Has anyone noticed the news on e-sources like Yahoo lately? Our formerly internationally beloved Canada has became a target for hate, both from within and without. When tax dollars were diverted to pay for an Olympic infrastructure, Canadian social activists rightly cried foul. Our ailing healthcare and educational systems had to take a back seat. Canada responded by legislating against any negative postings levelled against the Olympics in downtown Vancouver or Whistler during the Olympics. Of course, we wouldn't want anything pesky like poverty, education, healthcare or our constitutional right to freedom of speech to get in the way of the rich getting richer, and a handful of athletes obtaining glory. Furthermore, right-wing American rednecks have posted a backlash of threats against all of Canada for those few who aimed threats at the idiotic American figure skater who somehow thought that a self-righteous response to the moronic decision to wear fur would help his already bad publicity. Ironically, the same American gun-toters who support this kind of fashionistic hunting would just as soon gay-bash the clearly metrosexual, if not entirely homosexual, figure skater in any other situation. But in America the rules seem to be clear: patriotism first, homophobia second. The death of a luger even before the games began has been blamed squarely on Canada for not allowing access to the course to international competitors. I must admit, I cannot fathom the logic behind Canada's Olympic decision in that regard, and perhaps the blame is ours. Now that a Japanese luger has been disqualified for having a sled that was too heavy, a rule that judges have no choice but to honour, relations with Japan are sure to suffer too. And the latest? A 'watchdog' from Quebec is taking note of the lack of french amenities at our Canadian Olympics - an almost inevitable side-effect of holding them in the most anglo city of our bilingual country. Every would-be politician with a controversial bone to pick is using the public spectacle of the Olympics as their own private soap box, including me it would seem. It is sad that Canada has chosen to take on the 'honour' of 'having the eyes of the world upon us' in a time of global paranoia when those eyes are usually looking through cross-hairs. The Olympics has done little for Canada but make it a target for hate. But the Olympics is a time-honoured tradition instituted thousands of years ago by the ancient Greeks, a society which gave us theatre, poetry, sculpture, and democracy, and a society whose primary metropolitan centres (Athens, Sparta) spent so many decades in conflict that most of those poets died criticising their own culture, and in tears. Maybe it is time to see this 'time-honoured tradition' laid to rest. Can't we all just get along?
See you in hell,
Shakes.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The 1980s? OH NO!
David Christopher
HA 510
Dr. Lianne McLarty
Wed. Feb. 3, 2010
Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead in the Shifting Forest of 1980s American Fear
The film Evil Dead (c.1983)1 perpetuated basic social fears - it was created by and received into a pre-existing social culture with deeply entrenched and psychologically powerful archetypes of fear: a society religiously protective of its definitions of what is horrific. The movie tested and defined the boundaries of how far society is willing to look into the depth of what is feared. There is a level of extremity that is acceptable, and then there is too much. While the film tested this boundary at one extreme (in a graphic depiction of rape which Raimi regretted as offensive and not fearful)2, it seemed rather mild at the other - the horror hero or villain in the film is a forest! But if the scary forest seems benign by comparison with contemporary horror icons like Leatherface or Michael Myers why revisit it with the cinematographic fervor that Raimi did? Placing the movie within the critical discourse and its historical context explores what it might reveal about the social and political environment of fear in which it was created and deployed. Primarily using ideas in Wood’s article, An introduction to the American horror film3, I explore the socio-political fears which the movie brilliantly and covertly identifies. From that perspective, the forest is one of various innovative versions of “the Other”4 in the movie that are significant representations of the changing tide of fear that was present in the 1980s in America and the evolution of the art-form of horror film that reflects it.
In her article, Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, Carol Clover outlines a chronology and evolution of the horror film leading up to the 1980s. “The immediate ancestor of the slasher film is Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)”5. Clover states that in 1974 “a film emerged that revised the Psycho template to a degree”, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre6. In both cases the monster is humanized and de-foreignized. Dracula, the Mummy, and other now camp horror icons were all definitively foreign. “The process whereby horror becomes associated with its true milieu, the family, is reflected in its steady geographical progress towards America”7. Wood isolates this process as occurring between the fifties and the seventies. Leatherface and Norman Bates are both resident Americans and fully human. More important is the fact that they have or are taking part in post industrial revolution urban culture. Even the non-human slasher in Alien has arrived via technology and is imported into the urban (or technological) culture of the humans’ spacecraft.
The 1980s witnessed the horror film genre saturated with slasher flicks and their identifiable villains: Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and most iconic, Leatherface. Evil Dead follows conventions established by Massacre quite closely: five young victims traveling together through “uncharted territory” who form “two couples and a brother/sister family unit”8. Tony Williams, in his article Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror, argues that the slasher film is primarily concerned with external assaults on the dominant social construct of family. In Evil Dead, the family is loosely represented in several ways: the proposal-like jewellery gift from Ash, the obvious couplings, the brother and sister presence and the racially and socially identical group of friends with an obvious amicable history. In fact, the overall construction is strikingly similar to Massacre with the exception of the specific evil slaughtering the ‘normal’ urbanites identified corporeally in Massacre and less tangibly in Evil Dead. But if Evil Dead is so similar and participates with the slasher genre so closely, how is it different, and how does it reflect a changing tide of fear? In Horror Films of the 1980s, Muir states that while “these narrative locales and elements play as a tribute to the great horrors of earlier vintage, the opening scene also reveals Raimi’s unique visual genius and ability to leap beyond convention” 9. Amongst other innovations, Raimi radically inverts the ‘last female’ convention to the last male, re-uniting the previously disparate male-female dichotomy under a common cultural banner against the invading foreign Other.
