Nightmare Fuel / Evil Dead (2013)

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

"We're gonna get you. Not another peep. Time to go to SLEEP!"

• The Deadites, unlike their main series cousins, are played as completely straight, gone is the Narmy taunts and attitude, and Black Comedy slapstick, and replaced with pure evil, cruel, creepy, and sadistic, serious monsters.
• The opening scene, in which a teenage girl is captured by a clan of frightening, disfigured backwoods people, then horrifically and graphically burned alive by her father in order to drive out the Deadite possessing her. What makes it bad is that before she is burned, the girl is pleading for her life, begging her daddy to hold her again. Then suddenly, the Deadite kicks in and screams, "I'LL RIP YOUR SOUL OUT, YOU PATHETIC FUCK!" When the flames ignite, she screams, "YOU MOTHERFUCKER! I WILL KILL YOU! LIKE I KILLED YOUR WHORE!"^note This "whore" being her own mother. Dear God.
  • Her father can't bear to listen to her screams as she burns, and shoots her in the head — and, in doing so, unknowingly causes the ritual to fail, damning his daughter's soul (and adding to the body count that will eventually help unleash the Abomination).
• The possession sequence is a drawn-out nightmare. Eric, being Too Dumb to Live, is reciting words he's found in the book, and with each one, we get a P.O.V. Cam of something flying through the woods towards the cabin at high speed. Then Mia, tweaking out hard from withdrawal, steals the car and runs away from the group, only to end up alone in the woods with the demon—see directly below for details on that.
• The tree rape is much worse than the scene in the original. The trees wrap around Mia's arms and legs, hoist her up in the air, and pull her legs apart, with what seems to be a slimy bushel of thorns crawling up Mia's thigh and heading into her genital region (and likely into her vagina) and getting her possessed that way as they apparently come to reside within her. And yes, you get to view the whole awful thing.
  • Even worse, the thorny branch is vomited up by the Abomination itself — while it takes the form of (what appears to be) Mia's possessed, future self.
• Once she's brought back to the cabin near-catatonic, Mia begs David to listen and says there's something in the woods that followed them back to the cabin. He assures her everything is alright, then leaves, and Mia stares into the corner, where her Deadite self is posed in a painting before turning to the camera and shrieking.
• David finds the dog, Grandpa, bloody and bashed to death, with sharp scene cuts indicating Mia attacked the poor animal with a hammer. When he tries to confront her about this, she's in the shower, and with hollow, dead eyes, she's turned the heater on so high that the water gives her horrific burns, her skin boiling and blistering!
• David tries to drive her to help...only to find that the road has been completely flooded off seemingly out of nowhere. When he gets out of the car to see it up close and turns around, Mia, previously unconscious, is staring right at him. She's taken back to the cabin...
• And escapes the room she's kept in with a shotgun in hand. David tries to remove it from her and gets shot in the shoulder, and all of a sudden lightning strikes the house, a howling demonic voice tells all of them they're all going to be taken one by one, and then Mia, fully possessed, drops her head and stares directly forward before saying this line:
  You are all going to die tonight.
• Olivia is exposed to infected blood (vomited on her by Mia), and is almost immediately possessed, taken by the entity as soon as she makes it to the bathroom in pursuit of sedatives and to wash up. The cabinet mirror she opens to find the sedatives slowly closes, showing her a vision of her own possessed face, with Deadite eyes and all the flesh sheared off of her jaw.
• The bathroom sequence. We are first treated to a terrifying scene of Olivia getting possessed, in which she suddenly freezes out of nowhere as the demon takes over her body, and we see her piss her pants. There's also a quick flash of a page in the book, with a drawing of someone who's cut their own face off... indicating what's coming next. It cuts away to Eric, who checks on her after a bit, to find the bathroom pitch dark and the light flickering like a strobe. We hear a sound of slicing; Eric finds Olivia hunched over in the shower, and she turns to reveal that she has cut off her entire cheek from lip to ear with a piece of glass. What follows is a gruesome 2-minute brawl that involves said piece of glass, a syringe, and a broken piece of toilet that Eric uses to finally bash Olivia's brains in. Olivia's body then twitches violently on the ground as she dies, after which the camera pans to a view of her crotch, with her panties stained wet with the urine her body excreted as she died. And this is a mild version of what comes later.
