Forty years ago, Detroit’s Redford Theatre hosted the premiere of The Book of the Dead, a new film by Sami Raimi. A fan of the extravagant premiers popularised by William Castle, Raimi put on a show—custom-made ticket stubs promised the “Ultimate Experience in Gruelling Terror” and two ambulances were ceremoniously parked outside. If that were not enough, two wind tracks were set up to transport attendees to the film’s iconic setting: a dilapidated cabin in the woods. Two years later and the film, renamed The Evil Dead, would make over $29million worldwide; due in no small part to its dedication, on and off screen, to the kind of theatrical spectacle initially created in the Redford Theatre.
There is another word for this type of spectacle—Camp. Those familiar with the blood-soaked, chainsaw-wielding bombast of Raimi’s film will surely recognise the label, so often has it been used to describe the film’s distinct brand of B-grade tenacity. It is a film that moves rapidly “from camp to horror and back to camp” again and again, according to L. Michael Elliott.[1] Unsurprisingly, the original VHS release of the film included a trailer for John Waters’s Female Troubles (1974).[2] Raimi’s distinct blend of humour, gore, and theatricality places him side-by-side with Waters and the Camp tradition he pioneered. On the 40-year anniversary of Raimi’s cult-smash, these Camp associations remain as important, and influential, as ever.
Susan Sontag famously described Camp as an assertion “that good taste is not simply good taste…[but that] there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste.”[3] In Roger Ebert’s review of Evil Dead II, the film is described in similar terms. It is not “in bad taste,” according to Ebert, but rather, “about bad taste.”[4] After seeing the original film, Clive James offered a similar, albeit harsher, review, describing it as “A horror movie too stupid to horrify…”[5] Stupidity, bad taste, these are composite elements of a Camp aesthetic that remain central to the Evil Dead franchise and its influence. In 1981, viewers encountered the film’s darkly humorous violence, its bucket-loads of blood, and the theatrical excess of Bruce Campbell’s performance in a way that positioned them somewhere between awe-struck terror and fits of laughter. It is telling that the film concludes by cutting suddenly from a horrified scream to the jarringly bouncy “Jazz Tradition – Charleston”; such affective tension is key to the stylism of the film and its affinity to Camp Horror. It is also the reason it was initially perceived, as Stephen King recounts, as “too much.”[6]
Underpinning initial responses to The Evil Dead is the distinction between high art, and low art. Often associated with “low-art”—veiled as “bad taste”—the horror genre befits Camp’s interest in “retriev[ing] not only that which had been excluded from the serious high-cultural ‘tradition’, but also the more unsalvageable material that has been picked over…,” having been similarly denigrated in these terms of exclusion from “high-cultur[e].”[7] We see these preconceptions reinvigorated in discussions of contemporary horror. The release of A Ghost Story, It Comes At Night and Get Out in 2017 spurred a new age of horror, often described as “post-horror,” “smart-horror,” even “high art-horror.”[8] The horror genre’s status as “low-art” is implicit to these labels. There is a need to position these new films apart from the genre’s lowly origins, in a place of prestige, and therefore, artistic legitimacy. Three years earlier and Fede Álvarez’s adaptation of Evil Dead (2013) would make a similar attempt to add depth, and thus legitimacy, to the Evil Dead franchise. While there is certainly plenty of blood and gore in this adaptation, it was criticised for its attempt to tame Raimi’s original by favouring social realism. On initial viewing, it appears to conform to ideas of “smart-horror” as it would come to be defined. The quintessential cabin in the woods becomes the setting for an intervention, the initial scares an allegory for withdrawal symptoms. While there are positive aspects to the film, these changes read as an attempt to anchor the original’s stylistic bombast with allegory; in other words, with a “high-art” desire to “mean” or “say something” significant.
For Camp, stylism is significant in and of itself; there is a joyful, often excessive, aestheticism to Camp that in Sam Raimi’s original makes you aware, even in awe, of his technical skill. In the face of a giggling, melting, or insulting Deadite, the viewer finds their response—whether fear or wary chuckle—inseparable from the fake blood and karo syrup, Stop Motion Claymation, or Dutch-Angle camera sweeping through the woods. In other words, our response leads to an encounter with the language of cinema itself, rather than to any allegorised reality.