The threat of the foreign Other was a changing sensibility in the early 1980s. “The fifties science-fiction cycle of invasion movies is generally regarded as being concerned with the Communist threat”10. “While campaigning for President [Ronald Reagan] insisted that the Soviet Union was at the bottom of all trouble in the world, and in 1983 he famously referred to it as “the evil empire””11. “Yet by the time his presidency ended growing numbers of Americans were arguing that the real enemy was not the Soviet Union, but Japan” and American culture was “as wary as ever of their nation’s vulnerability to internal subversion or external attack”12.
While the 1980s may have been the climax of the cold war, rife with anti-communist sensibilities and a pervasive nuclear fear, history shows that cold war fears were coming to a close. “By the late 1970s . . . Japanese imports were undermining American manufacturers in the motor, consumer electronics and other industries”13. “In [1979] one academic book to become a bestseller was Japan as Number One”14. “By the 1980 presidential campaign the trade gap with Japan was a political issue”15. “[A]nti-Japanese sentiment deepened with the recession of the early 1980s, especially in 1982 when many workers who lost their jobs blamed Japanese competition”16. The opening scene of Evil Dead portrays the viewpoint of an unknown and ominous evil lurking in the woods and closes with an image of a half-submerged vehicle in a state of battered dilapidation. Immediately following is the same car in its operating state, before its demise, carrying its travelling victims to their cabin destination. It can be no coincidence that the opening scene depicts a distinctly American car travelling out of its urban safety zone into the unknown wilds. American society, drunk on anti-communist nuclear fear did not simply release the energy of that fear, but transferred it onto an economic invader rather than a military one. The nihilistic fear of a Communist nuclear attack was superimposed onto an emerging fear of a Japanese economic invasion.
At the time of the film’s release, the perception of a foreign threat was in flux, shifting from a Communist Russia to an economically relentless Japan. In this state of flux, symbols specifically depicting the Communist threat could be superseded with a wide berth of more general symbols of international Otherness moving towards Asia and Japan. Wood points out that “Irena in Cat People is from Serbia, Zombie is set in the West Indies, The Leopard Man in Mexico, etc.”17. Raimi innovatively locates a more elusive and hidden foreign Other squarely within American borders. In this way, Evil Dead is a perfect evolution and recombination of the foreign Other from outside American borders and the domestic threat of its own societal members. While America wasn’t looking and became preoccupied with resident evils, the foreign Other infiltrated the country and hid. From this new headquarters it became worthy of exploration again in movies such as Evil Dead . The Japanese threat, especially in the automotive industry, came all too close to home.
Wood defines a “basic formula” for the horror film. “[N]ormality is threatened by the Monster”18. Any critical analysis of a film, therefore fundamentally requires the identification of the Monster within the film. Wood defines eight categories of Other which include “Other cultures”, “Ethnic groups”, and “Alternative ideologies or political systems”19. In fact, Wood defines the Other in Marxist terms: “the concept of “the Other”: that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with . . . in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it”20. The Other “functions not simply as something external to the culture or the self, but also what is repressed (but never destroyed) in the self and projected outwards in order to be hated and disowned. A particularly vivid example . . . is the relationship of the Puritan settlers to the Indians in the early days of America. The Puritans rejected any perception that the Indians had a culture, a civilization, of their own; they perceived them not merely as savage but, literally, as devils or the spawn of the Devil”21. The savage Other and the denial of their culture is clearly evident in Evil Dead. The evil of the religion from an ancient foreign culture is a foregone conclusion in the plotline. The fact of its impossibility is overlooked in order to relegate the culture to its necessary position as evil and dangerous. The writing of the book from which the incantations are drawn would be an impossible side-effect of a culture so aligned with evil that it would destroy itself (as are all of the urbanites except Ash) before any record could be made, unless it was written by some sort of demon itself, further aligning the foreign culture with evil and endowing its demons with uncharacteristic and unlikely literary capabilities.
Wood isolates the horror of the foreign to the Thirties. “In the Thirties, the monster was almost invariably foreign”22. “[T]he foreignness of the horror characters is strongly underlined . . . by the fact that nobody knows where [the monster] comes from”23. Wood lists Island of Lost Souls, Manitou, and Prophecy as movies that address the foreign Other24. I suggest that Evil Dead should be included on the list, although its depiction of the foreign Other is more subtle. “[F]ilms set on uncharted (and usually nameless) islands lend themselves particularly to interpretation of this kind”25. The nameless forest in Evil Dead becomes an island of just this sort when the bridge is destroyed and Ash and his companions are marooned in the insular forest.
The most obvious Other in the film, in stark contrast to the human slashers of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc. is a forest. “In any discussion of specific Evil Dead scenes, Cheryl’s rape by the woods is certain to be addressed. It’s Evil Dead’s most controversial scene, and remains a mesmeric trademark moment”26. After her rape, Cheryl will directly identify the forest as the body that attacked her: “it was the woods themselves. They’re alive”27. “Those pagan roots have emerged again and dragged the maiden, like Persphone into Hades, back to the jungle”28. Like 'the new twist on the old vampire story' trend of the eighties and nineties, Raimi presents the less obvious new twist on the old evil forest story. The unexpected subtlety of the forest as monster leaves the audience with the illusion of exploring uncharted and unexpected horror throughout the film. The mind cannot protect itself from a villain that is so elusive. The frightening labyrinthine nature a forest can have is seen in foliage mazes overtly depicted in classic literature like Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and movies including The Shining and later in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and less obviously in The Blair Witch Project. This cross-section of films demonstrates a universal fear of evil dark foliage across movies aimed at children and adults alike. In Evil Dead, the forest is pressing its ominous evil inwards and all around. Raimi’s ““shaky” cam”29 innovation fused the mobility of contemporary horror villains with the forest. The forest is rendered able to move and attack its victims. The soundtrack represents the centre of the mobile evil which mows its way through and over the forest. By juxtaposing it against more corporeal villains, Raimi slams the forest back into the relevant spectre of modern fears and criticisms. A terrifying reminder that it is still relevant and represents much that is still to be feared.
