, the cusp of puberty, losing an older sibling.

And so regardless of the inspiration, Sam took up the mantle of magic in his house and he loved to elicit a reaction from his audience.

So like the thing that everybody says about him in all these interviews is that he just wanted the audience to be entertained.

So shock, awe, wonder, how did he do that?

Magic seemed to be the best way to get those reactions until he discovered the power of movies.

And Lizzie, could you guess what film may have inspired a young Sam Raimi?

I'm going to go out on a limb here just because of the amount of,

I'm probably wrong, but the amount of sort of pea soup-like substances in this movie.

And I'm going to say The Exorcist.

No, and that's because I totally tricked you.

It actually was a home movie.

Okay.

And so it was, I know,

you got it wrong.

So it wasn't, it wasn't a feature film.

Sam Raimi's dad actually shot a 16-millimeter film of family events.

And he shot a birthday party one time and he developed the film and then he played it back on the wall.

And at first, Raimi's watching it, and everything seems normal.

Like, kids blow out the candles, they eat the cake, they open the presents, they leave the party.

But then the next scene is the kids arriving at the party.

And for the first time, Sam Raimi understood, holy shit, you can reorder time with film.

Like the ultimate magic trick.

I can shoot something one way, reorganize it, and it means something completely different.

So he later said in an interview, when I saw that, I went, oh my God, it's a masterpiece.

You have altered time, meaning his dad's like, you know, 16 millimeter home film.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

This was a miracle I didn't think should really have been in the hands of mortals that you could capture time and rearrange its sequencing.

I had to be involved in that.

That's what drew me to the thing.

Not the drama of movies, just this simple idea of capturing reality in a can and juggling it, which I think is like a really interesting approach.

It wasn't, you know, Jaws or something enormous that made him want to do it.

It was something as small as a family movie.

Yeah.

So Campbell described it as like a logical transition to the next level of sleight of hand, basically.

And lucky for Raimi, he happened to grow up in a neighborhood full of aspiring filmmakers.

So let's listen to a little clip of Brucey talking about the early days running around shooting Super 8 film with Sam Raimi in the neighborhoods of Detroit.

There was a nucleus of about six of us who had this interest, and we all were split apart in different neighborhoods.

We had a little neighborhood here, and Sam was over in his little neighborhood making Super 8 movies.

Sam did a lot of magic, and so films seemed like a natural extension for him to do that.

And so he was doing these silly little movies and I was doing silly little movies.

And another guy, Scott Spiegel, who co-wrote Evil Dead 2, was making like three Stooge rip-offs where he'd used the actual soundtrack but put in his own visuals.

And then we kind of all hooked up in high school and then

we found that, you know, one guy had costumes and another guy had some, had a good camera.

So we combined all of our facilities and then we were able to on weekends we just would go out and shoot

so they formed this kind of like loose neighborhood collective and the key players seem to have been Sam Raimi Bruce Campbell Sam's two brothers Ivan Raimi who was his older brother and Ted Raimi who's his younger brother and Ted Raimi's obviously an actor now neither of those two are the one that passed away obviously no sander passed away before this had happened got it and then their classmates scott Spiegel, who Campbell mentions, and Josh Becker, all of whom will come up throughout this episode.

Also, we should mention on the periphery is eventual The Evil Dead co-star Ellen Sandweiss, who plays Cheryl Williams Ash's sister in the film.

She's great.

She's great.

And she was not a core member, though.

And I think there's an important distinction here.

She later said, they got girls to be in their movies when they needed one, but we were never part of the movie-making group.

That was definitely the boys, and they had their own boys club.

Sure.

So the boys cranked out dozens of movies.

They all did everything.

It wasn't like Sam was the director and you know what I mean.

Everyone else had other roles.

They rotated roles.

Sam acted, Bruce acted, they all directed, they operated the cameras.

It seems like they did every genre except for one.

We can confirm that they did comedies, westerns, war movies, dramas, even a James Bond spoof, but it seems like they never did horror.

That's so interesting because that feels like the most obvious transition from magic, to be honest.

So much of it is

magic eye-type tricks and

in-camera tricks.

Yeah.

And we'll get to the moment when Raimi kind of discovers that, but it's much later than you might think.

So high school comes to an end.

Raimi goes to Michigan State University to join his brother Ivan, who is three years ahead of him.

And now I did read in one source that his parents were kind of pushing him to grow up, get an education, find a job, and that Raimi did take some film classes, but decided to major in English because his number one goal was to avoid working at his dad's furniture store, which he saw as like the end of his life.

Got bad news for you, Sam.

You can totally work at a furniture store with an English degree.

That's true.

That's actually the fastest way to a furniture store.

It sure is.

I would like to note that I did read a conflicting quote attributed to Raimi's father that he encouraged Raimi to pursue literature, quote, so that when you finally make pictures, you have something to bring to it, end quote.

Oh, I hope that's the right one.

Yeah, I hope so too.

So it was at MSU that Raimi met arguably the second most impactful collaborator in the story besides Bruce Campbell, and that is Rob Tappert.

So Rob was three years older than Raimi.

He was Ivan's roommate.

He was an economics major, and he also dreamed of making movies, but he couldn't imagine doing it because Hollywood was 3,000 miles away.

That was until Raimi said, check out these Super 8 videos I've been making with my buddies.

And Rob was like, holy shit, this is amazing.

Like, these are the greatest things I've ever seen.

And he's like, we could totally make movies.

So they formed the MSU Society for Creative Filmmaking.

And this does something really huge for them.

Basically, they have access to a whole network of collaborators and audience feedback for the first time.

So Sam Raimi basically discovers the magic of test screenings when he's in college.

He could fill an auditorium with people who had actually paid to watch his movies, like a dollar, usually a ticket, and he could study their reactions.

He even screened some of his stuff from high school.

And this is a game changer because they actually used to pay people 10 cents a ticket to come watch the movies that they made before.

So they would actually pay people to watch.

And now they're actually making money and they're getting to learn from how people are reacting to it.

And I think like, this is why you go to film school, right?

It's to get access to an audience.

It's to get access to feedback.

It's also to get access to people who are willing to work on your movies for free, which Raimi has now.

In some ways, though, this is maybe even more valuable than going to like a conservatory style school because you're bringing in a lot of people who maybe don't know anything about film, don't want to work on film, don't want to even work in the arts, but they're coming to see the movies.

And like, I feel like that's something that often is missing from an art school education is like how to appeal to a wider audience, which it seems like he was getting.

Absolutely.

He's seeing what an actual cross-section of America might think of his films as opposed to, let's be honest, and I went to film school, snobby film school assholes who are going to tell him everything he's doing wrong, whether or not they're right.

Yeah, exactly.

I went to theater school, same thing.

Yeah.

Now, at the same time, they're putting all these ads in the local student papers to try to get people to come to the movies and try to get people to join their club.

And one of these ads catches the eye of the next important collaborator.

Tom Sullivan.

So Tom Sullivan, who would end up doing the special effects and makeup in The Evil Dead, was actually 10 years older than these college kids.

And he was an illustrator, but he aspired to do makeup and special effects for the movies.

I think similar to everybody else, he was like, I'm in Detroit.

How am I going to get to work on a movie?

His wife was a student.

at MSU, though.

So he was flipping through the school paper in 1978.

He sees this article about the Society for Creative Filmmaking.

And these ads were like very inventive.

They're very funny, like Sam Raimi.

And he says, hey, can I come work with you guys?

And they say, yeah, what do do you do?

And he says, well, I do illustrations.

So he starts doing the ads and the titles for all of their movies.

So he gets wrapped into the fold.

And just before this, they'd actually had their biggest hit yet.

The movie's called The Happy Valley Kid.

It's a short film about a bullied student played by Rob Tappert.

He also acted at the time, who finally apparently snaps.

I don't, I wasn't able to watch it.

I couldn't find it, but it sounds like kind of a weird

incel turned violent film, like very funny i think it was kind of a comedy a dark comedy would be funnier at the time sure yeah yeah definitely but it cost 700 to make and it turned a profit of five thousand dollars wow so they sold five thousand they sold fifty seven hundred tickets to this short film which is crazy they did 44 packed house screenings according to bruce campbell and the only reason they had to stop screening it was because the reel of the film fell apart Oh, no, they ran it so many times that they physically could not run it anymore, which is just that's that's like the dream, that's like going viral, you know what I mean?

The equivalent of going viral, I feel like, at Michigan State University in 1978.

Sure,

so this gives them the confidence to write their first feature film, and it's a crime comedy called It's Murder.

It starred Scott Spiegel and Sam Raimi.

He wrote it, directed it, starred in it.

Spiegel plays a detective whose name is Richard Les, aka Dick Les,

trying to figure out who murdered an old man whose inheritance has gone to Raimi's, I guess, somewhat slimy character.

Raimi not only wrote, directed, and starred in the film, he poured all of his money into it because it had a car chase, a big cast.

They shot at 24 frames per second as opposed to 18, which was more expensive because it's more film.

They took out a bunch of expensive ads.

They have this incredible custom poster, basically everything you'd expect from something called It's Murder.

Yeah, Sam Raimi looks like Rick Moranis and Ghostbusters in this poster.

And it's described as the most deadly motion picture ever made.

And it features fake poll quotes

from

publications, a la the new megalopolis trailer that featured fake poll quotes.

A new cult film, We Died Laughing from the Jonestown Gazette.

Uh-huh.

Art in its purest form from the New Yorker.

So they just absolutely made up poll quotes and attempted to sell people on their new feature film.

There was only one problem.

It cost them $2,000 and everyone absolutely hated it.

That'll happen.

Also, I just want to, I can't remember exactly when the Jonestown massacre happened, but I wonder if that

was right around.

Yeah, I think that was intentional.

