It's always been somewhat funny for me to look back upon Evil Dead II in retrospect. The film came to me at a time when I had already been knee deep in the horror genre, ingesting each and every scary movie I could get my hands on. A good buddy of mine had HBO, and I distinctly remember him showing up at my house one day and handing me a VHS tape that had the words "Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn" scratched across it, a horror movie he had recorded off HBO a few days previously. Eager to see this new (to me) horror film, I watched Evil Dead II that very same night, and my experience was that of pure terror.
Sitting on my trusty couch located in my basement-converted bedroom, I dived head first into Evil Dead II, only to find myself taking more than one break. And it wasn't to go to the bathroom or to get something to eat. Nope, I actually had to turn the film off and leave the room I was so mortified during certain moments.
Something about the Evil Dead II simply creeped me out. There are a handful of these long and grueling moments of silence where Ash is left to sit and frantically wait for whatever horror was waiting to terrorize him next. Sam Raimi effectively used strange, unnatural sounds to jump out and assault Ash and, in turn, myself. The skewed camera work dashes back and forth between frantic and crazed to lingering and ominous. This made what was happening on screen unpredictable and left me completely unsure of where the fuck things were going.
These long and drawn out moments of tension were broken up by sudden bursts of monsters and madness that came at me when I least expected it. An unseen force so powerful it could burst through car windows and knock down doors would randomly attack Ash anytime he took a step outside. This left me in a state where the tension would only grow more intense when the time to build it would come back around. It was in those moments where the film's level of insanity raises and goes into a place where both Ash and I were left to our own unsure thoughts, lingering and sending our nerves into a state of disarray.
Somewhere in between all of this, I found myself having to turn the movie off and simply walk away to, I guess, compose myself. In fact, I had to do this not only once but three times. THREE! Of course, that number and this viewing event have always stuck with me, as it is something that never would be replicated with any other movie or at least any other movie when I was a full-fledged horror fan. I think I was maybe 14 at the time, so I had already seen my fair share of horror movies, and more than a few that scared me well enough, but what Evil Dead II brought to me was something that sent my head spinning in fear to the point where I had to actually stop watching.
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