The forest and its motivating religion can only go so far in generating fear before it can no longer sustain the increasing visceral-visual reaction required in horror and the imagery must return to the horrifically mutated ‘demon-body’ of the infected urbanites to graphically depict evil. “[H]orror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation”30. Carol Clover and Linda Williams explore the relevance of the corporeal body in detail. Here it is sufficient to locate it as one of the visual manifestations of the Monster or Other. What is paramount is how these bodies of normality transform into the monstrous. Once infected, or possessed, by the ancient religion, the converted member, exposed to the evils of the Other, becomes an immediate and direct threat to those still repressed by the normality of their ethnocentric culture. The need for the forest to possess its victims bodily may also be a covert admission of the Other within the ‘us’ while maintaining an opposition against urban American culture. The repetition throughout the movie of the phrase “join us” by both the voice in the forest and the deadites themselves vividly underscores the notion of Other and its inherent fear. If the urbanites willingly embraced the Other and joined them, there would be nothing to fear. The movie uses the term “deadites”31 in order to suggest its zombies are somehow different. The term ‘urbanite’ was popularized in the 1950s and had become a standard part of American vernacular by the 1980s. “Deadite”31 is obviously derivative of the term and makes clear that the normality of the urbanite is corrupted once exposed to the evil Other in the forest.
But therein lays the ambiguity in the forest as Other. The physical forest rapes Cheryl but when the camera moves, it knocks trees over suggesting a deeper evil that is not actually the forest but an evil that haunts it. In Horror Films of the 1980s, Muir points out that the “invisible, unseen force roams the forest knocking down trees like King Kong”32. After the clock stops33, the first act of possession occurs. An ominous breeze blows across Cheryl from an open window and she is then compelled to scribble a horrific face on her art pad. The possession of Scott’s girlfriend occurs after a force from the forest rushes in upon her breaking the window glass to do so. She undergoes no other physical assault. Ash’s girlfriend becomes a deadite after being left alone in another room for a short period, but she had already been stabbed in the ankle with a pencil by the deadite Cheryl. The film is ambiguous as to whether her possession was a result of one or the other. The last possession (notably after all female bodies have been corrupted) is of Ash’s friend Scott. He is brutally physically attacked by his own deadite girlfriend but later rushes out into the forest where he is also physically assaulted by the foliage. While he is convalescent on the couch, he transforms at some unknown time off-screen. Once all four are infected, it evolves into a typical zombie movie with the last man protagonist, Ash, beset on all sides by his attacking zombified friends. However, the method by which the forest evil takes possession of its victims’ bodies is painfully vague.
The corruption of the urbanite body points towards stereotypical symbols of a deeply entrenched Christian society. “Within the biblical context, the corpse is also utterly abject. It signifies one of the most basic forms of pollution – the body without a soul”34. Extending Creed’s rationale beyond exclusively feminist criticism, the Christian ideology is strengthened while tying itself back to environmental issues: in a growing population (often seen as horrific in the zombie movie) the human body itself is a pollutant to the mother earth that spawned it.
Early in the film, Ash identifies a geographic location for the setting. “We just crossed the Tennessee border…”35. A near car accident diverts attention away from anything more specific. Tennessee has a contiguous border with eight other states, placing the setting pretty much anywhere in the mid-eastern United States. While Tennessee is probably best known as the home of Elvis’s Graceland, geographically it is also the central state in the so-called Baptist Bible Belt. While likely an unintentional coincidence on the part of Raimi, it does support the larger semiotic deployment of the film within its cultural context. In the film, Ash’s friend curses at some locals on the roadside by yelling “Ahh, go to hell” followed by his exclamatory “Jesus Christ”37. Both phrases are indicative of a vernacular couched in Christian doctrine. Heale quotes George Bush as having said “”cocaine was smuggled in on a ship,” a “deadly virus” eating at “the soul of our country”” in 198938. Even Bush was able to recognize the political sensibility aroused by linking foreign imports (admittedly illegal ones in this example) against a religious right. He deploys the terms “smuggled in” against “the soul”.
So the film deploys anti-Christian and anti-American urban economy symbolism. It depicts the monstrous Other as both an elusive evil in the forest and the corporeal bodies of the urbanites turned deadite. But hidden even deeper in the Other is not the monster itself, but its source. The academic whose voice is heard on the reel tape reveals that the search for knowledge of foreign cultures is the very cause of imported evil. The voice claims it was in the process of “excavating the ruins of Kandar” (which may have been a linguistic nod to Tolkien’s Gondor) and touches on all the depictions of the Other and its anti-American civilization tendencies39. It refers to the “myriad distractions of modern civilization”, “far from the groves of academe”, “those forces that roam the forest in dark bowers of man’s domain”, and claims that it is “through these incantations that the demons are given license to possess the living”39. Wood describes two films in which “science is initially responsible for bringing the monster into the community and thereby endangering the latter’s existence”40. For Evil Dead, we can make the exact same statement with academic research substituting for science. Muir describes a “resemblance to a little a little-known 1971 film called Equinox, which saw another adept demonologist take a book of demon incantations to his remote cabin in the woods, where things go wrong”41. The unidentified researcher/archaeologist’s studies into ancient foreign religions is brought home to American soil where it can infect the community. The academic’s choice to pursue his study of “ancient Sumerian funerary practices”39 is a repetition of the Pandora’s box myth. The very act of seeking knowledge – the Christian apple that Adam could not resist – damns its subject to hell. As a fundamental part of a capitalist-patriarch society, Christianity is deployed to defend and reinforce its organizational hegemony. Christianity is unmentioned but clearly placed in opposition to ancient and/or foreign cultures. In a final trope of anti-academic sentiment, it is only by burning the Book of the Dead (that contains the deadly incantations) that Ash manages to vanquish the demons that have possessed his companions. But they are dead and Ash remains irrevocably changed as well, having had to take part in the horrific culture of the Other by dismembering his girlfriend. In an inversion of Massacre, the protagonist becomes Leatherface.