So, Lizzie, I'd like to give you a sense of Sam Raimi and I'll play you a brief clip of him discussing this big failure setback in his early film career.

There's one guy in the audience.

So I'm showing the movie that I worked really hard on.

This is the negative.

I spent all my life savings on it.

And halfway through the movie, the guy throws up his arms and says, this sucks.

And he walks down out of the theater and I hear his feet echoing,

and I was a projectionist, you know, and I said, well, don't you want your money back?

Yeah, keep it.

And so I had his buck fifty, but that door slammed.

I was left alone with the movie.

And I couldn't take the film out of the projector.

I remember thinking, do I rewind the movie

30 minutes or do I, I guess I'll watch it.

It's a very sad 40 minutes watching the rest of that movie alone in that theater in the darkness, thinking, I've got to make better movies than this because I can't live like this.

It's just too awful.

Oh, no.

Yeah, so Raimi had a pretty tough time with that film, but I think it led to

kind of his most important rule for filmmaking that he had the standard he'd held himself to, which is that the one rule for a filmmaker is you have to entertain the audience that's your only job thank you yes which does seem to get forgotten somewhat frequently that's his only rule he says if i failed to entertain the audience it doesn't matter if i'm trying to say something if it makes a point it all that matters is that they are entertained i agree people might hate me for that i agree i'm with you And I'm a fan of borrow, but I do think it needs to be entertaining, even if it's boring.

Yes.

There was one moment, though, Lizzie, that worked in the film consistently.

One of the bad guys jumped out of the back seat of a car and attacked one of the good guys in the front seat of the car.

And it was an unexpected moment.

And the audience jumped every single time this moment happened.

And they were genuinely scared.

And Sam Ramey discovered the power of the jump scare for the first time.

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Now, Raimi had not had any interest in horror, but Rob Tappert had.

He was obviously the econ major.

He was going to be the producer of The Evil Dead.

And he said, guys, if we're going to make a real feature film, it should be a horror film.

And that's because there were two markets available where you could get in as a low-budget feature,

Drive-Ins and VHS.

Both of which heavily feature horror.

Horror, exploitation, you know, low-budget everything.

You could get in on drive-in lots and you could get into people's homes on VHS.

This was like kind of the birth of the home video market is happening right around this time.

The only problem is, of course, Sam Raimi hates horror.

He is a self-described coward who actively dislikes the experience of being scared.

So Rob Tappert says, look, just come see this new horror film with me.

It was shot for almost nothing and it's incredible.

And Lizzie, this is 1978, 1979.

And he guesses as to why it is a seminal, groundbreaking, it is synonymous with the holiday happening in three days.

Oh, Halloween.

No, it was Sam Raimi's dad's home movie.

No, it was Halloween.

And so Tappert takes Raimi to see the movie.

Raimi loves it.

And Tappert turns to him and he goes, yeah, so can you make a movie as good as that?

And Raimi says, no,

absolutely not.

But we could make something almost as good.

And so Raimi, Tappert, and Campbell spend the next few months squeezing into the front seat of their car and driving to see as many drive-in horror films as they can.

Like the whole gamut.

Super low budget, medium budget, high budget, American, British, Italian, Mexican.

And the trend that they notice that's really encouraging is that unlike other genres, horror doesn't need name actors, fancy costumes, or expensive locations.

No.

And that's huge because they have none of those things.

Frequently only needs one location.

Exactly.

So they made a scary short called Clockwork, which is technically a serial killer story.

It's seven minutes long.

A man lurks in and around a woman's house.

She comes home alone.

He breaks in.

Eventually he stabs her.

Then she stabs him.

You guys can actually watch it on YouTube.

And through this short, basically, they were testing how to do different types of scares on the audience.

And it's at this time that Raimi builds the, quote, three good laws of a horror film.

One, the innocent must suffer.

Two, the guilty must be punished.

And three, the hero must taste blood to be a man.

I should also note that those are kind of the rules.

of eventually the cabin in the woods, this end up of Evil Dead.

So Raimi gets to work on a very simple and contained script.

Five college students travel to a a remote cabin, accidentally wake up, originally an ancient Egyptian, but eventually Sumerian demon.

Mayhem ensues, and he calls it Book of the Dead.

There is a Book of the Dead in this.

There is.

He writes the first draft while he's at Michigan State.

He actually did it as part of his English major.

He submitted it for independent study credit under Professor Sheila Roberts.

Kudos to Sheila.

I guess she gave him some feedback.

Might have ended up in the movie, for all I know.

There's a lot of polls from H.P.

Lovecraft.

The Book of the Dead is a fairly direct lift of Lovecraft's Book of the Dead called The Necronomicon.

Well, which is what this is called as well.

Yes, exactly.

Eventually.

Eventually.

It's a fictional grimoire and obviously pulls from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

There's also a short story by Lovecraft called The Whisperer in the Darkness that takes place in a remote cabin that Raimi may have been pulling from.

Now, I also need to quickly mention, guys, I know there is a film from 1970 called Equinox, which bears a striking similarity to Evil Dead.

Lizzie, you've never seen it.

You've never heard of it.

It's a tiny budget film, again, shot by some kids.

It's released in 1970.

It features a group of college students who go to a cabin in the woods.

There is a Book of the Dead, a professor researching that Book of the Dead.

They play a tape.

There are demons.

Oh, wow.

There is a sexual assault of one of the female characters by a demon.

Here's what I'll say.

Maybe Raimi saw it.

We don't know.

I couldn't find any source to confirm this.

It's much more an homage to like the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion style of monster movies from you know 30 40 years prior right that's jason and the argonauts which we frequently mention the stop motion skeletons exactly if you'd like to watch it you guys can and decide for yourselves if it's a lift or not it's on youtube you can get the dvd through criterion for what it's worth i did watch it it's funny that like high high level it seems oh my god it's so similar if you watch it it in my opinion doesn't feel particularly similar.

Tonally, it feels like a wildly different movie.

Also, how accessible would that have been to him in the late 70s?

Yeah, it's possible, you know, he caught it at a drive-thru or something like that, or maybe saw it on VHS.

That's true.

To me, it's like they both lean pretty heavily on classic tropes as opposed to one stealing from the other.

Sorry, you did mention this is not the first Cabin in the Woods.

What is?

Do we know what would have been it?

That Equinox is the film that I was

or one of them.

Yeah, at least with the college, you know, the teens going to the Cabin in the Woods sort of angle.

Okay.

So Raimi's script at first was actually much more similar to the Texas chainsaw massacre originally.

And you can see a lot of similarities, including obviously the use of a chainsaw in this film.

Sure, which will, of course, come back in later installments of the franchise.

To replace an art.

Uh-huh.

So Raimi's got his script and he does the smart thing.

He drops out of school.

This was in March of 1979.

And fun fact, Tappard actually says that he and Raimi were evicted from their apartment for being too loud while editing movies.

But he decides they need more than a script.

They need a proof of concept.

So they take all the best scares in the script.

They cut it down to like 20 pages and they shoot a 30-minute Super 8 concept film called Within the Woods.

The point of this is to show people we know how to make something scary.

We know how to make something that's going to entertain an audience, and you should invest your money into this film.

And so to be clear, they're not doing this to take it to Hollywood.

They are doing this to try to get money locally to make this film.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

So they basically pull all their money from odd jobs, $1,600.

They shoot the film in six days.

It stars Bruce Campbell, Scott Spiegel, their longtime collaborator, Ellen Sandweiss, and Mary Valenti, who was Rob Tappert's family friend.

Obviously, Spiegel and Valenti do not end up in The Evil Dead.

Campbell and Sandweiss do.

Also, this was Tom Sullivan's first real chance to test out makeup and effects.

You can watch a very bad transfer of the film on YouTube.

It's really hard to see.

It's never been properly released.

That being said, there are a lot of similarities, obviously.

The plot is very similar.

Two couples go to a cabin in the woods.

One couple stays in, they play Monopoly.

The other goes into the woods for a picnic.

That's Bruce Campbell.

He uncovers an ancient Native American grave, disturbs it, goes missing.

He's found dead and mutilated, returns possessed by a demon.

Everybody kills each other until finally, in an interesting twist, it's a gender-swapped version of The Evil Dead.

Ellen Sandweiss's character dismembers Bruce Campbell with a chainsaw at the end of this one.

Oh.

So Campbell's the demon and the woman is the final girl and takes out Bruce with a chainsaw.

It also does feature a lot of the camera moves that would be seen in Evil Dead.

So you can see kind of the stylistic similarities.

And again, there's more on this online, you guys, if you want to watch it.

So they screen the movie at their old high school.

The audience is terrified.

It's a huge success.

They think, great, we have our proof of concept.

Unfortunately, they also did a rough pass on the budget at about this time.

And Lizzie, any guess as to what they thought Raimi's 66-page script would cost to shoot?

$15,000, $20,000.

$150,000.

I don't think they're going to get that in Michigan.

Well, you might be right.

It was 100 times more than they'd spent on Within the Woods.

It was expensive, obviously, because it was longer.

It had a lot more effects.

They needed a lot more crew.

They needed a bigger location that they could kind of tear apart.

But also, they needed a different kind of film.

So they'd shot on Super 8 up until this time.

Right, you can't for this.

You can't.

So they were going to try to shoot it on Super 8 and blow Super 8 up to 35 millimeter for projection.

They did a test film at Raimi's mother's lingerie store.

God bless the Raimi parents.

They're like letting their son shoot at all these locations.

They're so supportive, I'm convinced.

They called it Terror at Lulu's.

And apparently it was unwatchable.

The grain was quote, the size of hailstones.

Oh, no.

And you just couldn't see what was happening on screen.

So they had to move up a format and shoot on 16 millimeter film, which is a larger negative, but it's much more expensive.