Of course, Álvarez’s adaptation of The Evil Dead came three years before the supposed influx of “smart-horror.” There is more to recent horror films, I argue, than “high art” attempts at allegorical significance and social realism, which labels like “smart-horror” imply. Though these aspects are important to contemporary horror, they are peppered with elements of stylism that continue Sam Raimi’s Camp sensibility.
When Toni Collette stands up at a family dinner during Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), one almost expects her to look to the camera and declare, as Bruce Campbell does in Evil Dead II: “Groovy!” Her monologue, referred to colloquially as “I Am Your Mother,” bears all the hallmarks of Bruce Campbell’s signature style of excess.[9] And, just like Campbell, it prompted a cult-following—a Pop Remix, a Tik Tok trend, even merchandise. Aster’s follow-up, Midsommar (2019), concludes with a scene that is equally felicitous to Camp aesthetics. Watching an ex-lover burn in a bloodied bear suit while wearing thousands of blooming flowers, Florence Pugh concludes the film as a walking testament to Oscar Wilde’s oft-quoted Camp dictum: “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.”[10]
Contemporary horror is littered with these kinds of nods to Camp stylism. From the Babadook’s queer iconography to
the crude humour of Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse or Jordan Peele’s darkly humorous writing, there is an increasingly Camp timbre to “smart horror.” Rather than isolated instances of humour, or singular absurdities, these moments of Camp excess and style are inseparable from the horrors of these films overall, as well as our response to them. I have said that The Evil Dead successfully draws on Camp modes to ensure that our response leads to an encounter with the language of cinema. In contemporary horror, the use of similar modes often leads to an encounter with the preconceptions of the horror genre itself. In other words, beneath the high-art baggage of a “smart-horror” label lies a Camp style that takes aim at such a label and its high-art connotations for the horror genre. By using the sprawling language of Camp to do so, these contemporary films recall the stylism pioneered by Sami Raimi’s The Evil Dead, which remains associated with this ability to take aim at horror’s low-art status. Or, as Roger Ebert writes, to appear “in bad taste” in order to think “about bad taste.”
Forty years on and there remains something unshakeable about The Evil Dead. Like a campy giggle from a cross-legged Deadite that terrifies as much as it amuses, the legacy of the film is one that straddles ideas of “bad” and “good” taste, horror and comedy, and low and high art. In this way, it is a legacy inseparable from Camp as we once understood it, and as horror filmmakers continue to encounter it.
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Notes:
[1] Elliott in Riekki and Sartain, 196.
[2] Probert.
[3] Sontag, 237.
[4] Ebert.
[5] James.
[6] King, 20–23.
[7] Sontag, 238.
[8] Rose.
[9] Cinemasangha.
[10] Wilde.
Works Cited:
Cinemasangha. “HEREDITARY Is The Camp Classic Of 2018.” Cinema Sangha, 14 June 2018.
Ebert, Roger. “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn.” RogerEbert.com, 10 April 1987.
Elliott, L. Michael. “Do the Necronomicon: Evil Dead‘s Journey in the Realm of Musical Theater.” Riekki and Sartain, pp. 196-99.
James, Clive. “From the Observer Archive, 23 December 1984: Clive James Savages The Evil Dead.” The Guardian, 22 December 2013.
King, Stephen. “‘The Evil Dead’: Why You Haven’t Seen It Yet…and Why You Ought To.” Twilight Zone Magazine, vol. 2, no. 8 (November 1982): pp. 20–23.
Probert, John Llewellyn. “The Evil Dead and Me,” This Is Horror, 2013.
Riekki, Ron, and Jeffrey A. Sartain. The Many Lives of The Evil Dead: Essays on the Cult Film Franchise, McFarland, 2019.
Rose, Steve. “How Post-Horror Movies Are Taking over Cinema.” The Guardian, 6 July 2017.
Sontag, Susan. Notes on Camp, Penguin, 2018.
Wilde, Oscar. Epigrams; Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, TheClassics.us, 2013.
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Guy Webster is a PhD researcher at The University of Melbourne. His work traces the importance of conceptions of fear for early 20th Century Modernism. You can find his work in The Conversation, Cambridge Quarterly, Textual Practice, and beyond. His research interests include: affect, modernism, Virginia Woolf, and the Gothic. Twitter: @guytothewebster
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