The semiotics of symbols and conventions are unconsciously deployed into the artwork. “For the filmmakers, as well as the audience, full awareness stops at the level of plot, action, and character, in which the most dangerous and subversive implications can disguise themselves and escape detection”42. “Popular films, then, respond to interpretation as at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams of their audiences – the fusion made possible by the shared structures of a common ideology”43. Bellin in his introduction to Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation, convincingly describes how a work of art (especially film, which is inherently collaborative) is constructed by and deployed into a pre-existing culture characterised by its own social and political ideologies. The artwork, in turn, either reifies or interrogates the very social and political ideologies that created it. “[T]o say that fantasy films are social constructs is not solely to say that they are constructed by their social contexts. It is, at the same time, to say that they are constructive of their social contexts”44. He quotes Eric Greene as stating “One of the characteristics of fiction is the ability to extract controversial problems from their social circumstances and reinscribe them onto fictional, even outlandish, contexts”45. Clover refers to the images of “cinematic play” as having “pronoun functions”: images that are smaller representations of a larger antecedent idea46. In this case, the “pronouns” are monstrous Others. They represent an “outlandish context” in which repressed fear of a foreign Other, formerly a military one outside of American borders, has shifted to an economic one that has infiltrated the country’s political boundaries and threatened its very prosperity.
In Evil Dead, the monster or Other follows a specific path; research of the Other, import of the Other, release of the other (via religious incantation) into an ancient archetypal fear (the forest), indirect and ambiguous (and therefore more frightening) infection or possession by the Other, direct assault by corrupted individuals who have become the Other. “[T]he fascination of horror is not to fix the images at their every appearance but, instead, to trace their migrations to the audience”47. By following these lines, Raimi places the forest and ancient religion against insular urban American culture, a definitive reflection of an uneasy shift from communist military fears to Japanese economic fears. Secondly, symbols of Christianity are opposed with advances in academic knowledge. The various and innovative depictions of the Other conflate to demonstrate a unity between the dominant social orders of Christianity and the domestic economy. Raimi uses conventions of the slasher film, but juxtaposes or fuses them with less corporeal villains and representations of a fear that was shifting away from the human urban violent criminal towards the foreign economic invader. Evil Dead is preceded by depictions in horror films of Others that are distinctly foreign and are ultimately vanquished and destroyed. It is contemporary with a series of movies in which the foreign Other is absorbed into a growing population which itself threatens to attack normality in sheer numbers (zombies) or environmental revenge of a planet whose stewards have failed utterly. No-one will be the Other and all will be destroyed. Wood describes horror films that immediately precede the c.1983 release of Evil Dead, particularly The Omen (1976) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), as worlds in which “annihilation is inevitable, humanity is now completely powerless, there is nothing anyone can do to arrest the process”48. Evil Dead participates in this convention. When the clock stops, there is no context for its occurrence and the question that arises is one of wonder. Will the horrific night go on forever? Many horror films offer an all-too-easy escape formula from the horror; Evil Dead is vague. There is no offer of an escape and time itself gives way to the unavoidable chasm of horror. Evil Dead lies at an historical cusp between the established human-slasher convention and the unavoidable evil of an unknown future. The film creatively and extensively covers all aspects of the shifting tenor of fear in America and the evolution of the art-movie genre in which fear was depicted and perceived.
Notes and Endnotes
1 Wikipedia dates the film release in 1981. In Fantastic Cinema Subject Guide, Senn and Johnson date the movie in 1982. In Horror Films of the 1980s, Muir dates the movie in 1983.
2 In a brief description of the film cataloguing it in Fantastic Cinema Subject Guide, Senn and Johnson feel the need to point out that Raimi “regrets including that scene in the movie” quoting him as saying “it was unnecessarily gratuitous and a little too brutal” (164).
3 Wood, Robin. An Introduction to the American Horror Film. Print.
4 Wood 199. Wood first introduces the term identifying semiotic interpretations of monsters in horror films, borrowed from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and it is repeatedly used by many critics throughout the discourse.
5 Grant, Barry Keith. The Dread of Difference : Gender and the Horror Film. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Print. 72.
6 Grant 72.
7 Wood 209.
8 Wood 212.
9 Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Films of the 1980s. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2007. Print. 320.
10 Wood 201.
11 Heale, M. J. "Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980-1993." Journal of American Studies 43.1 (2009): 19-47. Print. 2.
12 Heale 2.
13 Heale 2.
14 Heale 2..
15 Heale 3.
16 Heale 3.
17 Wood 209.
18 Wood 203.
19 Wood 200.
20 Wood 199.
21 Wood 199.
22 Wood 201
23 Wood 209.
24 Wood 209.
25 Wood 209.
26 Muir 320.
27 Evil Dead. Dir. Sam Raimi. Perf. Bruce Campbell, etc. Anchor Bay Entertainmenet, 1981. DVD. 29:37.
28 Muir 320.
29 Muir 51.
30 Grant 69.
31 Evil
32 Muir 319.
33 Evil 7:45
34 Grant 39.
35 Evil 1:30
36 Grant 39.
37 Evil 2:30.
38 Heale 2.
39 Evil 16:38-17:50.
40 Wood 219.
41 Muir 319.
42 Wood 203.
43 Wood 203.
44 Bellin, Joshua D. Framing Monsters. Sothern Carolina University Press. 2005. Print. 8.
45 Bellin 8.
46 Grant 71.
47 Grant 70.
48 Wood 211.
Bibliography
Athey, Stephanie, and Daniel Cooper Alarcon. "Oroonoko's Gendered Economies of honor/horror: Reframing Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas." American Literature 65 (1993): 415-43. Print.
