Actor Bruce Campbell starred in the iconic 1981 film The Evil Dead and it launched an entire franchise consisting of several films and a television series where Campbell reprised his role. The franchise released a remake of the story with new characters in 2013 that felt distinctively different than the original film.
The original was groundbreaking when it introduced the evil dead demonic creatures and balanced its campy nature with true horror and destruction, while the remake focused more on the horror than the camp. There are aspects that are more or less successful in each film, but both are undeniably scary for different reasons.
Remake: Cinematography
The remake plays a lot with its lighting and environment of the woods and setting in the cabin. The way the remake plays with its cinematography gives the film a more modern and eerie edge as it is more stylized and polished than the original. In the original and the remake, the camera movements represent the evil dead approaching the cabin, but the remake also utilizes its lighting to dramatic and terrifying effect.
Original: Unpredictable Originality
The original Evil Dead had a chaotic and surprising energy to the film that no audience could predict, which made it all the scarier. Some horror films follow the motions and it's easy to predict a jump scare, but the original cult classic didn't fall into this trap.
Although the remake attempts to build onto the legacy, it ends up paying homage to the original by repeating some of its moments.
Remake: Why They're At The Cabin
The original Sam Raimi movie saw Ash and his group of friends go out to the cabin in the woods for a fun weekend together, but in the remake, the reason for the group being at the cabin is more serious. They meet out in the secluded area to help Mia quit her narcotics addiction. The group thinks that Mia's pleas for help as she tells them what she's seen out in the woods are part of her hallucinations from the drugs or the beginning of her withdrawal.
Original: Campy Nature
The campy nature of the original The Evil Dead can go either way into being not scary due to its camp or being even scarier due to the more comedic approach to such gore and horror. These are the moments in the original where the audience will be laughing, but then remember how horrific the moment truly is, and be upset that the film had them laughing instead of cringing from the horror.
Remake: Close-Up Gore
The original film was quite gory, but it was gory due to buckets of blood being thrown around the room; the camera alluded to gore. The remake decided to take a different approach by focusing on up-close gore and body horror that's bone-chilling at times, making the audience want to look away.
Original: The Evil Dead Laughing
Although the evil dead in the remake also makes horrific jokes throughout the 2013 film, there's something inherently creepy about the original evil dead laughing and screaming hysterically.
The original goes all in with the possessed being flung around the room and laughing uncontrollably while the remake has them act more controlled and deliberate.
Remake: Suspense
The original film immediately jumped into the action while the remake took the time to try to character build. It also has multiple moments where the audience thinks something surprising or gory might happen, which sometimes follows through, but other times doesn't. The suspense of the remake feels different than the original and is more like a typical horror trope that is usually guaranteed to scare its audience.
Original: Focusing On The Evil Dead
The original film mostly focuses on the evil dead entities that terrorize the group of friends in the abandoned cabin instead of taking the time to develop its human characters before they're possessed. The remake tries to give the characters more backstory and takes up a lot of the beginning of the film by building the characters, and it's not very successful. The original didn't spend much time on the characters, because it didn't need to in order to be successful or scary.
Remake: Foreshadowing
The original is scarier because of its unpredictability, but the Evil Dead remake found its scares in foreshadowing gory moments for each character as they use a nail gun or an electric knife at the beginning of the film that comes back to haunt them later. The book also showed multiple scenes that came true later in the film, and this type of foreshadowing of fate adds an extra creepy factor.
Original: Jumped Right Into The Action
The action and horror in the original Sam Raimi film is relentless, and although the remake finds its scares in suspense and build up, the original is just as terrifying with its beginning of the evil dead zombie like creatures chasing its victims to the cabin and never giving them a moment of peace throughout the film up right until the end of the horror film. The remake attempts to take time to form its characters, and the original succeeds more in skipping the character development and getting right to the action.