There's a higher chance something could go wrong and they'd need to buy more film.

It seems like this is roughly when they meet cinematographer Tim Philo.

He meets them after a screening of Within the Woods.

He had experience with 16 millimeter film.

And even though he was 20 years old, they were like, oh my God, this guy's an old vet.

He knows what he's doing.

And so they hire him.

Everyone's 20 years old.

Apparently, Sam Raimi wears a suit all the time.

And if anybody is even a year older than him, he calls them sir.

Oh, my God.

To the point where they're like annoyed with him.

They're like, dude, I'm 25.

He's like, yes, sir.

Thank you, sir.

Oh, no.

So they also started meeting with professionals in the Detroit commercial industry, obviously a lot of auto commercials, auto shows, that sort of thing.

And everybody's telling them the same thing.

Don't try to make your own movie.

Like we've all tried to make our own features.

It never works.

Don't do it.

And they're like, this is getting really depressing.

So they try to get another tool to raise financing called an intent to distribute, which basically Lizzie means they're going to regional sub-distributors.

So the way that like distribution was set up in the United States for a low-budget movie like this, if you wanted to get into VHS or drive-ins, you actually would handle it with sub-regions of the United States in a lot of instances.

And then you would kind of grow the movie, like they could do a Midwest sub-region, you know, and then move on to other areas.

Basically, they were trying to get a piece of paper from a distributor saying, hey, if this movie's any good, we'll distribute it.

We'll release it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's not an actual commitment.

It's just saying, we'll watch the movie when it's done, basically.

So they started asking the distributors what they want to see in a movie.

And mostly it was just feedback on the title, which was, don't put the word devil in it.

It'll upset religious conservatives.

Also, you should change the title to House of the Dead because no movie with the word house or dead in the title didn't make money.

Remember, this is 10 years after the breakout success of George Romero's tiny indie film, Night of the Living Dead, and a year after his much bigger budget follow-up, Dawn of the Dead.

So, dead films, very successful.

Sure.

That's the kind of advice that maybe don't.

Young filmmakers.

Yeah.

Well, it's also funny.

Night of the Living Dead's original title was Night of Anubis and then Night of the Flesh Eaters.

And then they had been convinced to change the title to Night of the Living Dead, kind of at the last minute.

Okay, well, that is better.

But I love the like, we've seen two movies do pretty well with these two words in them.

So you might want to include those.

Yeah, exactly.

Here's a word chart, and it's got two words on it.

Yeah.

Now, they did receive some pretty consistent, funny feedback on the script, which was basically you can't have five minutes of setup and 60 minutes of.

like violence and destruction and expect people to sit through it.

Well, they would beg to differ, I think, by the end end result.

I agree.

And what's funny is the firm that gave them that specific feedback is a distributor called Levitt Pickman, based out of New York.

They actually did give them an intent to distribute.

So, even though they felt that way, it seems like they saw something in the movie.

So, they meet with an attorney, Phil Gillis, who was a family friend of Rob Tappert.

He'd actually been interested in Showbiz.

He was in an amateur theater group and he'd helped Tappert and his brother get out of some legal trouble back in the day.

So, Gillis and another attorney from his firm, Brian Manusian, help Raimi put together what's called basically a limited partnership agreement.

It's basically a document that they can present to investors that shows that there's a legal framework around how their investments in the movie will work.

It's almost like a Kickstarter.

Basically, they're going to try to raise $150,000 and they get access to the money if they hit $90,000.

Sure.

Okay.

So summer of 1979, Raimi, Tappert, Campbell hit the pavement.

They buy suits.

They buy briefcases.

Just imagine them in like oversight.

Briefcases.

Nothing.

One piece of paper.

One piece of paper.

And they, based on nothing, promised potential investors that they would get a return of 2x on their investment.

That was their projection.

You will make 2x of your investment.

They start with family, family friends, friends, and friends of friends.

And then they expand to local lawyers, dentists, doctors, realtors, and contractors.

They screened Within the Woods on a projector in living rooms after dinner parties in the soap aisle of a supermarket where Campbell used to work.

Oh my God.

Not a football game.

And it seems like because they were so far from Hollywood, some people were intrigued by this unique investment opportunity.

It was something that people were interested in, and they also got a boost from the Detroit News.

So they got Within the Woods to screen before a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at a local theater.

Oh, perfect.

Okay.

Yep.

And there was a writer there to cover Rocky Horror Picture Show.

He or she gave them a glowing review in the Detroit news.

The quote is: It probably would never be advertised alongside the glossy, big-budget horror movies of our time, but you wouldn't easily forget a locally produced little film called Within the Woods.

In just 32 minutes, it provided more chills, thrills, and squeamish giggles than much recent professional duds like Prophecy and the Amityville horror combined.

All right, backers, Lizzie.

Let's talk about some of the high rollers that invested in the evil dead.

Steve's vacuum shop.

Well, Carol's lipstick stands.

A local entrepreneur who met Raimi at Kmart.

They were both there to get film developed.

A guy who worked at a local lighting company where they had rented equipment.

Basically said, I'm going to hold off my annual trip to Vegas and give you the money instead.

There was a law firm pension fund.

That seems wildly irresponsible.

An heir to the Delta three-way faucet, my personal favorite.

Wow.

Sam Raimi and Rob Tappert's relatives.

I'm guessing their parents.

And then, of course, Raimi, Tappert, and Campbell each had 13.3% stakes in the film.

So they were equal partners in the movie.

None of the other casts and crew are listed.

You can actually see the investment breakdown online.

Oh, wow.

The original document.

It's a really cool scan.

All right.

Let's talk about casting and auditions.

So there's only three roles to fill because Campbell's going to be Ash and Sandweiss is going to be Cheryl.

Right.

They see 100 actors for these roles, which is a lot

of local Detroit movie.

Lissy, do you think it's because so many people wanted to be in it?

No.

It's because a lot of people didn't want to be in it in the end.

People were a little weirded out by this project.

It had a vague, grainy ad in the Detroit news.

They held auditions in Raimi's basement.

Apparently, many of the actresses arrived with their boyfriends or just men they paid to come with them.

Honestly, ladies, buckle up for Los Angeles.

It's not better.

In fact, it's a lot worse.

And you probably will get invited to a lot of auditions in men's basements.

Oh, no.

Don't go.

Not a lot of basements in California.

Okay, moving on from that reference.

Non-union meant it only paid $100 a week.

And for reference, Lizzie, local car shows, this is like the height of the Detroit auto industry, paid $700 a week for people modeling in car shows, including Betsy Baker, I believe, who ended up being in the film, was doing car shows.

And of course, it was also a makeup-heavy horror film being directed by a 20-year-old college dropout.

Sam Raimi's 20 years old with a baby face, and he wears an oversized suit.

It reminds me of Louie's agent in the show, Louie, who's like just a teenage boy.

Eventually, they convinced Betsy Baker to join as Linda.

Ash's girlfriend, Teresa Tilley, who was the daughter of the CPA who had helped them create projections for their investor contract.

Great.

And Richard de Manincore, who plays the Scott role that Scott Spiegel had played within the woods.

And of course, Teresa Telly was credited as Sarah York, Richard de Manincore as Hal Delerich, since they were both SAG actors working on a non-union project.

Oh.

So they were going off card.

So they get old friends and old collaborators to take up all the crew positions that they need.

Tom Sullivan does special effects.

Josh Becker, childhood friend, joins up as a PA and eventually Lighting Tech, and he does a ton of stuff, sound recordist.

And by November of 1979, they had raised drum roll david

$85,000.

Oh no, that's close.

That's close to it.

Oh no.

They just could not raise.

the remaining $5,000 for the life of them.

So they actually had to send a desperate letter to their investors saying, please just give us access to the money at $85,000 for the love of God.

And the investors said yes because it was mostly their parents and

family friends.

So crisis averted, Lizzie.

They have $85,000 of the proposed $150,000 budget needed to go shoot this movie.

But it took them way too long to raise this money.

The original plan was like they were going to raise the money in the spring, shoot the movie in Michigan in the summer, but securing the funding took too long.

They need to shoot it in the winter now.

And you're not going to do that in Michigan.

You sure are not.

So they head south to Tennessee.

They go for the weather and the friendly state film commission.

They were given a bridge to destroy.

Oh.

Plus, the cost of labor was cheap, but little did they know they were heading into a very unusual winter.

This timeline is the best reconstruction I could do.

It's available in much more detail online or through all of these books, but let's get through the high-level details of production, Lizzie, which was

a gauntlet.

November 11th, 1979, the cast and crew, 17 people in total, so five casts, 12 crew, arrive in Tennessee with a plan to shoot for six weeks.

In addition to the names we've discussed, I'd like to shout out Steve Frankel, art director.

Seems like he was very good with his hands and handled most of the construction.

Don Campbell, who was a PA, and Bruce Campbell's brother, who had no interest in filmmaking and just wanted the money and to quote rec stuff, John Mason, who is a sound recordist for the film, and Bart Pierce, who, as we mentioned earlier, did a lot of uncredited special effects work assisting Tom Sullivan.

He was also responsible for optical special effects for the film.

He was only in Tennessee for a few days and was primarily involved in post and the pickups that they did after the original shoot.

The cast is getting paid $100 a week, the crew $50 a week.

What part of Tennessee are they in?

Because Tennessee is not, like, especially if you're near the Smoky Mountains, it's not like warm at that point.

Nope.

It's actually like pretty cold.

Yeah.

They're basically in Morristown, which is an hour outside of Knoxville, and it is up in the mountains.

And they are living in a shared house, four-bedroom, and they're mostly sleeping on the floor and army cots.

Their location manager and basically their Tennessee liaison is a fellow named Gary Holt, who claimed to be Elvis' former driver and sounds wildly eccentric.

