If you’re like me and love scary movies, when the red-band “Evil Dead” trailer was released, it pumped you up and you couldn’t wait to hit the theater to see it.

Multiple people told me, “that movie was SO scary,” or “I don’t even want to go see it looks so bad.” But I braved it anyway and attended the 1981 remake, bracing myself for one of the scariest movies of all-time.

Instead of being scared out of my mind, I was extremely disappointed. It was an excruciating movie to sit through. However, I will give director Sam Raimi props for the first 10 minutes of the film where he showed a flash back of the original demon and a drive down a winding road, emphasizing how deeply buried into the woods the cabin really was. But, that was really the only decent part of the movie, along with eye-candy, Shiloh Fernandez, cast as the male lead (meow).

Like a majority of horror movies, the situation these young adults are put in is 100 percent avoidable. If I entered a cabin, walked down into the cellar and found dead cats hanging from the ceiling, a book wrapped in barbed wire and a loaded gun, it wouldn’t be my first instinct to stick around and “figure out what it all means.” I would get out as fast as possible. But because the friends are essentially hosting an intervention for the lead character Mia, they refuse to leave.

Yet, we need these idiots in order to have a movie, so inevitably, an inquiring mind decides to open the book, read the passages aloud and take notes on what he finds, not knowing he just created a living nightmare for himself and his friends.

I won’t go into all the details because I could babble on for forever about just how bad it was, but Mia “demons out,” as I like to call it, and throws up on her friend which happens to transfer the demon. Next thing you know, everyone is turning into the demon and trying to kill everyone. Except the main characters’s brother, David, played by Fernandez, he’s like Mister Miyagi and kills it at staying alive, for the most part.

After a number of stupid pointless battles between the survivors and the demons, everyone dies, kind of.

Mia comes back to life after David kills the demon possessing her by burying her alive, and then reviving her with needles and a car battery. Just when you think it’s over and all is good, David dies sacrificing himself to kill the last demon in the house. But really his sacrifice screws Mia over.

After David’s death, the demon had consumed five souls and rises from the ground to take over the Earth, leaving Mia with a dramatically long battle of good versus evil. After 10 minutes of Mia running around aimlessly, she rips off her own hand after it gets stuck under a car, she slices the demon in half with a chainsaw and then decides she’s done with drugs. The end.

I was bummed out about this movie. I was really looking forward to being truly scared; it’s been awhile since that has happened. I decided to watch the original when I got home to see where Raimi went wrong, because the original is always better than the remake, right? Wrong. The original is unbelievably terrible. I laughed through most of it, ocassionally pausing to watch a YouTube video.  So it is understandable that the remake flopped the way it did.

I feel like the flop of the new “Evil Dead” kind of speaks for the horror genre as a whole right now. I am no movie expert, just your everyday citizen trying to watch a scary movie, but I cannot think of a horror movie I have seen in the last three years that absolutely scared me. The last one was “The Strangers,” which is now five years old. Perhaps the “Scream” movies.

Maybe those movies are so scary because they are about people killing other people, which realistically is more likely to happen than a demon possessing your best friend. Or in the case of “The Strangers” is based off a true story. But it seems like the horror trend is stuck in this possession and demon stage.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good ghost story, but I think they have run their course. There are only so many variations to a demon possession story. Zombies these days are not really scary either now that they are being featured in comedies like “Zombieland” and “Warm Bodies.”

What I want to see is a good old-fashioned murder mystery with a realistic scenario, something that’s actually bone chilling. Until then, I fear for the horror genre and what is in the works to be released next.

BY MEREDITH WATHNE
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