Film / Evil Dead (2013)

"You are all going to die tonight..."

Mia has a problem. For years, she has struggled with a heroin addiction that has come close to killing her, and her friends have decided to stage an intervention. After everyone meets in a remote cabin, they tell Mia that they will be staying there until she is fully detoxed. Unfortunately, this particular cabin has its own history with demons of a more supernatural sort, and her friends haven't learned not to read from mysterious grimoires like the one they find in the basement. Mia's subsequent visions of hostile entities and pleas for them to leave are taken as withdrawal symptoms, but it isn't long before everyone realizes that something evil has awakened—something that will unleash Hell on Earth unless they can stop it.

Evil Dead (2013) is the fourth movie in the Evil Dead franchise. Rather than continuing from Army of Darkness, it is a functional remake of the original The Evil Dead (1981), though it nominally takes place in the same universe, making it a sort of sequel. Unfortunately due to Bruce Campbell's retirement, a crossover is less than likely, but hey, this movie was made to be able to stand on its own anyway. With a Darker and Edgier tone than what we're used to, and a focus on the more disturbing elements. A sequel, Evil Dead Rise, released in April 2023, directed and written by Lee Cronin, who replaces Alveraz. Raimi and Campbell returned as executive producers.

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This film provides examples of:

• Bait-and-Switch: The entire Cold Open. We're set up to sympathize with the girl being hunted by what appear to be villainous country folk, only to then find out that said girl is possessed by a Deadite and previously killed her mother, and the kidnappers are doing so at the request of her father, who wishes to put his beloved daughter out of her misery.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • Crosses over with Beauty Equals Goodness; after David buries Mia alive to drive the Evil out of her, the horrific wounds she'd sustained in her demonic form disappear.
  • Years of drug abuse don't seem to have affected Mia's looks much, either (aside from a slightly unkempt appearance and a pale complexion).
• Bilingual Bonus: One of the phrases written in the Naturom Demonto, "Sono Tutti Morti", means "They Are All Dead" in Italian.
• Bittersweet Ending: Mia survives and kills The Abomination but her brother and her friends are all dead and she ends up losing her hand. Also the book is still out there.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Along with Call-Back, where David shoots Natalie's entire hand off as she's about to kill Eric.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Oh yes. The gore is much more detailed and realistic than the original by a longshot. If you post any gory scene from the 1981 original on Reddit, they'll accept it fine. But post any gory carnage from this film and the site will automatically mark it NSFW.
• Break Them by Talking: The deadite possessing Mia gives David this lecture for abandoning his sister and his dying mother years ago.
• Bring My Brown Pants: When Olivia starts to lose control and become possessed we see her urinate on herself when she realizes that she's about to cut her face off.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Literally, Mia had to amputate her own hand to get the chainsaw to kill the abomination.
• Call-Back: The film has several to the original film, including Sam Raimi's Oldsmobile parked outside the cabin, Deadite Cheryl's death threat being heard during Mia's possession, and Professor Knowby's original tape recording playing during the credits.
• The Cameo: Bruce Campbell as Ash appears in a post-credits scene.
• Cannot Kill Their Loved Ones: David prepares to burn the cabin while his possessed sister Mia is locked in in the cellar. He is ultimately unable to go through with it.
• Darker and Edgier: After an increasingly comedic trilogy, this film is fairly jarring in tone. It edges pretty close to Torture Porn as the main characters mutilate themselves and each other, the teenagers aren't at the cabin for a party, it's nearly devoid of jokes or one-liners, and it's entirely lacking the original trilogy's camp value. Granted, it's likely the film was specifically meant to be a remake of the first film, which actually was straight horror. Supported by the fact that the film refers to the Necronomicon as the "Naturom Demonto", which is what it was called in the original film.
• Deadpan Snarker: Mia.
  Olivia: No, come on, slumber party isn't over yet.
  Mia: Yeah, we still haven't played “Fuck, Marry, Kill”, right?
• Decoy Protagonist: The film seems to set up David as the new expy of Ash from the original film, from his clothing to the amount of focus he receives in the story, but after he's killed, it's Mia who takes on the Ash role in the end, losing her hand, dispatching the Abomination with a chainsaw, and being the only character to survive the ordeal. Neatly played with, as Mia is actually the film's first victim, so audiences wouldn't expect her to become the only one left at the end, at least, not until David successfully exorcises the demonic force from her.
• Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female: Averted. The scene where the possessed Mia pulls Natalie into the cellar and begins licking her legs, then splits her own tongue with a knife and force-kisses Natalie is just as sickening and violating as it should be.