Could have been not that far from Graceland.

That's true.

According to Josh Becker's journal, on their first day on location, Gary Holt played everyone a song he had written and recorded, quote, it was about 10 minutes long with a guy talking about the horrors of a Vietnam war vet, end quote.

Oh, no.

To make matters worse, the cabin they picked out that would be used for 90% of the shoot was no longer available.

So they showed up and there was no cabin.

Why?

I think it was getting demolished.

Apparently, this actually wasn't a surprise to Raimi and Tappert.

They had been told the day before they left for tennessee that the cabin was no longer available they were just hoping that maybe it would still be there yeah they were like if we don't leave like we will never get everybody you know what i mean to get there to make this movie and josh becker also knew and wanted to tell people and they basically told him to shut the up and not say anything and there was this interesting dichotomy where raime and tappert called Becker the canary in the coal mine because he was so worried about everything.

But Becker had good reason to be worried about everything.

He He was like, guys, we're already behind.

We're going to be stuck here through the holidays.

And that was a very prescient concern.

They found a new cabin pretty quickly.

On November 13th, after scouting some sketchy locations, including the abandoned resort filled with squatters.

Now, this new cabin was in a valley formerly used as grazeland for cattle.

Remember that?

It was, as you've seen in the film, Lizzie, very isolated at the end of a long dark road.

Had a bit of a spooky history itself, the mysterious death of a family inside in the middle of of the night.

Okay.

But most importantly, it had no electricity, no running water, no sewage system or telephone line.

And also, every room was full of four to six inches of cow dung.

Like caked to the caked.

It was unshootable in its current state, basically.

Also, Tom Sullivan's props weren't ready.

I think you mean all the oatmeal that he had to order.

The pounds of goo that he needed to reduce.

The book of the dead wasn't ready.

Basically, like the little knife with the skulls on it was the only thing ready.

The Book of the Dead wasn't ready.

The casts and molds of actors' faces weren't ready.

He'd only gotten the script three weeks before they started shooting the locked script, so he didn't have time to get anything ready.

So Raimi starts shooting exterior shots, and anybody not involved in the actual shot he's shooting is tasked with fixing up the cabin.

And that includes the entire cast.

And by fixing up the cabin, you mean shoveling the shit out of the cabin.

Yes, shoveling cow poop out of the cabin, rigging electricity, knocking down walls, raising ceilings, popped a couple of window panes to avoid glare, and building a new facade for the fireplace.

Wow.

Quite a bit to do.

The cabin also doesn't have a basement.

Those scenes were picked up later, as we'll discuss.

Now, Lisa, of course, there are two crucial amenities that they were not able to get going, and they would have to go without the entire chute.

Bathroom.

Ding, ding, ding, sewage.

That's one.

And running water.

Don't need them.

You're camping.

They didn't even have an outhouse.

You just had to go take a dump in the woods if you had to go.

Well, it's already full of cow shit.

Why not?

It's true.

While they didn't have running water, they had plenty of hot coffee.

Why?

Because it was part of Raimi's recipe for fake blood.

It was a combination of coffee, corn syrup, and red dye, and it was insanely sticky.

And the actors and cabin were caked in it.

It hardened when it dried.

It pulled out hair if you tried to remove it without hot water.

And they didn't have hot water, so they didn't have running water.

So they used hot coffee to get the blood off of themselves in between takes.

This sounds horrible.

Wait, but I'm sorry.

So they do have running water in a bathroom in the other place that they're all sleeping packed into.

Yes, which is a car ride away.

Great, good.

So you cannot leave set to return to it to like get clean up.

You have to do that on set.

Okay.

To add insult to injury, after they washed their hands in hot coffee, their hands would freeze because as you mentioned, Lizzie, Tennessee is having an unseasonably cold winter.

Yeah.

Temperatures reached a record low of 14 degrees.

That's, yeah, that's really cold.

Meanwhile, El Nino just sweeps across Michigan and they are having the mildest winter on record.

Yeah.

Very brutal.

Cameras and cables froze.

Eventually, somebody brought industrial heaters into the cabin.

They were not the kind you were supposed to use indoors.

Somebody's winter jacket did catch on fire as a result.

In the final film, you can actually see some of the actress's breath.

It was a lot.

So, in the rental house, Lizzie, you mentioned, they did have better amenities, but it was 17 people in a six-bedroom house.

Oh my God.

How long are we talking in terms of how long they're in here?

12 weeks.

No!

Yeah.

Three months.

Oh, no.

It was really tough.

I'm going to skip this clip, but if you would like, you can listen to an interview with Teresa Tilley, the actresses involved, and Bruce Campbell online called Ladies of the Evil Dead.

And they talk about the conditions.

And basically, it was just

you would be on set, you'd shoot for hours and hours and hours and hours.

There were no SAG guidelines.

They didn't even feed them some of the time.

They send you back to the house, and it was the three women in one room, and then it was the 14 men in the other three rooms.

And you have to imagine how awful it smelled.

Horrible.

In the men's rooms, in particular.

Horrible.

They're all 20 years old.

Yeah, unbelievably bad.

And Tom Sullivan is doing all of his makeup at that house and then sending people to set.

Where else are you going to put the goo?

You got to.

Exactly.

So all the oatmeal and goo is there too.

Great.

Not everyone slept at the house for the entire shoot because there was an incident that led to some of the boys spending a few nights at the cabin.

As Tappert told Fangoria magazine in 1982, they did get robbed.

So they left the cabin for about 10 minutes.

They came back.

All the power tools that they were using had been stolen.

By who?

Who is in the Tennessee woods climbing out of the trees to get their power tools?

So apparently there were a lot of locals around and they were very curious about what was happening because the Tennessee Film Commission had made a big deal.

I mean, they were going to destroy a bridge.

They had it, you know, know it was sanctioned it was allowed i will say tappert made it very clear that that was an exception to the rule generally speaking people were extremely helpful very generous very kind there were two unerving incidents we'll get to one of them that was very funny i believe josh becker describes or maybe tim philo a man and his six-year-old son like stumbled up to watch them film sharing a bottle of whiskey between them which i thought was a very funny no stereotypical image.

And then this next incident we'll talk about.

So, Raimi, Tappert, and Campbell, as basically the producers of the film, take turns sleeping at the cabin to protect their equipment by themselves.

So, it would be just Raimi spending the night by himself, Campbell spending the night by himself, Tappert.

So, one morning, Campbell is walking back to the cabin to relieve Raimi, who'd slept the night there.

And all of a sudden, this giant bear of a man carrying a shotgun with ammunition belts crisscrossed over his chest just starts marching toward Campbell from the direction of the cabin.

And Campbell's like, oh, Raimi was murdered last night.

Like, he's dead.

He got, this guy killed him.

He's dead.

My friend is dead.

The movie's dead.

And all Campbell could think to do was say, Good morning to this gentleman as he walked by.

And then he ran to the cabin.

And of course, Sam Raimi was fine.

The man was just hunting on the property.

And again, it seems like most everyone that was local was very kind to them while they were there.

Before you feel bad about any of the boys, boys, Lizzie, let's talk about what the actresses were going through on this shoot.

This one, you were an actress.

You went to theater school.

Tell me if you would have sat through all of this.

They would spend hours at base camp, the rental house, sitting for Tom Sullivan while he covered them with layers of makeup.

So you guys have seen those like time-lapse videos of actors getting made up, you know, for hours before the Avengers or whatever.

It's being done by one person in a freezing cabin.

Then they'd get driven to set.

If the weather was bad, they couldn't take the car down the road because it would get stuck in the mud.

So they'd get dropped off at the end of the road.

They would have to walk down the long, muddy or icy drive in full demon garb, full oatmeal face.

Then they would sit outside the cabin on a log in freezing weather.

and wait three to five hours before or between their scenes,

taking breaks to pour hot coffee on themselves to clean clean the fake blood off because Raimi constantly changed the schedule.

Yikes.

I mean,

here's the thing about being an actor, Chris.

You do a lot of horrible shit that you don't want to do.

And I feel like, I don't know,

I wish I could say, no, I wouldn't have stood for those conditions.

But if I felt like this was my chance and I was an actress in Detroit and I,

yeah, you you do it, which isn't fair.

Um, I think because actors are so often in that position of wanting the job so badly and, and not having a ton of control or really any control over like production or what's happening.

So kudos to them for doing that.

But yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of situations, especially on non-union projects where actors and actresses are very much taken advantage of.

In my college freshman year, you're not allowed to perform in the main shows and you have to do something called stagecraft.

And I believe one year, not my group, but another one, actually had to be inside of the set pieces for an opera, just moving the set pieces around for like a four-hour long opera.

And they would just sleep in there and then move them.

So that's a, that's a fine version of this, I would say.

But yeah.

They even had to go against doctor's orders in this instance, Lizzie.

Well, yeah, they're sitting outside in the freezing cold and then pouring coffee on themselves.

It's not a good idea.

Oh, I'm not, that's, that's all fine.

This is the real damaging stuff was the scleral contact lenses that they had to wear to get the demon eye effect.

So, Lizzie, I don't know if you remember, but contacts back then, they were made out of glass.

That's what contacts used to be made out of before they were soft contacts.

They were hard contacts.

So these glass contacts not only blinded you as an actor, your eye can't breathe through them.

Yeah.

So the optometrist told them don't wear them for longer than 15 minutes at a time, five times a day maximum.

That's 75 minutes a day.

You are on set for like 13 hours a day on a film shoot.

There is no way that they are only wearing them 75 minutes a day.

I also want to point out they don't have any running water.

So it's not like they can wash their hands to remove the contacts and put them back in.

So they are removing and putting in contacts covered in cow poop, fake blood, and coffee.

Ew.

I've also worn a black version of these for a live show once.

They are so uncomfortable.

