THE EVIL DEAD 1981
If you’re craving a horror flick that takes place one night in a rundown, demon-infested, rickety, cursed woodland cabin that becomes ground zero for ancient, face-melting evil, The Evil Dead 1981 is a sure thing! A supernatural carnage with buckets of blood… part slapstick slaughterhouse, and all-around mayhem… where the only thing older than the floorboards is the evil lurking beneath them – and is – all bonkers!
Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) is your ticket to the wildest cabin in the woods you’ll ever visit. Raimi, in his feature debut, wrangled his childhood friends—including the now-legendary Bruce Campbell—into the Tennessee wilderness, armed them with a shoestring budget, gallons of Karo syrup, and a devilish sense of humor, and unleashed a supernatural shocker that would change horror forever. It’s like a gory version of Gumby on acid!
Let’s set the scene: five college friends (Ash, Cheryl, Linda, Scott, and Shelly) retreat to a rickety cabin for a weekend getaway. Instead of s’mores and ghost stories, they find a mysterious tape recorder and the Necronomicon—a Sumerian Book of the Dead bound in human flesh. One ill-advised listen later, and they’ve summoned a demonic force that possesses the living, animates the trees, and turns their woodland escape into a blood-soaked carnival of chaos. Ash, played with jaw-clenching gusto by Campbell, is forced to fight off his increasingly possessed friends, dismembering, decapitating, and generally enduring more fake blood than any actor should have to wash out of their hair!
Raimi’s originality is what truly sets The Evil Dead apart. Instead of the typical masked slasher, the threat here is everywhere—an unseen, malevolent force that’s as likely to possess a tree as a person. Raimi’s camera becomes a character itself, swooping and racing through the woods in those now-iconic “demon POV” shots, achieved with little more than a greased-up plank and sheer relentless determination.
The Evil Dead’s low-budget effects, courtesy of Tom Sullivan, are a glorious testament to DIY horror: stop-motion melting faces, rubber limbs, and geysers of viscous, brightly colored blood that somehow make the grotesque both horrifying and hilarious simultaneously.
The cast, all relative unknowns at the time, give it their all—sometimes literally, as the punishing shoot left them bruised, battered, and occasionally stabbed by accident. Bruce Campbell’s Ash is the standout, transforming from hapless goof to chainsaw-wielding horror icon, his physical comedy and deadpan reactions laying the groundwork for the sequels, The Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Army of Darkness 1992, with a more overtly comedic tone.
Ellen Sandweiss as Cheryl delivers a particularly memorable performance, both as the terrified sister and as the first, utterly unhinged Deadite. But it’s Raimi’s exuberant, prankster spirit that gives the film its spark. Every time the audience gets a moment to breathe, he yanks the rug out—sometimes with a literal gush of blood from a lightbulb or a possessed hand bursting from the floor.
Composer Joseph LoDuca’s score ratchets up the tension, only to be gleefully undercut by Raimi’s next outrageous shock or visual gag.
Critics and audiences alike were initially stunned by the film’s sheer audacity. Stephen King’s rave review at Cannes helped catapult the film to cult status, and over the years, The Evil Dead has been recognized as a landmark in independent horror, spawning sequels, a TV series, and an entire franchise, turning it into a cultural icon. Its blend of visceral gore, inventive camerawork, and anarchic humor has inspired filmmakers like Peter Jackson and Edgar Wright with his Shaun of the Dead in 2004.
The Evil Dead is a delirious, blood-spattered rollercoaster—it’s a hilarious slapstick bloodbath, and possesses a madcap ingenuity. This film takes its low budget and turns it into a creative superpower. It’s as much a love letter to horror as it is a gleeful desecration of it, and Raimi’s fingerprints (and maybe some of Campbell’s fake blood) are all over every unforgettable frame!
PHANTASM 1979
Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979) is a fever dream of grief, mortality, and otherworldly dread—a film that feels less like a traditional horror story and more like a hallucination scribbled into a teenager’s diary after a particularly bad nightmare. That’s how it affected me when I first saw it, and let me tell you, it felt like a nightmare and gave me nightmares.
Phantasm feels like one of those wild comic books I used to snatch up from the local stationery store for a quarter and voraciously devour—Phantasm translates like one of those stories bursting with impossible monsters and shadowy heroes, each panel bleeding into the next with the reckless abandon of a fevered imagination. Watching the film is like falling asleep clutching a stack of those comics, only to find yourself trapped inside their pages, where the rules and boundaries of reality are rewritten by fantastical nightmare logic, and every turn brings a new, surreal jolt of terror drawn in bold, impossible lines and awe-inspiring dread. Especially when the Tall Man hurls one of those steel-spiked spheres at you, full pace.
At its heart, it’s a surreal odyssey about a young boy named Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) grappling with loss and the incomprehensible horrors lurking in his small town’s mortuary, presided over by the gaunt, otherworldly Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). With his corpse-pale complexion, predatory glare, and deepened voice that vibrates with sinister, bone-deep resonance, this lanky undertaker sends chills down the spine.
Unlike other horror icons with detailed backstories, the Tall Man’s origins remain elusive, only partially revealed as Jebediah Morningside, a 19th-century mortician who becomes something far more sinister after experimenting with interdimensional travel. This ambiguity fuels the existential dread at the heart of the Phantasm series: death is not an end, but a gateway to something unknowable and possibly malevolent.
