'The Evil Dead' reboot

When fans of Evil Dead first heard that a new director would helm a remake, everyone pretty much presumed it would suck. Most reboots do, after all, and it seemed impossible to recreate the magic that made the 1981 flick a cult favorite. Bruce Campbell, the star of the original film who also co-produced the new version, acknowledged the uphill battle for fan approval.

“It was a tough sell,” Campbell told Wired following the premiere. “We knew people were very opinionated, but we didn’t know how opinionated until this [remake] came up, then it was like, ‘Jesus Christ, is it that serious?’ And they’re like, ‘Yes, it is.’” But what they probably didn’t know at the time was that in Alvarez they had a director (and co-writer) who had a secret weapon: a trove of memories of exactly what had freaked him out at 12 years old and, by extension, what any remake had to have. (His answers — and the new movie — include the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis book, and the infamous “rape tree.”)

But let’s be clear: This isn’t your older brother’s (or father’s) Evil Dead. The original film, with its low-budget effects and occasionally flat (OK, bad) acting, became a classic because it embodied the schlocky greatness of horror movies of the early 1980s. 32 years later, Alvarez and his producers Raimi, Campbell and their original producer Robert Tapert have more to work with. What they’ve created isn’t a movie trying to recreate the past, but rather one that envisions what Evil Dead might looked like if Raimi had made it today’s technology (and a bigger budget).