And that's the soft contact version.

And I wear contacts and it was so uncomfortable.

I wanted to rip my eyes out.

I do want to make a disclaimer.

Tom Sullivan, it should be noted, seems to have tried his level best.

to look out for the actor's safety and comfort.

He knew the makeup was very uncomfortable and he was, it sounds like, always checking in.

He was also older than a lot of the other people involved.

I mean, he was like 30.

He does a lot.

I mean, like, if it's one guy doing all of this, it's crazy.

Of course,

the same care

could not be said of Sam Raimi.

For Sam Raimi, the more the actors suffered, the better.

Raimi had a term for where he liked his actors to be mentally for the shoot, and it was called the quote latex point.

And this was the point where they simply couldn't take it anymore and they wanted to rip their contacts and tear their makeup off.

That was the sweet spot.

Let's listen to Ellen Sandweiss and Bruce Campbell describe Raimi's methods for eliciting a good performance from them on The Evil Dead.

None of us felt like we, you know, there was, it was like a contest, you know, you couldn't break down.

It was a test of how tough you would be.

And and Sam took every advantage of when you had just had it, when you were losing it, and used that.

Knowing that you were at the end.

Knowing, yeah.

And then he would come up with his sweet, you know, how you doing, Ellen?

Hey, pal.

How's everything going, buddy?

Are you okay?

Yeah, exactly.

Pal, everybody's a pal.

Everyone's a pal.

We actually love Sam.

We don't think he meant anything by this.

He's just very driven.

He had to get the right shot.

He's the most driven filmmaker I think any of us have ever worked with.

And the funny thing is, if you can do a Sam Raimi movie, you can basically do any movie.

You know what's funny?

A lot of this is like very reminiscent of what they put you through in a theater conservatory program.

There is this sort of expectation that like when you are at your most uncomfortable, when you are pushed past the point of like feeling safe and being okay, like that's when you're getting your best work.

That's when, which in retrospect, as an adult, I now very much do not agree with.

I don't think that that's like what people have to be in order to create art.

I don't think it's uncommon at all.

especially for young creators and filmmakers to feel this way.

But I just want to to call out that I, I don't think that's true.

I don't think you have to be uncomfortable and angry to be in this malleable place.

Yeah, it's kind of, you know, like the Sidney Lumet approach as opposed to, meaning he does not feel that way versus, you know,

David Fincher pushing Jake Jellenhall to the point of near insanity for Zodiac.

So, I mean, as Tom Sullivan later said, working on a Evil Dead film with Sam is a lot like being a character in one of his movies.

That is how people kind of felt about it.

And it didn't help that Raimi also, because he shot so specifically stylistically, he didn't shoot master shots in most instances.

And this is something we've talked about before.

He wouldn't shoot like a wide, he would just break the scene into a series of shots because the camera moves are so wild and they have to be stitched together in a specific way.

But as a result, the actors oftentimes didn't have a good sense of what was going on or how it was going to be used.

They couldn't necessarily like get in.

It gave Raimi all the precision, but it didn't give the actors a lot of precision.

So they just had to be very mechanical with like, okay, I just need to be at 11 now all of a sudden because we're doing this very specific punch-in of my face.

Again, like that's something that as a very young filmmaker, I do totally understand.

Like he wants to be able to control everything.

He wants to be able to control the final vision.

This is the way that he sees to be able to do that.

I have to imagine that the older he got and the more that he worked, the more he was able to.

accommodate other people as part of his vision as well.

Absolutely.

Let's talk briefly, Lizzie, about some of the wild camera work in this movie.

So a lot has been made of like the POV shots of the demon, spirit, you know what I mean, going through the woods.

So what's interesting is they were actually supposed to have a SETI cam for this shoot.

So didn't have it.

Seems like.

Everything's handheld.

Yeah.

So they were supposed to have a SETI cam, but the SETI cam was very new.

Like if you remember, it was invented shortly before the Shining, and then it was, you know, popularized really just right around this time.

And it was very expensive.

And you had to basically have somebody who really knew how to use it.

Right.

You need a specialized operator.

Exactly.

As, you know, Dave Comides, an incredible operator, came onto our show to talk about.

There are obviously dozens of incredible operators today.

That was not the case in 1979.

No, there are probably like three.

Yeah, exactly.

So the inventor and his two friends.

Right.

So basically, Philo and Raimi come up with a DIY rig that they call the shaky cam.

So a friend of Philo's, the cinematographer, had created a simulated camera dolly by mounting a camera on a board and sliding it down the banisters of a staircase.

Okay.

Right.

So, and that, and it could give you a dolly move and it could also simulate kind of a crane move by doing that, right?

Go from high to low.

They basically said, okay, well, also, if you have a camera on a board and you hold it by its sides, it actually wobbles less than if you hold the camera with your hands in the middle.

So they basically put the camera on this board for a lot of the shoot.

And that was called the shaky camera.

And they realized the longer the board, the less wobble.

They did a version that was eight feet wide and they tried to run it through the woods and they kept just running into trees.

Yeah.

So they have a two-foot version that they're doing for a lot of the running stuff.

They also made the Vasso cam for Vaseline.

And this was the camera was on a board.

They put another board beneath it and they put petroleum jelly in between them and they just kind of slide the jelly boards across each other and it creates a bit of a dolly effect.

Sure.

They have the blanco cam and that's when the DP got carried on a blanket by crew members, pallbearer style.

And he just had the camera hanging out in front of the blanket.

So just like coffin carrying him around.

They had the wheelchair cam.

So Philo or Raimi would sit in a wheelchair and they'd get pushed after a running actor.

Basically anything they could do to give the sense that they had some money to move the camera.

And even the first shot, Lizzie, that opens the film in the swamp, that's Raimi on...

a raft or a you know floating device of some kind with the camera taped to his hands and Campbell's pushing him through the water as Raimi's just going like

like moving the camera around the branches and as close to the water as he can.

I mean, it looks pretty good.

I think it looks really fun.

It was certainly a different and unique look that came to define the aesthetic of the franchise.

I mean, even if you've watched Evil Dead Rise most recently, I think they're using drones to do the effect now, but it's still the same effect.

I have a question.

There is at least one, maybe more than one shot in this that are like completely out of focus.

Is there a reason for that other than just that they were shooting fast?

It's shooting fast.

You can't tell if it's out of focus.

You develop the film.

Right.

It's like, shit, it's out of focus.

Yeah.

There's, it's funny.

If you watch high-definition transfers of a lot of stuff from before the digital era, you can see a lot of out of focus.

Even I remember I was watching episodes of House recently from before they switched to digital, and there was some out-of-focus stuff in that that I noticed as well.

Raimi also liked to shoot wanners, something that Philo hated because they didn't have the budget.

Basically, the sense was he really wanted to do things that would make the audience wonder how it was done.

Again, like a magic trick.

And if the audience doesn't know what the term wonner refers to, that means one very long take.

Complex choreography that's all done with one shot and no edits, which makes it very difficult to shoot.

Yes.

Famous recent example was somewhat recent on True Detective.

There was like a 16, 17 minute long one take.

Or the entire movie 1917, basically.

They try to make it a wonner.

Yes.

Raimi also would do things that would piss Philo off, like not tell him when he wanted his actors to do something crazy.

So, for example, he told Betsy Baker one time when she was in the demon makeup to spit the milk in her mouth, not past the camera, as was discussed, but at the camera lens.

And he didn't tell the cinematographer.

God, there's so much milk burbling out of holes in this movie.

I know.

And so she spits the milk on the camera.

And they don't have a lot of...

cameras or film.

I think they had two cameras on the shoot.

So Philo was furious.

Also, he was mad because he would have done it if if Raimi had asked him.

But Raimi had this tendency of kind of springing things on people as he would have ideas.

It was also very unsafe on this set.

And it's kind of a miracle no one was seriously injured.

I would like to play one clip of Betsy Baker describing an injury from Onset, and then I'll give a list of some of the other ones.

Please tell me this is not related to the tree sexual assault scene.

No, we're going to get to that.

I don't think there were any injuries involved in that scene.

This is Betsy Baker when she was dragged across the ground by Bruce Bruce Campbell back into the cabin.

Yeah, there were injuries.

You got that right.

There were injuries.

How about the time you took my ankles and just dragged me through the cabin?

How about it?

How about it?

And there was real blood.

It wasn't Carol's syrup on the white nightgown.

It was real blood.

And they stopped me and said, Betsy, did that hurt?

Once I got my breath back, yeah, just a little bit.

So we fixed that.

They went out to the Delta 88, got a piece of carpet from the floor, and said, can you put that on your back?

I said, how?

Somebody threw duct tape, so we duct tape the carpet to my back, which worked great.

We did that tape about 19 more times.

It didn't hurt, didn't hurt.

Then we went home, and because I couldn't take a bath or go into the shower, because of course, you know, Drew said used all that, I said, well, look, I've got to get some sleep.

I've got this carpet on my back.

So I just started ripping off the duct tape.

And I think that was actually more painful than being dragged through the cabin.

God.

It seems like that was not the exception.

Guys, there were so many injuries, close calls.

I can't give an exhaustive list.

Check out Campbell's book.

Check out Josh Becker's journal, many other online resources.

I'll give you a quick rundown of some of the ones that jumped out at me.

Multiple casting crews stepped on nails,

fell off of rafters.

Bruce Campbell fell down a hill after celebrating one of his scenes and he sprained his ankle.

You can actually see him limp in the scene where he walks into the bedroom to kiss and comfort Linda, Betsy Baker.

A piece of latex got left behind in Bruce Campbell's leg after the leg shredding scene.

So he was actually wounded.

The latex got stuck in his leg.

It formed a boil, got infected, and filled with pus.

Oh my God.