• No sooner has a panicked David started trying to treat Eric's stab wound than Deadite Mia targets Natalie, who runs off to get supplies. A very freaked out Natalie hears a loud crash, and when she goes to see what made it, the door to the basement is wide open, when it had been bolted shut earlier. Deadite Mia turns on the Wounded Gazelle Gambit, acting scared and confused and injured, successfully luring a nervous but concerned Natalie down. That's when the Deadite reveals itself, dragging her down there and locking her in. There's a cut, so you think it'll only be revealed what happened to her later, but no, you get to watch Natalie's entire awful experience down there in the pitch black darkness. The Deadite crawls over her slowly, licking her legs as it does, before biting her hand and taking the box cutter off of her. Then, Deadite Mia slices her own tongue in half with a knife and forcibly kisses Natalie, pouring infected blood through her mouth. After she's rescued, Natalie notices her hand is starting to mutate from the bite, so she resorts to cutting it off with an electric carving knife.
• The Deadites in this one are hideously calculating. Natalie, undergoing the beginnings of possession, is trapped when all the doors start to close, cutting her off from help. She looks at the living room, where Deadite Mia is poking her head up through the basement trapdoor (which, by the way, was nailed shut). Deadite Mia taunts her, and seems to freak out, warning her not to cut off her arm, and Natalie does it anyway. Of course, by the time it's severed, the Deadite has receded into the basement and is laughing hysterically, because even though she did remove her arm, the infection was still going to happen because of the infected kiss, and the following is even more gruesome.
  • The nature of Natalie's arm 'mutating' deserves mention here. First of all, her bite wound is mangled and raw, appearing necrotic. Then, Natalie begins to squeeze her wound, and black masses which look like tiny leeches fall out of her flesh. Finally, her skin rapidly begins to turn black and rotting, until her whole arm is a bloody lump of bloody, tumorous scar tissue.
  • The fact that Natalie almost cuts her arm off with the electric carver... hanging on by a thread, it loses its tenuous grip on the rest of her when she's found.
• To wit, the Deadite possessing Mia stays in the basement when all indications are that it could escape any time. It even stays down there when the door is open and David is vulnerable. It's thrilled to infect the cabinmates one by one and watch their possessed selves inflict further chaos, almost seeming to control them like a proxy in certain scenes.
• Deadite Natalie. Mia and Olivia behaved like bona fide insane people, but Natalie looks, sounds, and behaves like a monster. She moves slowly, possessed of a haunting Kubrick Stare, making the sickening clicking noises previously heard during possessions. She starts shooting her face with the nailgun and then goes to shoot nails into Eric's arm and beat him up with a crowbar. David has no other choice than shooting her with the shotgun to remove her other arm. To put the sprinkles on the sundae, this successfully purges the demon and Natalie regains control for a while, not knowing why she is mutilated and dying in agony from her wounds in David's arms.
  • Deadite Natalie doesn't just beat them up with the crowbar—her first swipe on Eric destroys his hand when he tries to shield himself with it. His fingers are bent and splayed, his palm is widened and cracked down the middle, and the finger that got the direct hit is broken off backwards.
• The basement. It is terrifying and the viewer will be begging David to do anything else by the time he ventures down there into the darkness with the Deadite. Voices whisper terrible things to him as he moves down the stairs, lighting his way with the flashlight, and he shines the beam over a shelf where the box cutter is, before aiming it somewhere else...and when the light falls over that same shelf, the box cutter is gone. The Deadite knows he's there and why.
• From a series of splashes and unseen movements, David and the viewer are left to believe that Deadite Mia is hiding in a stone water tank, expecting her to burst up out of it. But when he turns around, she's there, levitating a foot off the ground and flying at him with the blade, shrieking like a madwoman. It's so much worse in the darkness, with what's happening barely caught with the jerking beam of the flashlight as the Deadite slashes him and tosses him against walls like a ragdoll. It then grabs him and tries to drown him, and almost succeeds.
• David burying Mia alive to try to kill her long enough to release the entity from her body. It tries to dissuade him by pretending to be Mia, screaming, crying, and begging; when that doesn't work, it hits him where it hurts the most (in a Voice of the Legion, no less):
  Demon!Mia: Why do you hate me, David?
  [David stops digging.]
  Demon!Mia: I know you do. You left home. You left me all alone with our sick mother, when I was just a kid.
  [David stares down at her in horror.]
  Demon!Mia: You made me lie. Every time she screamed your name, I told her you were coming to see her. Like you promised. But you never did.
  David: Please stop it. I'm begging you...
  Demon!Mia: I know mother hates you now. And she waits for you in Hell. [Chuckles]
  David: Shut up... SHUT UP!