  • Averted very hard too when Mia becomes entangled in the vines in the forest and a female looking demon (appears as Mia herself) vomits up a black, thorny, tentacle like creature that slithers up Mia's leg and rapes her, going completely inside of her. It is not even remotely erotic or comedic but absolutely terrifying and disturbing.
• Duct Tape for Everything: David uses duct tape for first aid to tape gauze onto a stab wound, wrap up an amputation site, and in the makeshift defibrillator he uses to revive Mia.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Grandpa, Mia's dog, sniffs out the trapdoor to the cellar.
• Evil Laugh: Deadite Mia gets a very quiet and menacing one.
• Expy: In the end, we get an evil version of Mia, which seems to be the Bad Ash of the new series.
• Eye Color Change: Characters' eyes change color when they are possessed. Most notably, Mia's change color right before she tackles Olivia.
• Foreshadowing: Early in the film, Olivia tells David that the last time she and Eric tried to help Mia get clean, Mia relapsed, overdosed, legally died for a bit, and had to be revived. This foreshadows David killing Mia by burying her alive, then reviving her.
• Forging Scene: David rigging the hypodermic needle-defibrillator.
• Genre Blindness: Eric is the one who decided to unwrap a package wrapped in garbage bags and barbed wire. Even after he realizes the book is bound in human skin and has very apparent warnings that the book shouldn't be tampered with including:
  Don't say it, Don't write it, Don't hear it!
  • Ironically enough this same character is the first one to realize and come to terms with what is really going on when thing start going to hell. Granted this is mostly due to the knowledge gained from having read the ill-fated book, as well as knowing that his reading from the book was the reason it all started.
• Going Cold Turkey: Mia’s friends brought her to the cabin to help her kick her heroin addiction.
• Groin Attack: A rare female example when Mia is possessed, her possession being caused by some kind of sentient intertwined thorns that are vomited up by a demonic vision of herself. The thorns slide their way up Mia's leg and into her vagina. It is certainly not played for laughs and clearly a very violating and painful moment.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Sometimes you have to do the hard thing for the best results. This is generally the theme of the group's plan as a whole for coming to the cabin, in that quitting drugs cold turkey is notoriously difficult to pull off and viciously hard on the quitter, but they hope for it to be more effective than rehab has been for Mia. Eric usually suffers the most when confronted with the Deadites, but he fights back instead of trying to run away; thanks to this, he lives a little longer, and is able to save David from the Deadites twice when he could've tried to escape. David himself is castigated by the others for running away and leaving Mia to care for their mother. Most aggressively, Mia is forced into a Life-or-Limb Decision to survive and vanquish the Abomination, wherein the choice to be made is an awful and hideously painful one, but will allow her to survive. Subverted with Natalie, though, as cutting off her arm doesn't save her at all.
• Heroic Sacrifice: David gives up his life to save Mia from Deadite Eric. Turns into Stupid Sacrifice right after when we learn that this fifth death fulfills the conditions for the abomination to enter our world, leaving Mia all alone against a much greater threat. Possibly Played Straight since David was quickly bleeding out and Deadite Eric's "He's coming" line implies the conditions were already met.
• Here We Go Again!: After Mia survives and walks away from the cabin, we get a glimpse of the book repairing itself to the point where it's wrapped up in barb wire and trash bags, so it could be open and read again for its next victims.
• Hope Spot: Natalie looks like she's made it out of the cellar, despite the broken step, until Mia grabs her ankle at the last second and drags her back down.
• Humanoid Abomination: The creature that rises up from hell in the finale, which is basically a lanky demonic form of Mia. It's even called "The Abomination."
• Licking the Blade: Taken to extremes, when Mia licks a utility knife and then presses her tongue into the edge hard enough to slice her tongue in half down the middle.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Subverted, then played straight near the end.
• Loophole Abuse: The only way to cleanse someone of the Evil is the kill them via immolation, dismemberment, or live burial. However, with careful planning and an improvised Magical Defibrillator, David manages to exorcise Mia and successfully bring her back to life.
• Made of Iron: Eric, full stop. Let's count 'em up, shall we? Knife in the chest, needle to the face, shot multiple times in the arms and chest with a nailgun, crowbar to the hand, crowbar to the head, and he STILL risks his life trying to save his friend.
• Magical Defibrillator: David shocks Mia back to life with a car battery charger wired to a pair of syringes.
• Meaningful Name: Sort of. The first letters of each of the characters' names spells D.E.M.O.N.
• Oh, Crap!: Natalie's face when she realizes Mia has just grabbed her ankle.