Becker sang to a bull in an attempt to distract it from Raimi and Philo as they had tried to escape an enclosure under a barbed wire fence.

Skin was burned by hot, oil-based fog.

Many on the production wondered years later about the long-term health effects of breathing it in.

Bart Pierce held down one of the dummies drenched in fake blood while Manincore swung a real axe down within a few inches of his head.

Raimi ran into a branch shooting in the woods at night and was likely concussed.

They used real knives and real shotgun shells.

They did not have blanks.

The chainsaw is fully functional and real.

They reversed the teeth, did a test.

It still cut through whatever they were testing it on, at which point Campbell said, give me the thing, roll camera, and they filmed the scene oh my god and of course they were doing all of this on as philo said typically four to five hours of sleep per night and even had one stretch where they worked 52 hours straight i can't believe no one's dead apparently during that 52 hour stretch sam went comatose according to philo they literally couldn't wake him up for two hours and philo said that sam raimi aged five years in tennessee that's bad that's a that's a really bad list There was a lot.

You can see more online.

After shooting, apparently, several of the cast members didn't speak to each other for several months.

It was very intense, but I will say, Sam Raimi had a slightly different perspective.

Tim Philo recalled in a later interview that he was sitting next to Raimi on a hillside by the cabin after a really hard day.

And Raimi said, It's never going to be this bad again, but it's also never going to be this good again either.

And obviously, I think he means in the sense that they'll never have this much freedom to do what they want to do again.

By the end of January of 1980, everyone's gone home with the exception of Raimi, Tappert, Becker, Campbell, and David Goodman, their chef and head of transportation.

And they were using basically each other and local actors as body doubles to shoot all the missing coverage that they needed of Bruce Campbell's character.

And a week before they're going to head back to Michigan, they actually got kicked out of the rental house because it was being turned into a brothel.

Sure.

They spent the last few days living in the cabin and eventually burned furniture to keep warm.

So Lizzie, on January 29th, 1979, which is 10 years to the day before my exact birthday, the boys made it back to Detroit.

They returned the cameras, which apparently had to be completely overhauled.

by the camera rental house and they were not happy and they were 100% broke and the movie wasn't done and they literally didn't have the money to keep editing it.

So they had to go raise more money.

So they shut down for a few months and they went out and again put on their suits and briefcases and basically took out bank loans over $100,000 at a 20%

interest rate.

Oh my God.

They also offered this same interest rate to several of their investors for more money and the investors took the deal and apparently made a lot on it.

Campbell feels like he took advantage of his dad.

He actually got him to agree to take out a loan against one of his homes to invest more in the film.

Oh my God.

I'm so glad it ended up okay.

So Lizzie, what do you think the finished budget for the film was?

They started with $85,000 and they're

$180,000.

$375,000.

What?

Yeah.

Beginning in the spring of 1980, work got underway to finish the film.

So they shot all of the basement scenes at the Tappert family farmhouse, which is, I believe, where they'd shot within the woods.

They then shot pickups at Sam Raimi's parents' house and in the woods of northern Michigan.

And then, of course, the whole meltdown sequence was filmed over three and a half months in Bart Pierce's basement studio.

That was Tom Sullivan.

Bart Pierce, and of course, cinematographer Tim Philo working tirelessly to bring that sequence to life.

Guys, if you want to learn more about these special effects effects at the end of the film, I encourage you to go online.

There's some really fun videos.

I'm going to skip that now, though, and jump to editorial.

1980, Raimi connects with New York-based editor Edna Paul, who he was referred to through the Detroit commercial world.

And Edna Paul's assistant is someone who would not only change Raimi's life and career, but film itself.

And Lizzie, I'll give you a hint.

He is one half of a famous directing duo.

Is it a Cohen?

It's a Cohen.

Which one?

Joel Cohen.

Wow.

Who would eventually become Raimi's friend and collaborator?

So Edna Paul, Raimi, and Cohen cut the film down.

First cuts 117 minutes.

Way too long.

They eventually get it under 90.

Then, of course, they had to do the sound.

And that was also very DIY as Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell acted as their own Foley artists.

And if you're unaware, Foley is when you are replacing the hard sound effects that you see in film with sound effects captured in a studio that includes footsteps, you know, rustling paper, picking things up, bumping into a wall,

really anything that you see an actor doing on screen that can be physically repeated in a studio.

In addition to all sorts of other fun effects, there's some amazing videos online.

If you guys want to look, search Foley Artists on YouTube.

It's a really incredible art.

And then finally, they're going to do a premiere in Detroit and they get the movie blown up from 16 millimeter to 35 millimeter film.

And it's barely going to be done in time.

So Raimi says, Joel, I need you to get your little brother Ethan to pick up the print and fly it from New York to Detroit.

And the way Raimi describes it is really funny because he goes, Ethan can do it.

He doesn't have anything better to do.

Nobody will miss him.

Apparently, at the time, Ethan was a statistical accountant at Macy's.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

So on October 15th, 1981, Book of the Dead premiered at Redford Theater in Detroit under the title Book of the Dead.

They did all this kitschy stuff.

It was very fun.

They put an ambulance and a security guard outside they're like people are going to be you know they're going to faint we need the ambulance you know there's going to be a riot they play spooky wind effects before the movie plays but the biggest surprise lizzie is that the audience thinks it's funny so no one really expected that i don't even know if raimi really expected that that's so interesting because it's like it's funny for sure it's funny So the cast was stunned because they had just shot all these little sequences, right?

And it was horrifying.

It was a horrifying experience.

Yes, right.

Absolutely.

And the cast is like, this is a drama.

It's a horror drama.

And the audience is like, this is one of the funniest things we've ever seen.

An old woman came up to Raimi and Campbell and she was like, I was having a bad day.

And then this turned it around.

And they were just like, thank you.

Now, I do need to point out there's one person in particular who did not enjoy the premiere.

And Lizzie, you mentioned a very infamous scene, which is

the vine rape of Ellen Sandweiss's Cheryl that occurs pretty early, you know, 30, 40 minutes into the film.

So Ellen Sandweiss, who had been making movies with Raimi and Campbell for a decade since they were kids, I'm assuming whose family knew, you know what I mean?

These boys' families as well.

She was deeply embarrassed and she had brought her parents to the premiere.

She did not really understand that she was going to be raped by vines.

It seems like a lot of the actors actually didn't know the scene was in the movie.

And it totally makes sense that she wouldn't really know what the scene was for two reasons.

Raimi doesn't shoot masters, one,

and two, Lizzie, as you can tell, all of the footage is reversed in order to create the fact of the vines going up her body.

So when you shoot it, he's pulling vines off of her as opposed to climbing them up her.

When you see the whole thing together, as Sandweiss later said, quote, let's face it, the woods scene shocked the hell out of all of us.

I was absolutely mortified.

My parents were there.

In fact, the story of the evening was, you know, when it was over, a person who knew my mother just kind of walked up to her and said, what we have to deal with with our children, end quote.

This scene didn't only haunt Sandwise.

Raimi was actually asked about it many times during interviews following the release of the film.

And I want to play a brief clip from a televised debate.

in the United Kingdom on censorship and film, in which Raimi, I think, kind of tries to dodge the accusation that it is a rape scene, but ultimately has to admit that perhaps he didn't think it all the way through when he was writing the film.

I mean, it's very clearly sexual, so I'm interested to hear this.

There was actually a scene in Evil Dead Woman.

I don't know whether our audience has seen it at all, but of a woman being raped by, of all things, a tree.

Now,

how necessary is it to have those kind of scenes in horror films today?

Well, I don't think it's necessary specifically to have any particular type of scene in a horror picture.

There is a particular sequence in the woods with a woman where the trees come to life and she is attacked by them, it's true.

And she was raped by them, by the looks of things.

Well, you don't really see anything, so it's really up to the imagination of the viewer.

I actually watched the film today.

I was told to watch it today.

It was pretty clear to me what was going on.

Well,

okay.

Well,

there was a scene in the picture that did have sequence of woman in the woods, and her clothes were certainly torn off, and

it was a fantasy.

And I don't think that I personally would repeat that sequence again had I had the chance to rewrite the picture, but I wrote it when I was 18 years old.

Yeah.

I mean, I understand not wanting to come across poorly, but I wish he would.

own what that was because to the point of the interviewer there, there is no question whatsoever what the intention of that scene is.

If you haven't seen it, she's running through the woods.

She ends up

getting, you know, all of a sudden an arm is grabbed by a vine, another arm is grabbed by the vine.

It literally rips her dress off to the point where her breasts are exposed.

You see vines start to climb very suggestively up her legs, you know, towards her vagina.

And then it actually, I think, ends at one point with like a giant tree branch basically impaling her

in her lady bits.

Like, I don't know how you could argue this is not a sexual assault by trees.

And the fact that he is trying to argue that does bother me.

Yeah.

And the reason I wanted to play this clip is that I think Raimi really painted himself into a corner with this scene.

He did, in later interviews, express more direct regret.

I found one quote, I think it was unnecessary, gratuitous, and a little too brutal.

My goal is not to offend people.

It is to entertain, thrill, scare, make them laugh, but not to offend them.

I think my judgment was a little wrong at the time, end quote but evil dead put him at the center of a conversation about censorship and so i think he from my perspective rightly didn't want to cede the ground that anything should be censored by the government in film however it put him in a position in which he effectively had to defend or dodge questions about a scene in his own movie that perhaps he wishes he had actually censored himself i agree i think

He

I think he tried to write a scene that was going to be as shocking as possible.

Yeah.

In the sense that he wanted to shock people, like that magician element of it,

and did not think about the fact that film is a different medium and it lives on, it burns itself in our minds, it can be rewatched, it can be rewound.

And in fact, it's not up for interpretation like he suggests.