Bellin, Joshua D. Framing Monsters. Sothern Carolina University Press. 2005. Print.
Brummer, Alex. "The Men Who Put the Fear of God into America." Guardian 23 (1986): 21. Print.
Cheyfitz, Eric. "Balancing the Earth: Native American Philosophies and the Environmental Crisis." Arizona Quarterly 65.3 (2009): 139-62. Print.
Donziger, Steven R. "Fear, Crime, and Punishment in the United States." Tikkun 12.6 (1997): 24-7. Print.
Evil Dead. Dir. Sam Raimi. Perf. Bruce Campbell, etc. Anchor Bay Entertainmenet, 1981. DVD.
Grant, Barry Keith. The Dread of Difference : Gender and the Horror Film. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Print.
Heale, M. J. "Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980-1993." Journal of American Studies 43.1 (2009): 19-47. Print.
Horowitz, Gad. Repression : Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory : Freud, Reich, and Marcuse. Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Print.
Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Films of the 1980s. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2007. Print.
Penner, Jonathan, actor, Steven Jay Schneider, and Paul Duncan. Horror Cinema; London: Taschen, 2008. Print.
Sapolsky, Barry S. "Sex and Violence in Slasher Films: Re-examining the Assumptions." Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80.1 (2003): 28-38. Print.
Senn, Bryan, and John Johnson. Fantastic Cinema Subject Guide : A Topical Index to 2500 Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 1992. Print.
Thomson, Douglass H., Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank. Gothic Writers : A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002. Print.
Weatherby, W. J. "America's Horror Movie Brought to Life." Guardian 16 (1984): 15. Print.
Wood, Robin. An Introduction to the American Horror Film. Print.
HA 510
Dr. Lianne McLarty
Wed. Feb. 3, 2010
Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead in the Shifting Forest of 1980s American Fear
The film Evil Dead (c.1983)1 perpetuated basic social fears - it was created by and received into a pre-existing social culture with deeply entrenched and psychologically powerful archetypes of fear: a society religiously protective of its definitions of what is horrific. The movie tested and defined the boundaries of how far society is willing to look into the depth of what is feared. There is a level of extremity that is acceptable, and then there is too much. While the film tested this boundary at one extreme (in a graphic depiction of rape which Raimi regretted as offensive and not fearful)2, it seemed rather mild at the other - the horror hero or villain in the film is a forest! But if the scary forest seems benign by comparison with contemporary horror icons like Leatherface or Michael Myers why revisit it with the cinematographic fervor that Raimi did? Placing the movie within the critical discourse and its historical context explores what it might reveal about the social and political environment of fear in which it was created and deployed. Primarily using ideas in Wood’s article, An introduction to the American horror film3, I explore the socio-political fears which the movie brilliantly and covertly identifies. From that perspective, the forest is one of various innovative versions of “the Other”4 in the movie that are significant representations of the changing tide of fear that was present in the 1980s in America and the evolution of the art-form of horror film that reflects it.
In her article, Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, Carol Clover outlines a chronology and evolution of the horror film leading up to the 1980s. “The immediate ancestor of the slasher film is Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)”5. Clover states that in 1974 “a film emerged that revised the Psycho template to a degree”, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre6. In both cases the monster is humanized and de-foreignized. Dracula, the Mummy, and other now camp horror icons were all definitively foreign. “The process whereby horror becomes associated with its true milieu, the family, is reflected in its steady geographical progress towards America”7. Wood isolates this process as occurring between the fifties and the seventies. Leatherface and Norman Bates are both resident Americans and fully human. More important is the fact that they have or are taking part in post industrial revolution urban culture. Even the non-human slasher in Alien has arrived via technology and is imported into the urban (or technological) culture of the humans’ spacecraft.
The 1980s witnessed the horror film genre saturated with slasher flicks and their identifiable villains: Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and most iconic, Leatherface. Evil Dead follows conventions established by Massacre quite closely: five young victims traveling together through “uncharted territory” who form “two couples and a brother/sister family unit”8. Tony Williams, in his article Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror, argues that the slasher film is primarily concerned with external assaults on the dominant social construct of family. In Evil Dead, the family is loosely represented in several ways: the proposal-like jewellery gift from Ash, the obvious couplings, the brother and sister presence and the racially and socially identical group of friends with an obvious amicable history. In fact, the overall construction is strikingly similar to Massacre with the exception of the specific evil slaughtering the ‘normal’ urbanites identified corporeally in Massacre and less tangibly in Evil Dead. But if Evil Dead is so similar and participates with the slasher genre so closely, how is it different, and how does it reflect a changing tide of fear? In Horror Films of the 1980s, Muir states that while “these narrative locales and elements play as a tribute to the great horrors of earlier vintage, the opening scene also reveals Raimi’s unique visual genius and ability to leap beyond convention” 9. Amongst other innovations, Raimi radically inverts the ‘last female’ convention to the last male, re-uniting the previously disparate male-female dichotomy under a common cultural banner against the invading foreign Other.
The threat of the foreign Other was a changing sensibility in the early 1980s. “The fifties science-fiction cycle of invasion movies is generally regarded as being concerned with the Communist threat”10. “While campaigning for President [Ronald Reagan] insisted that the Soviet Union was at the bottom of all trouble in the world, and in 1983 he famously referred to it as “the evil empire””11. “Yet by the time his presidency ended growing numbers of Americans were arguing that the real enemy was not the Soviet Union, but Japan” and American culture was “as wary as ever of their nation’s vulnerability to internal subversion or external attack”12.
