Eijo: Madness certainly isn’t a new concept in the world of horror — in fact, it’s often the only rational response to many of the nastier goings ons within shock cinema — but how many times has madness been shown to be not only a natural outcome, but a helpful one as well? Not many, I’d say.
Take a look at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Lead actress (and, in the horror vernacular, “final girl”) Marilyn Burns endures so many abuses — finding the fresh corpses of her friends, watching as her brother gets chainsaw’d to bits in his wheelchair, getting bundled up in a burlap sack and beaten with a broom by a giggling redneck, tied to a skeleton chair and seated as guest of honor at a cannibal family’s supper table in which she’s the intended main course, beaten, sliced, chased… ah well, I don’t wanna give it all away — suffice it to say by the end of the flick she’s alive, yes, but after going through so much crap she loses her mind, fishtailing from screaming to laughing to screaming again. And who can blame her?
What’s interesting in Burns’s situation is that for the majority of the film, she focuses so much on surviving that she becomes positively heroic in her thinking and quick action (jumping through not one, but two windows to get away from the cannibals) and it’s not until the very end when she’s actually safe that she goes fruit-loops right before our very eyes.
Now let’s take a look at perhaps the most famous final girl of all, Sigourney Weaver in ALIEN. Like Burns, she sees everyone around her murdered by a monster (that, while terrifying, is only slightly more scary than cannibalistic in-bred Texans) — but unlike Burns, Weaver escapes the alien more or less still doing okay mentally, only taking leave of her senses momentarily, when she goes to absolutely ridorkulous lengths to save a cat. (Seriously? Cats are cool, man, I love cats, but if there’s a monster nearby? Eff the cats!) Now perhaps Weaver’s character holds onto her sanity because she was able to plan and execute a successful attack on the alien, destroying it in order to make her escape while Burns merely “got away,” full in the knowledge that Leatherface is still out there somewhere, dancing around with his chainsaw. Either way, we’ve got two movies based around similar events but with different psychological results — results which aren’t clear until the end.
The Evil Dead also follows the same chain of events — final girl Bruce Campbell watches all of his friends die as well, but they die much earlier in the film and Campbell’s psychological reaction comes earlier as well. He’s off his bird well before the final credits, and the twist is this: his madness not only doesn’t hurt him in the long run, it saves him.
The key difference here is the villain, and the fact that writer/director Sam Raimi fully explores the psychological ramifications of that villain — evil demons. The Texas cannibals and the alien are both, for all intents and purposes, non-supernatural villains with simple tastes: cannibals want to eat people and the alien wants to make a nest of hosts n’ corpses in a warm part of the spaceship. Nasty stuff, sure, but each villain has its own logic, its own rules.
The demonic spirits of The Evil Dead however, are the very antithesis of logic. As spiritual anarchists, these demons attack all forms of reason — they mock sanity, love, rational thought, perception, even nature. They attack your mind, yanking the rug out from under you and only after they’ve stripped away all your hope and sanity do they come in for the kill. They’re malevolent pranksters, wearing the face of your recently deceased girlfriend to do what? Attack you? Nope. Just giggle at your dumb ass. Now that’s messed up.
So while Burns and Weaver go through some pretty nasty business, psychologically speaking, Campbell goes through even worse stuff because he’s getting dogged by the very demons that assaulted his sister with trees (still a very disturbing scene), made her go mad, then killed her, and then used her possessed body to kill his girlfriend Linda.
Not that Campbell starts off in the best shape — as wussy post-feminist girly boy Ashley, Campbell starts out as a winning combination of goofy dork, lame boyfriend, and crappy sidekick in a fight. He flinches at every dang prank his annoying buddy Scott pulls, gets overly worried, lets everyone else tell him what to do, and freezes up with terror every time something scary happens.
Turns out that jerk Scott is the proactive one, the guy who ventures into the dark basement and attempts to find an escape route while Ashley just stands around waiting for the right moment to give his girlfriend Linda a pretty necklace.
But then everyone starts dying — Ashley’s sister, Scott’s girlfriend, then Ashley’s girlfriend Linda. And when Scott returns from his ill-advised trek to find an way out, and he’s torn to shreds by trees (one wonders what the branches did to his hidey hole) and bleeding to death on the couch, Ashley can only think to say, “You’re gonna be all right. You’re gonna be fine.”
