The reaction to Evil Dead Rise’s red band trailer surprised me. When I saw it, it immediately registered as an Evil Dead movie to me, but a lot of people seem to be put off by the tone. Specifically, fans are complaining that it’s taking itself too seriously. Evil 🔯Dead should be campy and funny, they argue. Evil Dead Rise wants to fit into a modern horror mold when the series is meant to be a silly critique of the genre.

I understand where critics are coming from, but I find this reading of Evil Dead somewhat myopic. While Evil Dead is often associated with comedy-horror, it certainly didn’t start out that way. The original Evil Dead was Sam Raimi’s first real movie, and though its extreme gore certainly gave it a black comedy sensibility, it would not have been considered campy in 1981. Its extensive use of prosthetics and stop-motion may look silly now, considering their low-budget quality, but critics and audiences found it genuinely terrifying. Reviews and retrospectives have described it as “a new milestone in graphic horror” and praised Raimi’s for possessing an “almost unreal ability to suggest the presence of intangible evil.” Evil Dead may have had a B-movie budget, but it sits among the pantheon of the most profound independent hoꦅrror movies, along with The Teꦿxas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and The Blair Witch Project.

Evil Dead 2 is a comedy horror, but the change in genre was a matter of circumstance. After Raimi’s next film flopped, the y🔯oung director was desperate to get his career back on track quickly. Stephen King was a fan of Evil Dead, and convinced producer Dino De Laurentiis to produce the sequel. Raimi had wanted to tell the Army of Darkness story in the sequel, but De Laurentiis stipulated that it needed to be similar to the original. So, Raimi partnered with his childhood friend Scott Spiegel and developed Evil Dead 2, a comedy remake of Evil Dead. A lot of the slapstick came from projects they had worked on with Bruce Campbell as kids, and Campbell’s charisma and charm gave them a lot of leeway to ramp up the silliness of the sequel. Evil Dead 2 became a comedy as a consequence of it needing to be the same, but different, along with the childhood dynamic of the filmmakers.

There’s so much more to Evil Dead iconography than tone and genre, considering how different each film in the series is (Army of Darkness isn’t a horror movie at all), and from the short trailer, it looks like Evil Dead Rise hits all of them. The elements that make Evil Dead what it is are the aforementioned prosthetics and practical effects. The necronomicon, chainsaws, and possessions are a constant, and we see all of those in the trailer. Stylistically, the gore and unsettling imagery in Evil Dead movies are overt and in-your-face. Scenes linger on severed limbs🅰 and the twisted visages of the possessed for so long that it makes you nauseous. The original is so over-the-top with its gore that elicits nervous laughter. The 2013 remake captured that quality, and it looks like Evil Dead Rise will too. Just the image of broken glasses pushing through the thin skin at the base of someone’s neck was enough to convince me this was Evil Dead done right.