I think this was the 4th time I've watched this, and every time I'm left wondering _"Was this supposed to be horror, or satire, or just campy B-movie horror with over-the-top buckets of blood?"_ I've still yet to figure it out. It's gruesome enough to be considered "gorror" (gory horror) but insanely stupid enough - and satiric enough - to be almost comedic. Yes, there are some jump scares but the whole thing was just so incredibly asinine that it's impossible to see it as a real "horror" movie. I can imagine that, in 1983, it was probably "th' bomb" with teenagers who were starting to get into really gruesome stuff (with the advent of the _Friday the 13th_ and _Nightmare on Elm Street_ movies) but watching it today, it's just impossible to take it seriously. The first time I saw the "tree scene", it was pretty freaky; now it's just stupid. The one "shout out" I can give to this is the pencil through the ankle; that scene STILL makes me cringe like only the Achilles' tendon scene from _Hostel_ can do. Hopefully this will be my final time to watch this; it's gruesome and probably as gory as they could get back then but - I don't care what any other review states - this one, by today's standards, is just ridiculous. Kudos to Sam Raimi for what he created back then, but that was then and this...well, today this is just laughably dumb.

It still shows that today's multi-million movies can sink where others can swim when compared to the original 1986 scare-fest 'The Evil Dead'. It cost only $350,000 to produce at the time and the box office receipts were around $2.6 millon, the remake of the original movie cost over $17 million and even with inflation amounts to nowhere near that cost, and having said all that it's not so-called nostalgia that pushes me to rate this horror movie highly, not even the way it set of a whole new way of how the public devoured horror and creator's started to follow Sam Raimi's lead, it was the way the movie made you felt with no quick fix stupid jump scares however, a lost feeling of nowhere to run or hide from the impending evil force accompanied by clever camera work and the sort of music you wouldn't like at your mother's funeral. Take the simple scene where some of the forsaken holiday from hell punters attempted to escape the evil entity, by taking the only dirt track out of the grim forest only to be met by an upturned bridge so blocking their attempt to reach civilization, the only safe place they knew of to return to was the battered hut they was calling home for the weekend, how much more could you feel open to attack than just a few old nailed planks between you and doom? And I think this was Raimi's whole intention and many didn't understand what makes the whole movie work, it's just the simple feeling everyone gets wherein they just feel exposed, unprotected, have no idea of their attacker or where their coming from, especially then if you notch it up a gear with a centuries old evil malevolence intent on screwing your whole body inside out. This is why over thirty years later new formats by the way of Evil Dead steel book bluray, to sort after original VHS copies and hand painted models sell in their millions still, how many other movies can testify to that? There is vast interest all over the globe in this horror flick there is no denying that, so it shows you don't need vast amounts of money to make a great movie, you just need vast amounts of imagination to create an exceptional movie.

The Evil Dead is what most, if not all horror movies should be, very real and powerful.

Boring as hell, but quite impressive given the budget and resources they had. The camerawork and editing have a very distinguishable taste, but everything has been remade with more money and a more comedic approach in the sequel.

Hands down: one of the scariest movies I've ever seen! After watching it alone at night and with the curtains shut, you know what I'm talking about...