While the 1980s may have been the climax of the cold war, rife with anti-communist sensibilities and a pervasive nuclear fear, history shows that cold war fears were coming to a close. “By the late 1970s . . . Japanese imports were undermining American manufacturers in the motor, consumer electronics and other industries”13. “In [1979] one academic book to become a bestseller was Japan as Number One”14. “By the 1980 presidential campaign the trade gap with Japan was a political issue”15. “[A]nti-Japanese sentiment deepened with the recession of the early 1980s, especially in 1982 when many workers who lost their jobs blamed Japanese competition”16. The opening scene of Evil Dead portrays the viewpoint of an unknown and ominous evil lurking in the woods and closes with an image of a half-submerged vehicle in a state of battered dilapidation. Immediately following is the same car in its operating state, before its demise, carrying its travelling victims to their cabin destination. It can be no coincidence that the opening scene depicts a distinctly American car travelling out of its urban safety zone into the unknown wilds. American society, drunk on anti-communist nuclear fear did not simply release the energy of that fear, but transferred it onto an economic invader rather than a military one. The nihilistic fear of a Communist nuclear attack was superimposed onto an emerging fear of a Japanese economic invasion.
At the time of the film’s release, the perception of a foreign threat was in flux, shifting from a Communist Russia to an economically relentless Japan. In this state of flux, symbols specifically depicting the Communist threat could be superseded with a wide berth of more general symbols of international Otherness moving towards Asia and Japan. Wood points out that “Irena in Cat People is from Serbia, Zombie is set in the West Indies, The Leopard Man in Mexico, etc.”17. Raimi innovatively locates a more elusive and hidden foreign Other squarely within American borders. In this way, Evil Dead is a perfect evolution and recombination of the foreign Other from outside American borders and the domestic threat of its own societal members. While America wasn’t looking and became preoccupied with resident evils, the foreign Other infiltrated the country and hid. From this new headquarters it became worthy of exploration again in movies such as Evil Dead . The Japanese threat, especially in the automotive industry, came all too close to home.
Wood defines a “basic formula” for the horror film. “[N]ormality is threatened by the Monster”18. Any critical analysis of a film, therefore fundamentally requires the identification of the Monster within the film. Wood defines eight categories of Other which include “Other cultures”, “Ethnic groups”, and “Alternative ideologies or political systems”19. In fact, Wood defines the Other in Marxist terms: “the concept of “the Other”: that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with . . . in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it”20. The Other “functions not simply as something external to the culture or the self, but also what is repressed (but never destroyed) in the self and projected outwards in order to be hated and disowned. A particularly vivid example . . . is the relationship of the Puritan settlers to the Indians in the early days of America. The Puritans rejected any perception that the Indians had a culture, a civilization, of their own; they perceived them not merely as savage but, literally, as devils or the spawn of the Devil”21. The savage Other and the denial of their culture is clearly evident in Evil Dead. The evil of the religion from an ancient foreign culture is a foregone conclusion in the plotline. The fact of its impossibility is overlooked in order to relegate the culture to its necessary position as evil and dangerous. The writing of the book from which the incantations are drawn would be an impossible side-effect of a culture so aligned with evil that it would destroy itself (as are all of the urbanites except Ash) before any record could be made, unless it was written by some sort of demon itself, further aligning the foreign culture with evil and endowing its demons with uncharacteristic and unlikely literary capabilities.
Wood isolates the horror of the foreign to the Thirties. “In the Thirties, the monster was almost invariably foreign”22. “[T]he foreignness of the horror characters is strongly underlined . . . by the fact that nobody knows where [the monster] comes from”23. Wood lists Island of Lost Souls, Manitou, and Prophecy as movies that address the foreign Other24. I suggest that Evil Dead should be included on the list, although its depiction of the foreign Other is more subtle. “[F]ilms set on uncharted (and usually nameless) islands lend themselves particularly to interpretation of this kind”25. The nameless forest in Evil Dead becomes an island of just this sort when the bridge is destroyed and Ash and his companions are marooned in the insular forest.
The most obvious Other in the film, in stark contrast to the human slashers of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc. is a forest. “In any discussion of specific Evil Dead scenes, Cheryl’s rape by the woods is certain to be addressed. It’s Evil Dead’s most controversial scene, and remains a mesmeric trademark moment”26. After her rape, Cheryl will directly identify the forest as the body that attacked her: “it was the woods themselves. They’re alive”27. “Those pagan roots have emerged again and dragged the maiden, like Persphone into Hades, back to the jungle”28. Like 'the new twist on the old vampire story' trend of the eighties and nineties, Raimi presents the less obvious new twist on the old evil forest story. The unexpected subtlety of the forest as monster leaves the audience with the illusion of exploring uncharted and unexpected horror throughout the film. The mind cannot protect itself from a villain that is so elusive. The frightening labyrinthine nature a forest can have is seen in foliage mazes overtly depicted in classic literature like Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and movies including The Shining and later in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and less obviously in The Blair Witch Project. This cross-section of films demonstrates a universal fear of evil dark foliage across movies aimed at children and adults alike. In Evil Dead, the forest is pressing its ominous evil inwards and all around. Raimi’s ““shaky” cam”29 innovation fused the mobility of contemporary horror villains with the forest. The forest is rendered able to move and attack its victims. The soundtrack represents the centre of the mobile evil which mows its way through and over the forest. By juxtaposing it against more corporeal villains, Raimi slams the forest back into the relevant spectre of modern fears and criticisms. A terrifying reminder that it is still relevant and represents much that is still to be feared.