As you say, Lizzie, it's directed actually very specifically to show us the point of view of a demon using vines to rape a woman.

And he effectively pulls off that trick,

but it comes at a big cost, which is, it's not just, obviously, it was horrible for Ellen as an actress to deal with this, but I would argue it's the biggest thing in my mind that holds the movie back tonally and narratively as well.

I agree because everything else does feel a little bit tongue-in-cheek.

And then this does not.

And, you know, again, like he said in that, he's 18, 20 years old.

I understand wanting to write something that is the most shocking thing you can possibly write and thinking, what would be more shocking than this woman being assaulted sexually by trees?

But like, I would rather hear him say that than try to brush off and say it's up to interpretation.

It's not.

So he reaches out to James Ferner, the secretary of the British Board of Film Classification, who actually agreed with him and said, yeah, this is a parody of horror.

And he agrees to approve the movie Uncut.

But then some of his colleagues watched it and they did not agree.

So they ended up cutting 49 seconds from the film and they gave it an X rating in the UK.

Not that it seemed to matter.

All right, let's rewind back to 1981.

They premiere the movie.

The audience loves it and nobody wants to distribute it.

Nobody wants to touch it.

Is it because of the trees?

Maybe.

It is a bloody oatmeal fest, as Lizzie would say.

But their luck changes in December of that year.

A 74-year-old film sales agent named Irvin Shapiro agrees to watch the film.

He has decades of experience.

He's 50 years older than anybody involved in Evil Dead, and he actually represented Night of the Living Dead, Romero's film, and was a co-founder of Cann.

Most importantly, he understood the importance of the international film market for horror films, and he was working with Stephen King on Stephen King's Creep Show.

Wow.

So Shapiro watches the film, the credits roll, and he says, quote, it ain't gone with the wind, but I think we can make some money with it.

That's about right.

Yep.

He tells them to change the title since people are going to think they have to read for 90 minutes if they call it Book of the Dead.

Plus, a shorter title means a cheaper newspaper ad.

He suggests 101% dead.

They say no.

He then suggests the Evil Dead, and they say, fine.

So Shapiro, to his credit, he guides them through everything.

He puts together delivery materials that he needs to show to potential buyers.

He actually pays for all of this because they're broke at this point.

And in March of 1982, he takes Evil Dead to the American film market in Los Angeles, and it finds its first distribution deal.

Lizzie, this is where the distributor mess comes into play in the United Kingdom.

So basically, Stephen Woolley, British co-founder of Palace Pictures, he'd been releasing Werner Herzog and John Waters films up until this point.

He's looking for a horror movie.

He catches the last 20 minutes of Evil Dead and he goes, oh my God, this is amazing.

He goes and sees another screening of it.

He's like, it's so inventive.

It's so unique.

He convinces his business partner to buy the film for UK distribution.

but they have to buy it for both home video and theatrical, which is more expensive for them and more than they want to pay.

But Shapiro's like, you got to buy it all.

I got to sell all of it right now.

So they buy that for £60,000.

So then in May, Raimi and Shapiro take the movie to Cannes and they screen it out of competition and they get another big assist from Stephen King.

Stephen King watches the movie.

I'm sure Shapiro set this up and he loves it.

In fact, Shapiro convinces Raimi to call King for a poll quote to help with them selling the movie.

King doesn't want better.

He says, I'll write you a full review for Twilight Zone magazine.

Wow.

It's published in November of 1982 and it was titled Evil Dead, Why Haven't You Seen It Yet and Why You Ought To?

Basically, it's this gushing review.

I'll read you one moment.

He's describing meeting Raimi.

That he is a genius remains unproven.

That he has made the most ferociously original horror film of 1982 is beyond doubt.

The only problem is that you may never see it.

And it basically served as a call to action to distributors to buy the film.

Now, at the same time, Palace Pictures is experiencing a little bit of buyer's remorse back in the UK because now that they own the film, they're re-watching it and seeing how low budget it actually looks, which is very low budget.

And they're seeing like all the mistakes.

And basically, they're really concerned it's going to be dubbed a, quote, video nasty.

Have you ever heard of video nasties?

Okay.

Hyper violent Lizzy, as you know, or sexual films released on home video specifically to skirt the rating system in this case the british board of film censors woolly gets really nervous because he thinks the movie is a comedy and he wants the british film board to see the movie as a comedy and he thinks if they actually cut down the violence it's going to have the opposite effect as intended so if you hit the zombie 20 times it's funny but if you hit it three times it's gross and scary so the excess is what makes it funny in his mind So he reaches out to the British film board and he says, hey, can you watch this?

I want you to make sure, you know, know, it's the right tone.

And they actually agree.

They're like, it's almost a parody of horror because it's so exaggerated in their mind.

They cut 49 seconds out of the film and they give it an X rating.

And so it

gets a rating, but it's X rated in the UK.

Apparently, it doesn't matter.

It opens on January 17th, 1983 in Scotland.

And then they do this whole campaign south across England.

And they try, they basically say, it's a big budget Hollywood movie.

They're describing it as if it's out of LA.

It's like this low-budget Detroit movie.

And people love it.

They fly Raimi and Sullivan to the UK, including Glasgow, to do special effects demonstrations before the screenings of the film.

And it is a huge hit.

And they did this really unusual thing.

They released it on VHS and in theaters at the same time.

Wow, an early streaming model.

It was because they were worried people were going to pirate it from the theater immediately.

So there was like, it's available in both.

And apparently this made theater owners very nervous because they thought it would ruin the experience.

But people, it found different audiences kind of in each format.

So the movie is very successful.

It is actually the most successful home video in 1983 in the United Kingdom.

More successful than The Shining.

Wow.

In fact, the uncut version of the film, 49 Seconds Included, was actually released by mistake for the first few weeks.

Nobody noticed.

So it just goes to show British Film Board didn't need to cut those 49 seconds.

Anyway, back in the U.S., Stephen King's endorsement is paying off in spades.

Newline Cinema is all of a sudden interested in the evil dead.

They sign Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi, Rob Tappert to their first U.S.

development deal.

There's a very cute photo of the first check from January 6th, 1983 in Bruce Campbell's book.

You can see it.

Basically, because they had sold the foreign rights to Palace Pictures, they were able to keep all these various forms, arms of distribution separate, which actually allowed them to sell the rights to this movie for a lot more money.

because each time they sold an arm of distribution, they had the proof of the success of the other arm of distribution as a form of leverage over the next deal that they were doing.

So basically, Newline gets domestic theatrical, video domestic goes to Thorn EMI, and they're making more money off of all of these deals.

April 24th, 1983, Evil Dead premieres in New York to rowdy audiences.

Word of mouth has spread.

The horror community loves this movie.

Fangoria magazine basically said Stephen King was incredibly accurate with his love of this film.

It's amazing.

Reviews from mainstream publications are also generally positive.

They note a lot of influence from George Romero.

They describe it as something new for the genre.

Everybody's noting its humor, the skillful camera work.

While the LA Times called The Evil Dead an instant classic and variety praised its black humor, Siskel and Ebert were decidedly not fans of the movie.

And perhaps the most scathing review came from the New York Times, which effectively accused Raimi of making a joke of a movie and basically said he was more a salesman than he was a director.

But Raimi had effectively sold audiences on this movie.

The Evil Dead made $2.4 million in the United States and Canada during its run.

Numbers on international box office vary wildly.

I read $2.8 million.

I also read $29.4 million.

So take everything with a grain of salt.

Wow.

Bruce Campbell did say it took six years to break even because of the 20% loans that they had taken out from the bank.

But where it really made its money was on video.

So as I mentioned, it became the number one hit in 1983 in the United Kingdom.

And it was...

dubbed the quote number one nasty.

So even though it wasn't technically a video nasty, it developed the reputation of a video nasty and the attempt to censor it, and it actually was censored in like Finland and Germany, and eventually they tried to censor it in the UK, just pushed people to want to see it more.

And if you guys want to learn more, there's so many interesting things.

The police actually raided video stores in the United Kingdom and seized copies of the movie in 1983.

And you can find more of that online.

I'm not going to talk about that here.

Let's round the corner on Evil Dead.

So Sam Raimi was obviously somewhat established as a writer-director.

He, Tappert, and Campbell turned this new currency with Hollywood into a project that they made with the Cohen brothers, 1985's Crime Wave.

Have you ever seen this, Lizzie?

No.

It was a big, old, fit, big, big, big, fat, stinky mess turd movie.

And we have to cover it.

It is crazy.

It's not very good.

I did watch it, and it's going to be, it's going to make it amazing what went wrong.

It's like, take all the good will you just earned and light it on your own kind of movie.

Raimi's career obviously did recover, mostly by way of 1987's pseudo-requel of Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, which was co-written by longtime friend and collaborator Scott Spiegel.

And then by the 90s, he had Dark Men, Darkman, Army of Darkness, The Quick and the Dead.

And then, of course, most famously, the superhero films that had arguably birthed the modern superhero movement, Spider-Man's 1, 2, and 3 with Toby Maguire.

Fun fact, Spider-Man 3 was at the time the most expensive film ever filmed, and I believe the budget was almost 1,000 times what he had had on Evil Dead.

Wow.

And it has one of the most amazing dance sequences of all time.

A much memed dance sequence, yes.

And Evil Dead 2 was commercially very successful, right?

It was fairly successful.

It actually only grossed a few million dollars against

$2 or $3 million budget, but it also was a cult hit and became very successful on VHS as well.

Now, Bruce Campbell, of course, achieved near-mythic cult and be movie star status, has shown up throughout the Evil Dead franchise.

As you mentioned, Lizzie Army of Darkness, my personal favorite, although I guess it's technically not canon in the Ash and Evil Dead world.

Fun fact, Evil Dead 2 was supposed to be Army of Darkness, but Dino De Laurentes was like, I'm not paying for a period piece.