Scrimm is a cerebral, manipulative force of evil, played with chilling gravitas with his towering 6’4” frame, that piercing stare, and the iconic, guttural “Boy!” catchphrase, altering his posture, deepening his voice, and perfecting that insidious eyebrow raise, transforming the character into a mythic figure. He isn’t just burying the dead; he’s shrinking them into dwarf zombies, packaging them like sardines, and shipping them off to another dimension for slave labor.
If that premise sounds unhinged, it’s because Phantasm thrives on its refusal to make sense.
It’s a film in which logic dissolves into dreamlike absurdity, chrome spheres with razor blades and drills hunt humans like mechanical wasps, and the line between reality and nightmare blurs into oblivion.
Coscarelli, then just 23, wore nearly every hat on set—director, writer, cinematographer, editor—and his DIY ethos bleeds into every frame. The visuals are a brilliant example of low-budget ingenuity: comic book color-drenched corridors of the mausoleum stretch into infinity, the Tall Man’s looming silhouette haunts like a Gothic specter, and those infamous silver spheres (practical effects marvels made of fishing line and sheer audacity) zip through the air with lethal intent.
One scene, where Mike flees the sphere through the mortuary’s labyrinthine halls, is pure kinetic terror, the camera lunging and weaving as if possessed. Yet for all its grotesquerie, Phantasm is oddly poetic. The mortuary becomes a metaphor for Mike’s unresolved grief—his brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) dismisses his fears, mirroring the way adults often trivialize a child’s trauma. Even Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the ice cream-truck-driving sidekick, feels less like a hero and more like a hapless everyman dragged into a cosmic nightmare he’ll never understand.
One of Phantasm’s most unforgettable moments comes when Mike lies in bed, trying to convince himself that the terrors of the day are behind him. Night presses in around his bedroom. The room is dark and still, the black is as thick as velvet. There’s a kind of quiet that makes every shadow seem alive, like an uneasy breath. He lies rigid beneath the covers, eyes wide and searching the gloom of darkness for shapes that shouldn’t be there. The darkness at the foot of his bed sits atop soil and grass, and the cold earth below seems to ripple, like a black tide-gathering force. With tombstones surrounding Mike in a ceremonial circle, the Tall Man hovers, summoning up his minions. An impossible pale collection of hands and small black hoods emerge from the inky voice, their fingers stretching, reaching out, surrounding his bed and grabbing at him, yanking him down toward the abyss that yawns beneath his bed. His cry is swallowed by the darkness, his body dragged into nightmare’s waiting maw as if the shadows themselves have come alive to claim him. In that moment, the boundaries between waking and dreaming dissolve.
What makes it so effective is how suddenly the ordinary safety of a childhood bedroom is shattered. The hands don’t just grab him—they yank him down, as if the darkness itself is trying to swallow him whole. It’s a moment that perfectly captures the film’s nightmarish logic, where the line between reality and nightmare is razor thin, and nowhere—not even your own bed—feels safe.
The film’s haunting score, composed by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, is a character in itself. Their main theme—a melancholic, theremin-tinged melody—wraps the film in an eerie, almost elegiac atmosphere, juxtaposing the chaos onscreen with a strange, mournful beauty.
Critics have compared it to John Carpenter’s Halloween score, but where Carpenter’s synths evoke sharp, clinical fear, Myrow’s work feels like a lullaby sung at a funeral. It’s no wonder the soundtrack became iconic, its notes lingering like the Tall Man’s malevolent grin.
Phantasm’s release in 1979 arrived at a pivotal moment for horror. The genre was shifting from the gritty realism of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween toward more fantastical, even psychedelic terrain. Yet Coscarelli’s film defied categorization—part Twilight Zone episode, part Gothic fairy tale, part sci-fi freakout. Critics were initially baffled. Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed it as “incoherent,” while others recoiled at its disjointed narrative. However, as scholar John Kenneth Muir notes, the film’s power lies in its “subconscious fantasy,” a child’s attempt to process death through surreal symbolism.
Scholars like Muir argue it redefined indie horror, proving that ambition could overcome budget limitations. Its dream logic and refusal to explain itself paved the way for David Lynch and Twin Peaks, while its blend of horror and sci-fi echoes in films like its particularly close cousin – Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond (1986), which, like Phantasm, dives into otherworldly dimensions and features grotesque body horror and mad science. The film’s story of a machine that opens a gateway to a terrifying parallel reality is steeped in the same kind of hallucinatory, reality-bending horror that defines Phantasm.
Over time, its reputation grew, with Roger Ebert later praising its “nightmarish illogic” and “sheer originality.”
The Tall Man, played with bone-chilling gravity by Angus Scrimm, became an instant icon. His elongated frame and sepulchral voice turned a simple mortician into a mythic boogeyman, a precursor to Freddy Krueger and Pennywise. Scrimm’s performance—equal parts camp and menace—anchors the film’s chaos, making the absurd feel terrifyingly plausible. Meanwhile, Michael Baldwin’s wide-eyed vulnerability as Mike grounds the madness in raw, adolescent fear.
Phantasm’s legacy is undeniable. It spawned four sequels, inspired Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series, and even caught the attention of J.J. Abrams, who spearheaded a 4K restoration through Bad Robot.
Yet for all its influence, Phantasm remains singular-a weird, wistful meditation on loss disguised as a B-movie. As Coscarelli himself once said, “If this one doesn’t scare you, you’re already dead”. And after 46 years, the Tall Man’s laughter still echoes—a reminder – like great comic books – some nightmares never truly end.