The forest and its motivating religion can only go so far in generating fear before it can no longer sustain the increasing visceral-visual reaction required in horror and the imagery must return to the horrifically mutated ‘demon-body’ of the infected urbanites to graphically depict evil. “[H]orror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation”30. Carol Clover and Linda Williams explore the relevance of the corporeal body in detail. Here it is sufficient to locate it as one of the visual manifestations of the Monster or Other. What is paramount is how these bodies of normality transform into the monstrous. Once infected, or possessed, by the ancient religion, the converted member, exposed to the evils of the Other, becomes an immediate and direct threat to those still repressed by the normality of their ethnocentric culture. The need for the forest to possess its victims bodily may also be a covert admission of the Other within the ‘us’ while maintaining an opposition against urban American culture. The repetition throughout the movie of the phrase “join us” by both the voice in the forest and the deadites themselves vividly underscores the notion of Other and its inherent fear. If the urbanites willingly embraced the Other and joined them, there would be nothing to fear. The movie uses the term “deadites”31 in order to suggest its zombies are somehow different. The term ‘urbanite’ was popularized in the 1950s and had become a standard part of American vernacular by the 1980s. “Deadite”31 is obviously derivative of the term and makes clear that the normality of the urbanite is corrupted once exposed to the evil Other in the forest.
But therein lays the ambiguity in the forest as Other. The physical forest rapes Cheryl but when the camera moves, it knocks trees over suggesting a deeper evil that is not actually the forest but an evil that haunts it. In Horror Films of the 1980s, Muir points out that the “invisible, unseen force roams the forest knocking down trees like King Kong”32. After the clock stops33, the first act of possession occurs. An ominous breeze blows across Cheryl from an open window and she is then compelled to scribble a horrific face on her art pad. The possession of Scott’s girlfriend occurs after a force from the forest rushes in upon her breaking the window glass to do so. She undergoes no other physical assault. Ash’s girlfriend becomes a deadite after being left alone in another room for a short period, but she had already been stabbed in the ankle with a pencil by the deadite Cheryl. The film is ambiguous as to whether her possession was a result of one or the other. The last possession (notably after all female bodies have been corrupted) is of Ash’s friend Scott. He is brutally physically attacked by his own deadite girlfriend but later rushes out into the forest where he is also physically assaulted by the foliage. While he is convalescent on the couch, he transforms at some unknown time off-screen. Once all four are infected, it evolves into a typical zombie movie with the last man protagonist, Ash, beset on all sides by his attacking zombified friends. However, the method by which the forest evil takes possession of its victims’ bodies is painfully vague.
The corruption of the urbanite body points towards stereotypical symbols of a deeply entrenched Christian society. “Within the biblical context, the corpse is also utterly abject. It signifies one of the most basic forms of pollution – the body without a soul”34. Extending Creed’s rationale beyond exclusively feminist criticism, the Christian ideology is strengthened while tying itself back to environmental issues: in a growing population (often seen as horrific in the zombie movie) the human body itself is a pollutant to the mother earth that spawned it.
Early in the film, Ash identifies a geographic location for the setting. “We just crossed the Tennessee border…”35. A near car accident diverts attention away from anything more specific. Tennessee has a contiguous border with eight other states, placing the setting pretty much anywhere in the mid-eastern United States. While Tennessee is probably best known as the home of Elvis’s Graceland, geographically it is also the central state in the so-called Baptist Bible Belt. While likely an unintentional coincidence on the part of Raimi, it does support the larger semiotic deployment of the film within its cultural context. In the film, Ash’s friend curses at some locals on the roadside by yelling “Ahh, go to hell” followed by his exclamatory “Jesus Christ”37. Both phrases are indicative of a vernacular couched in Christian doctrine. Heale quotes George Bush as having said “”cocaine was smuggled in on a ship,” a “deadly virus” eating at “the soul of our country”” in 198938. Even Bush was able to recognize the political sensibility aroused by linking foreign imports (admittedly illegal ones in this example) against a religious right. He deploys the terms “smuggled in” against “the soul”.
So the film deploys anti-Christian and anti-American urban economy symbolism. It depicts the monstrous Other as both an elusive evil in the forest and the corporeal bodies of the urbanites turned deadite. But hidden even deeper in the Other is not the monster itself, but its source. The academic whose voice is heard on the reel tape reveals that the search for knowledge of foreign cultures is the very cause of imported evil. The voice claims it was in the process of “excavating the ruins of Kandar” (which may have been a linguistic nod to Tolkien’s Gondor) and touches on all the depictions of the Other and its anti-American civilization tendencies39. It refers to the “myriad distractions of modern civilization”, “far from the groves of academe”, “those forces that roam the forest in dark bowers of man’s domain”, and claims that it is “through these incantations that the demons are given license to possess the living”39. Wood describes two films in which “science is initially responsible for bringing the monster into the community and thereby endangering the latter’s existence”40. For Evil Dead, we can make the exact same statement with academic research substituting for science. Muir describes a “resemblance to a little a little-known 1971 film called Equinox, which saw another adept demonologist take a book of demon incantations to his remote cabin in the woods, where things go wrong”41. The unidentified researcher/archaeologist’s studies into ancient foreign religions is brought home to American soil where it can infect the community. The academic’s choice to pursue his study of “ancient Sumerian funerary practices”39 is a repetition of the Pandora’s box myth. The very act of seeking knowledge – the Christian apple that Adam could not resist – damns its subject to hell. As a fundamental part of a capitalist-patriarch society, Christianity is deployed to defend and reinforce its organizational hegemony. Christianity is unmentioned but clearly placed in opposition to ancient and/or foreign cultures. In a final trope of anti-academic sentiment, it is only by burning the Book of the Dead (that contains the deadly incantations) that Ash manages to vanquish the demons that have possessed his companions. But they are dead and Ash remains irrevocably changed as well, having had to take part in the horrific culture of the Other by dismembering his girlfriend. In an inversion of Massacre, the protagonist becomes Leatherface.
