Meanwhile, her companion’s stoic refusal to take her home inadvertently lead to her isolation and attack: the catalyst for the events that followed.
Necessarily concerned with the trauma of her own withdrawal, Mia’s selfishness and aggression were rendered unattractive, but comprehensible. Setting those reservations aside, we were interested in the use of Mia’s addiction and its management as a moral device. It was also unable to sustain any uncertainty on the part of viewers who’d already been presented with clear evidence of the supernatural at the film’s opening. This may not have been entirely convincing (less so as other characters clung onto it in the face of ever more disturbing developments). This seemed to constitute an attempt at plausibility as Mia offered an initial witness – an unreliable narrator if you will – for the encroachment of the ‘Evil.’ Her companions were then (supposedly) justified in treating Mia’s subsequent possession and violent tendencies as a particularly sociopathic ‘cold turkey’ experience. This time the characters are no longer taking a low-budget vacation, but are seeking a remote retreat as part of an intervention to benefit one of their number, Mia, who has a history of substance abuse. The most obvious ‘twist’ in the original formula was the addition of a new occasion for the cabin trip.
So, once we’d ticked off the film’s various plot-holes and improbabilities (if you find your cabin’s cellar is full of hung cats, leave dammit) we got down to a core question: was the new Evil Dead playing its genre straight, or reworking it? If reworking it, was it doing so for laughs, or was it trying to out-Whedon Whedon by turning Raimi’s schlocky, plasticine-encrusted formula into a clever commentary on its own, er, plasticity? This new Evil Dead, with its claustrophobic woodland cabin and (some might say equally claustrophobic) cast of youthful monster-bait had to negotiate its relationship with that established horror format: a question rendered even more interesting in the wake of intervening pastiches and reworkings.
As our previous blog-posts had anticipated, Alvarez’s film faced a few challenges as a successor to a series that had fostered a seminal genre of horror cinema.
Genre was an obvious entry-point for our discussion and a question we were able to approach from a few directions.