Sometimes remakes of older films can find a new angle on the material, discover a previous unexplored theme or just improve on the storytelling somewhat. It turns out that will probably not be the case of the upcoming remake of Sam Raimi’s classic horror film The Evil Dead.
It turns out that the screenplay, which has seen some recent work by Diablo Cody, looks to give the five young adults who venture out to a cabin in the woods only to accidentally unleash hideous evil spirits with some motivation for doing so. Bloody Disgusting did the digging and here’s what they found out.
The “new spin” is the motivation behind the trip, with the lead character taking his younger sister to the family’s cabin to help her kick her drug addiction. Without her drugs she becomes insane and difficult to control, which makes it impossible to see that she’s actually possessed.
Honestly, while on the surface it seems like a neat idea, it ultimately undercuts the horror of the situation.In the original, the students were just out on vacation, looking for a good time for a couple of days away from the world. Sure, they might not have been at the cabin entirely legally, but for the most part they were innocents. By making one of them a drug user trying to kick their habit, it implies a stronger sense of wrong-doing on the young adults’ part, thus making what happens to them after the evil spirits are released into something more of a punishment rather than a random act from an amoral universe.
I’ve always found that films where the victims did nothing intentional to bring the horror down upon them to be way more effective than ones where the victim has it coming for whatever reason. I’m sorry to see this remake going in that direction. I still think that Raimi and company would perhaps have been better off just filming an adaption of Evil Dead: The Musical.