The semiotics of symbols and conventions are unconsciously deployed into the artwork. “For the filmmakers, as well as the audience, full awareness stops at the level of plot, action, and character, in which the most dangerous and subversive implications can disguise themselves and escape detection”42. “Popular films, then, respond to interpretation as at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams of their audiences – the fusion made possible by the shared structures of a common ideology”43. Bellin in his introduction to Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation, convincingly describes how a work of art (especially film, which is inherently collaborative) is constructed by and deployed into a pre-existing culture characterised by its own social and political ideologies. The artwork, in turn, either reifies or interrogates the very social and political ideologies that created it. “[T]o say that fantasy films are social constructs is not solely to say that they are constructed by their social contexts. It is, at the same time, to say that they are constructive of their social contexts”44. He quotes Eric Greene as stating “One of the characteristics of fiction is the ability to extract controversial problems from their social circumstances and reinscribe them onto fictional, even outlandish, contexts”45. Clover refers to the images of “cinematic play” as having “pronoun functions”: images that are smaller representations of a larger antecedent idea46. In this case, the “pronouns” are monstrous Others. They represent an “outlandish context” in which repressed fear of a foreign Other, formerly a military one outside of American borders, has shifted to an economic one that has infiltrated the country’s political boundaries and threatened its very prosperity.
In Evil Dead, the monster or Other follows a specific path; research of the Other, import of the Other, release of the other (via religious incantation) into an ancient archetypal fear (the forest), indirect and ambiguous (and therefore more frightening) infection or possession by the Other, direct assault by corrupted individuals who have become the Other. “[T]he fascination of horror is not to fix the images at their every appearance but, instead, to trace their migrations to the audience”47. By following these lines, Raimi places the forest and ancient religion against insular urban American culture, a definitive reflection of an uneasy shift from communist military fears to Japanese economic fears. Secondly, symbols of Christianity are opposed with advances in academic knowledge. The various and innovative depictions of the Other conflate to demonstrate a unity between the dominant social orders of Christianity and the domestic economy. Raimi uses conventions of the slasher film, but juxtaposes or fuses them with less corporeal villains and representations of a fear that was shifting away from the human urban violent criminal towards the foreign economic invader. Evil Dead is preceded by depictions in horror films of Others that are distinctly foreign and are ultimately vanquished and destroyed. It is contemporary with a series of movies in which the foreign Other is absorbed into a growing population which itself threatens to attack normality in sheer numbers (zombies) or environmental revenge of a planet whose stewards have failed utterly. No-one will be the Other and all will be destroyed. Wood describes horror films that immediately precede the c.1983 release of Evil Dead, particularly The Omen (1976) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), as worlds in which “annihilation is inevitable, humanity is now completely powerless, there is nothing anyone can do to arrest the process”48. Evil Dead participates in this convention. When the clock stops, there is no context for its occurrence and the question that arises is one of wonder. Will the horrific night go on forever? Many horror films offer an all-too-easy escape formula from the horror; Evil Dead is vague. There is no offer of an escape and time itself gives way to the unavoidable chasm of horror. Evil Dead lies at an historical cusp between the established human-slasher convention and the unavoidable evil of an unknown future. The film creatively and extensively covers all aspects of the shifting tenor of fear in America and the evolution of the art-movie genre in which fear was depicted and perceived.
Notes and Endnotes
1 Wikipedia dates the film release in 1981. In Fantastic Cinema Subject Guide, Senn and Johnson date the movie in 1982. In Horror Films of the 1980s, Muir dates the movie in 1983.
2 In a brief description of the film cataloguing it in Fantastic Cinema Subject Guide, Senn and Johnson feel the need to point out that Raimi “regrets including that scene in the movie” quoting him as saying “it was unnecessarily gratuitous and a little too brutal” (164).
3 Wood, Robin. An Introduction to the American Horror Film. Print.
4 Wood 199. Wood first introduces the term identifying semiotic interpretations of monsters in horror films, borrowed from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and it is repeatedly used by many critics throughout the discourse.
5 Grant, Barry Keith. The Dread of Difference : Gender and the Horror Film. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Print. 72.
6 Grant 72.
7 Wood 209.
8 Wood 212.
9 Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Films of the 1980s. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2007. Print. 320.
10 Wood 201.
11 Heale, M. J. "Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980-1993." Journal of American Studies 43.1 (2009): 19-47. Print. 2.
12 Heale 2.
13 Heale 2.
14 Heale 2..
15 Heale 3.
16 Heale 3.
17 Wood 209.
18 Wood 203.
19 Wood 200.
20 Wood 199.
21 Wood 199.
22 Wood 201
23 Wood 209.
24 Wood 209.
25 Wood 209.
26 Muir 320.
27 Evil Dead. Dir. Sam Raimi. Perf. Bruce Campbell, etc. Anchor Bay Entertainmenet, 1981. DVD. 29:37.
28 Muir 320.
29 Muir 51.
30 Grant 69.
31 Evil
32 Muir 319.
33 Evil 7:45
34 Grant 39.
35 Evil 1:30
36 Grant 39.
37 Evil 2:30.
38 Heale 2.
39 Evil 16:38-17:50.
40 Wood 219.
41 Muir 319.
42 Wood 203.
43 Wood 203.
44 Bellin, Joshua D. Framing Monsters. Sothern Carolina University Press. 2005. Print. 8.
45 Bellin 8.
46 Grant 71.
47 Grant 70.
48 Wood 211.
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