• Our Zombies Are Different : While Deadites throughout the franchise were never exactly pleasant creatures, the ones in this film are straight up malicious, the deadites seem to delight in keeping their hosts aware enough to see and feel what the host is doing, evidenced by one making a girl clearly watch in horror as it makes her mutilate her own face, and giving a false Hope Spot to another by letting her cut off her own arm, but, in an inversion to the original attempt in the franchise, it possesses her anyway, these ones actually seem much more fond of Self-Mutilation and seriousness, than the Evil, prankster stylings of the Original Trilogies, they also look different, gone are the milky white eyes and inhuman growls, replaces with sickly yellow iris and a weird demonic insectile chirping sound.
• Rasputinian Death: Eric qualifies as this. He first falls and hits his head on the sink with enough force to break it, suffers a stab wound on his chest dangerously close to where his heart ought to be as well as multiple stabs from a syringe to the face, the needle breaking off and becoming embedded dangerously close to his eye. Some time later he gets attacked with a nail gun and gets more than a few in his arms, body and face. Soon after he gets attacked with a crowbar and gets his hand smashed almost in half trying to block it, as well as getting a few full blows directly to his head. Despite this he still manages to make his way to the basement from the outside and save David from the possessed Mia, at which point she stabs Eric fatally.
• Reconstruction: The Evil Dead was a pretty straightforward horror movie with little humor, and the camp came in more and more in the sequels. This film just goes back to the mood of the first film.
• Senseless Sacrifice: David's death, while removing Deadite Eric as a possible threat to Mia, otherwise succeeds only in making the fifth and final sacrifice to summon the Abomination.
• Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: In the overall franchise that's known for being comedically scary, this movie swings straight into comedy-free horror, even more than the original film. The original film plays the horror straight has a ton of unintended comedy because it visibly shows that it had a very small budget. This movie plays the horror straight with the budget and technology evolution to make it much more gruesome.
• Stealth Sequel: If one takes The Stinger with its appearance of Ash seriously, this means that this is a sequel to the original Evil Dead trilogy, just involving some new bastards getting into the same mess that Ash did so long ago. This is confirmed in a line in Evil Dead Rise as it's explained that the book discovered is one of three of the Naturom Demonto.
  • Word of God states that this movie and Ash vs. Evil Dead, an official sequel to the original trilogy, do indeed take place in the same universe, and that the creators like the idea that Mia might pop up in the series eventually, or Ash might make more than a cameo in a future movie.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Watch out for yellow eyes.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: A very minor example during the Deadite attack in the bathroom. Deadite Olivia viciously goes for Eric's eye with a syringe. Not only does the needle not make it through his glasses lens, but it breaks off and gets embedded off-target, completely averting the expected Eye Scream. Syringes, as it turns out, aren't knives and will break if mishandled.
• The Stinger: Ash appears at the end of the credits to say one of his signature lines. "Groovy".
• Trailers Always Lie: The trailer includes several clips that don't appear in the finished movie, including David messily attacking someone with a chainsaw and Mia chanting the possessed Linda's song from the original. Later averted when in 2016 an "Unrated Cut" surfaced with the cut scenes put back in.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of the Dead, here called "Naturom Demonto" like in the original film instead of "Necronomicon Ex Mortis", the name used in later ones.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Eric. Seriously, the amount of shit he has to blithely go through to unleash the Evil — cutting open barbed wire, ripping open a garbage bag, then painstakingly etching to get the magic words that have been painstakingly scribbled out, all while ignoring scribbled warnings against doing just that — is just ridiculous.
  • After arriving at the cabin, Eric and David explore the basement, which not only has dozens of rotting cat corpses hanging from the ceiling, but also a very scorched support beam, suggesting that somebody was burned there. Instead of freaking out and leaving the place, they react with Dull Surprise, and instead set about cleaning out the ritualistic dead cats.
• [Verb] This!: "Feast on this, motherfucker!" just before shoving the chainsaw into the Abomination's mouth.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Mia does this twice. When the cravings are getting to her, she's outside the cabin walking around in circles, she vomits after a while. Later when she gets possessed, she projectile vomits blood all over Olivia.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Mia gets several looks at the Force (the disembodied thing flying around the woods), and sees a demonic version of herself. Later, just before Olivia gets possessed, she sees a similarly monstrous version of herself in the mirror. "The Abomination" may also count, as Mia is the only one there to see it and it looks somewhat like her, or it could just be that the Abomination took the form of the first person to be possessed.

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"Groovy."