You can go shoot a Cabin in the Woods movie again.

And so that's why he made Evil Dead 2.

Oh, too bad.

One of my favorite Bruce Campbell films I do want to call out, because it's thematically relevant, is Bubba Ho Tep.

I don't know if you've ever seen it, but Campbell plays Elvis, a geriatric Elvis, battling an ancient Egyptian mummy in a retirement home.

And it's very fun.

And he, of course, reached peak self-awareness with 2007's My Name is Bruce, a very meta B-movie send-up of himself in which the real Bruce Campbell is kidnapped by a Bruce Campbell super fan and has to defeat the Chinese god of the dead in a small town in Oregon.

And that actually also featured Alan Sandweiss kind of returning to the fold for the first time.

Tom Sullivan went on to do special effects for Evil Dead 2.

He was involved in Army of Darkness.

He was a sculptor for the Fly 2.

He goes to a lot of horror conventions.

Ellen Sandweiss did go on to do some small parts.

She did theater work and commercial work in Detroit.

She was in My Name is Bruce.

And she did actually return to the Evil Dead franchise in the Ash vs.

Evil Dead TV show.

Josh Becker, who it seems, if you read his journals, had a strained relationship with Raimi and Tappert on set, did continue to collaborate with the two.

In fact, Sam Raimi co-starred in Josh Becker's first feature film, Striker's War, low-budget feature.

And his second film, Lunatics a Love Story, starred Ted Raimi, Raimi's younger brother.

And eventually, he actually worked with Bruce Campbell on a movie called Running Time, and he directed the Rob Tappert-produced Xena Warrior Princess TV show as well.

Wow.

Yeah, Xena Warrior Princess was birthed out of this crew.

You know what?

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Well, Tappert, for his part, co-founded Ghost House Pictures with Raimi much later in the early 2000s.

They'd worked together on many of Raimi's films.

He also EP'd Xena Warrior Princess.

Fun fact, he's married to Lucy Lawless.

Adorable.

We love Xena.

And we had a reviewer who said, I comment on the men's looks too much on this show.

So I'll just say, Lucy Lawless, one of my earliest crushes, Smoke Show.

Looking good.

Good for you, Rob Tappert.

Let me tell you, my grandpa loved two shows.

They were Xena Warrior Princess and Jag.

And I don't think either was for the plot.

Fair.

It was for the ladies.

Betsy Baker largely stepped away from film to focus on being a mother.

She did come back to the screen in 2006.

She's had various credits in film and TV, most recently Bosch Legacy and NCIS.

Rich DeManincourt went on to work as a bidder for a contractor in Detroit.

and left acting altogether.

At a 20th reunion for the film, he got on stage and said, quote, hi, folks, I'm rich and none of this hoopla means anything to me.

I have a real job.

According to Bruce's book, it sounds like it was right around that time of that 20th reunion that the cast kind of understood for the first time how big the movie was within these cult fan circles.

In fact, it was around this time that Betsy Baker, Teresa Tilley, and Ellen Sandweiss reunited in middle-aged and started attending Comic-Cons together and became known as the Ladies of the Evil Dead.

Oh, that's great.

They were beloved by the fans, and it seems like even Ellen Sandweiss was able to enjoy this well-deserved praise that she was receiving.

You can see clips online where she's reading through scenes from the movie, including one where she actually acts out in a joking way that infamous scene with the fake vine from the film.

I'd like to end with an excerpt from Josh Becker's book.

If you read his journals, he seems to have been quite miserable throughout the shoot, as were so many people on this film.

And yet, somehow, they all trauma bonded through it and seemed to kind of love Sam Raimi, even though he's a bit of a crazy bastard.

So, this entry is dated January 26, 1980.

I just awoke at the cabin, along with Bruce, Sam, Rob, and Goody, and could barely move on account of a headache developed from mental abuse, beer, pot, and sleeping on the floor.

I took some aspirin, the staple of my diet over the past two weeks, and some vitamin C, drank some tea, and improved somewhat.

Now I only feel awful.

In the very near future, probably less than 10 hours, we shall be headed back home.

This may have been the most difficult and the most rewarding experience of my life.

I began this shoot bitter, unhappy, and a PA.

I end it fairly happy, exhausted, in mental and physical pain, a lighting and sound man.

End quote.

And I think that despite all the pain and hardship, what I do love about this movie is that it's just a bunch of kids who had no credentials, who had no

right in the eyes of Hollywood to be doing what they were doing, and effectively said, all right, I'm going to be a director.

I'm going to be a producer.

I'm going to be an actor.

I'm going to be a soundman.

And they did it.

And that's pretty amazing.

It is amazing.

I do.

I love the figure figure it out on the job elements of this, even though so much of that came at the expense of people's comfort and safety.

That's obviously not good.

But it is fun to hear about a project that existed pretty much entirely outside of the Hollywood machine and people who, again, did not go to film school.

Not that, not that going to film school is bad at all, but there's something very cool about.

just saying, just because I can't get to Los Angeles or I can't go to film school doesn't mean I can't do this because that's true.

I don't think that those barriers should stop anybody from wanting to make movies if that's what you want to do.

That's right.

All right, Lizzie, let's talk about what went right.

The goo, honestly.

All right, Tom Sullivan, are you giving it to makeup artists Tom Sullivan?

Yes, I am.

That poor one man was having to cake these people in so much oatmeal, goo, coffee, corn syrup, red dye, everything, for all of the parts of it that don't necessarily work, quote unquote, it still all works.

It's still fun.

There are some effects that are like

really pretty good.

That thing where early on where she stabs the pencil into the leg and is just like jamming it around the leg, like that stuff is great.

I think it's pretty amazing what he did with the time and money that he had.

It's very much feels of a hole.

It feels internally consistent.

Yes.

So even if things feel dated, they don't bump you out of the film.

No, and it's not even dated so much as it is like these kids in a cabin in the woods made this movie, which there is something very charming about that.

I agree.

I'm going to do a slightly different what went right this week, which is

what went right is everybody around Sam Raimi.

Yes.

And I want to emphasize this fact that it takes a village to make a movie And not just your friends.

It takes Irvin Shapiro, a 74-year-old man, ready to usher in a new generation of talent.

It takes Stephen King willing to write you the review you need to get distribution.

It takes Philip Gillis willing to put in his own money.

It takes Bruce Campbell's recently divorced dad willing to take out a loan against his home to support the dreams of his son.

It takes Sam Raimi's parents, who'd lost their own son when he was 15, willing to lend out their stores and money.

It takes Bessie Baker and Teresa Tilley, putting up with what was surely physical and mental abuse for the good of the shoot.

It takes Ellen Sandweiss willing to expose herself for the dream of a childhood friend.

It takes the good people of Morristown, Tennessee, who, despite the occasional story of theft or intimidation, were, according to many involved, incredibly generous and welcoming to this ragtag Taskin crew.

Location manager Gary Holt, who despite his eccentricities and weird Vietnam War songs, apparently welcomed the entire cast and crew into his home for Thanksgiving, making sure that everyone had a good meal and a welcome table while they were away from their families.

Tom Sullivan and Bart Pierce, who spent months away from their families to figure out how to make stop motion work in a basement in Michigan.

Josh Becker, who swallowed his pride to clean cow shit out of a cabin, and of course, Ethan Cohen, who had nothing better to do.

I think we often like to ascribe credit to a single person when it comes to art.

And that's true of movies, too.

It's easy, it's convenient.

And there's something very alluring and sexy about the idea of authorship.

But I think what I learned in researching this project is that even though Raimi is and always has been an amazing musician, and it takes a very, very clever man to pull off the tricks that he does in this movie, it takes a lot more guts to be sawed in half.

And that concludes our coverage of The Evil Dead.

Thanks for listening, everybody.

All right, Lizzie, it's about time that we thank the real MVPs of this show, our full-stop supporters on Patreon.

Guys, if you are interested in a shout-out like this, or getting an ad-free RSS feed or voting in our upcoming holiday poll, choose diehard,

you

please for Chris's sanity, choose diehard.

You can go to www.patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast and join for free for a dollar for five dollars or for fifty dollars and lizzy for fifty dollars show the good people what they're gonna get david q the creepy wind music can i can chris can you give me a little example of what i'm just give me a little refresher on

andrew mcphago bango okay i'm gonna try i'm so sorry here i go in my best deadite

here it goes great Keep going.

Oh my god.

Ramon Benueva Jr.

Stacey Downmullin

Andrea

Lenna

Half Greyhound

Brittany Morris

Darren and Gail Conkling

Jay Killen Kang

Andrew McFagel Bagel

Matthew Jacobson!

Grace Potter!

We really do like your music.

Keep going.

This is really good.

I have a horrible cough.

Ellen Singleton.

Jewish Risamant.

Scott Gerwin.

Sadie.

Just Sadie.

Brian.

Brian Donahue.

Adrian Pencore.

Chris Leo,

Kathleen Olson, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer,

Don Scheibel, George, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristen, Solomon Chinani,

Michael McGrath.

Oh, God.

Wow.

And guys, if that is not worth $50, I don't know what is going on.

I'm sweating.

Before we leave you all, we should tell you what is coming up next week.

We should.

Which I am extremely excited about.

Chris, I don't know if you're as excited as I am.

I sure hope you are.

Tell me something, girl.

Yes.

How you happy in this modern world?

That's right.

It's going to be time for A Star Is Born.

The Bradley Cooper Lady Gago.

I'm very excited.

I actually quite enjoy this film.

I love it.

I love it.

I think it's very good.

I'm excited.

I do too.

So we will be covering that.

We'll see you back here in two weeks.

Go to patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer, editing music by David Bowman.

This episode was written by Jesse Winterbauer.