• Just when it looks like Mia's been successfully cleansed and brought back to life, Deadite Eric shows up, in the most awful way—with a surprise stab to David's throat. From there, Eric barely moves, simply keeping its awful blank eyes on David as he shambles away, trying to stop the bleeding. The cabin is completely dark, so when it finally does start to walk after David almost casually, it's but a shadow against the light of the window. Once David shoves Mia out, it slowly advances on him with a pair of pliers in hand, and no one wants to know what it might've been planning on doing with them before it got blown up. It gets two whispered words out before David sets the cabin on fire:
  Deadite Eric: It's coming...
• The Abomination being released.
  • The whole battle with the Abomination is the stuff nightmares are made of. It. Does. Not. Stop. Attacking. The creature starts by dragging itself out of the mud like a zombie; when Mia tries to escape in the jeep, it smashes through the window and drags her out. She tries to hide in the tool shed, only for the Abomination to start stabbing through the walls of the shed; it misses Mia's body, but knicks the top of her leg — which is slowly sliced open as the blade is drawn back. The next stab goes directly into her leg. Mia flees the shed, chainsaw in hand, only for the Abomination to stagger out of the shed behind her, wielding a machete. She tries to hide under the jeep, but the Abomination flips it over, pinning Mia's arm While the Abomination threatens her, she manages to get free by tearing her arm off. Only then does she turn the chainsaw on her double, slicing it in half head first.
• There's a fair amount of unnerving moments hidden in split-second shots. For example, when Mia is initially possessed and the bloodied-up Olivia kicks her down into the basement, she can be heard falling down the steps one by one. Only a second later, when Eric shuts the door, Mia can be seen already standing upright on the stairwell near the trapdoor. Similarly, while Deadite Natalie is attacking, Mia's in the basement shrieking like a lunatic—yet when Eric shoots the nailgun at Natalie, both Deadites pause. The direction Deadite Mia is looking, accounting for the layout of the house and everyone's positions, is directly at Eric...
• The whole film drives home just how quickly Deadite possession happens. Olivia is puked on by the freshly-possessed Mia, and minutes later, before she can even finish washing her face off and retrieving sedatives, Olivia is gone, and in her place is a screaming, murderous madwoman who is halfway into cutting her own face off in the few seconds it takes Eric, who heard the door slam of its own accord, to show up. There's virtually no humanity to her, and she stares with wide eyes and a slack face as she stabs Eric with the needle over and over, arm swinging back and forth mechanically. Natalie is just as prompt; her possession begins while she's washing her wound, and when she's found with her arm severed, the scene cut to David duct taping her stump over features her just looking...hollow. She doesn't react at all, and there's a blank look to her, as if she isn't even seeing David in front of her, not from shock due to pain or blood loss, but...something else. Sure enough, before the boys can finish their argument in the next room, she is overtaken and goes on the attack.
• On a more subtle note, the "updated" version of the Necronomicon. In the original trilogy, it was kind of creepy yet still rather obviously a B-movie prop, not much unlike something you'd find in a Halloween store. This one however looks FAR more disturbingly authentic and unholy than ever before. The patchwork binding made from necrotic human skin alone is just plain discomforting, to say nothing of the contents of the pages within.
• And speaking of, the Naturom Demonto's pages are terrifying. In it are demonstrations of what exactly Deadites do to themselves and others, in gruesome detail, and the scrawlings all over the book give an indication of what previous victims like Harold had to go through. Of particular note is the phrase "HE IS WATCHING", indicating that at all times, the demonic presence within is aware of what's happening around the book, perhaps even able to influence events. Said demonic presence also wants people to know they're doomed, as Mia falling under its control is announced with a howling wind, lightning strikes, and the entire house violently shaking as it uses its own voice to say so.
• In the unrated cut of the movie, there's several scenes in which you can hear the demon whispering. The long take of Eric sitting still with the whispering spirits is extended, and a voice can be heard whispering "Kill him..." and "Coward..." when Olivia tries to kill Eric and when David goes down into the basement, respectively
• The music in the movie is spine-chilling. Special mention goes to the absolutely psychotic music that plays when the Deadites attack, with "Psycho" Strings galore. An extra special mention for the Silent Hill siren that rings out whenever a Deadite is revealed—Roque Baños knew what he was doing with that soundbyte.
• While nowhere near as bad as the other examples, Ash looking at the camera in The Stinger with a Scare Chord of some sort will still probably catch people off-guard.

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