This is when we begin to see Ashley’s sanity unravel. He paces the room, stepping carefully past the dismembered pieces of Scott’s girlfriend, and just keeps repeating, “We’re all going to be just fine.”
What’s interesting about Ashley’s descent into madness is that it comes in fits and starts. When he finally decides to face his demon-possessed girlfriend, he goes full-on nutty and takes her out to the shed where he chains her to a work table and revs up a chainsaw with all the intention of cutting her into little bits. This is the first time in the Evil Dead series that we get a glimpse of Ash, the cult icon — he’s bloody, he’s insane, and he’s holding a chainsaw. (This moment is such a well crafted foreshadow of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, it almost makes me want to believe Raimi had this whole series worked out from the start, though I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.)
But then Ashley sees his girlfriend’s new necklace and it grounds him. Regaining his last shred of sanity, he takes her outside to bury her like any civilized person would — and for his trouble, he’s attacked by her, forced to decapitate her with a shovel, and then finds himself trapped under her headless body as it dry-humps him while spurting blood all over his face from its neckhole. Yep, Ashley’s halfway to Crazy Town now.
Back inside the house, Ashley descends into the creepy basement ostensibly to get more ammo for his shotgun, but we know this scene is really about him falling down the rabbit hole. As a record player begins to spin an old timey song, Ashley discovers a film projector. The projector turns on, and what appears to be an enlightening moment of exposition (perhaps a key piece of history about the Book of the Dead, the evil tome that started this whole mess) turns out to be both a plot MacGuffin and a thematic high-point: the nail in the coffin of Ashley’s mind — the projected image (which Ashley never even turns to look at) is quickly obscured by thick gore which has dripped onto the lens. The record player breaks. A light bulb fills with blood. And that, folks, is the end of Ashley’s sanity.
When Ash emerges from the basement, his (and our) perception has shifted. Every shot is askew, off-center, and (in one great moment) completely upside down.
Ash approaches a mirror, sees his face which is still recognizable, and reaches out to touch the glass, but his hand goes right through it like water and he starts screaming because now he’s not only mad — he’s mad and he knows it.
The demons know he’s mad as well, and they recognize this for what it is, a turn of the tide against them — insanity is their main advantage and if Ash is crazy too then they can no longer intimidate him. So they’re done playing now. They come in for the kill but Ash fights them off, blasting them to bits with his shotgun and here’s the weird thing — his insanity has turned him into a badass. By tearing down all his notions of civilized behavior, he’s released his inner cro-magnon — the dude’s de-evolved from a late 20th Century milquetoast to a medieval mamma-jamma. The demons aren’t giggling anymore.
Serious as heart-attacks, the demons give their all — stabbing, biting, pulling, ripping — just abusing the everlovin’ heck out of Ash, but he’s beyond fear or even rational thought. He sees the Book of the Dead nearby and applies the power of his madness-fueled imagination (for when in a million years would this ever work normally?): uses his girlfriend’s necklace to hook the edge of the book so he can yank it within his grasp and hurl it into the fireplace. The effect is instantaneous and dramatic — the demons scream and melt and burst into creamed corn or something, and there’s blood everywhere.
A couple giant arms suddenly reach out of the pile of demon corpses. This is the Demon King, the dude who likes to go roaring around the woods (contrary to popular belief, we actually do get to see it, or at least one of its forms, as a gigantic face roaring in the doorway of the cabin at the end of Evil Dead II), and as it vanishes a voice whispers to Ash, “Join us.”
The Demon King is clearly impressed by Ash’s mad-fu.
As the sun rises, Ash gets to his feet and walks outside. All seems right with the world (excepting the fact that Ash is still completely nuts) until the final shot: the Demon King’s point-of-view as it barrels into Ash, apparently quite insistent on Ash joining the evil dead club.
While there are certainly differences in continuity from one Evil Dead film to the next, the thing that really surprised me watching The Evil Dead again was how perfectly it sets up the Ash we know and love from the next two films. Truly, he is an insane hero, and he proves again and again that he is perhaps the only person fit to battle the demons because he plays at their level — he enjoys the pure thrill of killing just as much as they do, and he’s often laughing just as hard, if not harder, than they are.
