The first ever footage of the gruesome new Evil Dead remake is out, spilling blood all over everyone — and showing how Sam Raimi's horror classic is getting even darker.
Plus we spoke to director Fede Alvarez, who explained what you're seeing and what it means — straight from the trailer debut from New York Comic Con.
First up, take a look at the trailer, which starts off blurry, but is swiftly pushed into focus. As soon as a better quality version comes out, we'll be sure to post it.
While at NYCC, we got to sit down with director Fede Alvarez at a roundtable and quiz him on all the changes, adaptations and subtle Raimi homages he would be slipping into his version of Evil Dead.
Evil Dead is iconic. What's the tone this time out? What can we expect?
Fede Alvarez: It's definitely something that comes out of the first one. You have to understand this started with Sam [Raimi] asking me if I would remake Evil Dead. And of course, [I] freaked out because Evil Dead is so many different things... I locked myself into a room with one of my best friends back home, we wrote the movie together. And we spent a lot of time asking what Evil Dead meant to us [personally].
I watched Evil Dead when I was 12. I was going through all the horror I could grab, I remember going to the video store and asking for something "real." And the guy gave me the Evil Dead VHS. When you're 12, you're not supposed to see that. It was the same feeling like the first time I discovered porn, I knew I wasn't supposed to do this, but I did it anyway. I went home, my parents weren't around, and it was a very, very, very bad call. I shouldn't have watched that movie. I was 12, too young. I was traumatized by it. It was a super violent and scary movie.
Coming back to now, with my friend writing the script, we thought, "That's what we have to do now. Keep what we really remember." Then the last time I saw it was about 6 years ago, I didn't want to re-watch it, I wanted to remember the key ideas, what has stayed with me all this time? So that's what we put in the new one. Basically what we pitched to [Raimi] was let's try to make the scariest movie ever. Something that is gross, something you feel like you're not supposed to watch, something that is violent, something that will scare the shit out of you. And that's exactly what Sam wanted to make.
What level of gore will we see in this movie?
Fede Alvarez: It is gory, that's for sure. There is a line that Sam always talks about, the line between horror and comedy. You go too far and everyone starts laughing, but if you hit the right place everyone is scared to death. We were always standing on that line. And sometimes gore can be very funny, guts falling out blood splashing all over the place. It's not that kind of gory film. It is has a lot of blood. A lot of blood. I would come back home every day after shooting covered in blood... It is a very gory film. People had to cover themselves in plastic bags because there was blood and splatter everywhere.
How much CG is in the movie?
Fede Alvarez: We didn't do any CGI in the movie. There's no CGI in the movie. Everything you will see is real, which was really demanding. This was a very long shoot, 70 days of shooting at night. There's a reason people use CGI it's cheaper and faster, I hate that. We researched a lot of magic tricks and illusion tricks. [Like] how you would make someone's arm disappear.
There's a moment where a girl goes through her arm with a kitchen knife — spoiler alert. And we knew since day one the camera would start wide, she goes for the knife, you see her arm, she starts going for it. And you think they're going to cut away at any moment, but we don't. She just goes for it and screams and the arm breaks and falls. So we really pushed the boundaries there, trying to create those illusions... It has a particularly bloody ending. The last scene is just...I want it to be the bloodiest scene, ever. And I think it is.
[What about the raping tree?]
Fede Alvarez: This is not a classic being remade by a big studio, it's still his film. It's the guys from the original. I didn't write one scene and [the producer] asked "where's my raping tree?" So *types on the table and whistles* raping scene, there you go. But it has to be way more terrible than the original.
There are a lot of iconic shots in the original, will we be seeing any homages to Rami's camera work [you can see the low tracking shot through the woods in the beginning of the trailer]?
Fede Alvarez: Not really, well, yes some. More so hints to the original. Sam asked me why I didn't put in this shot from his movie and stuff. And I said, "Well, that's your movie." I have my pride. I'm a director. I'm not going to go and recreate some other director's vision. There were some moments where we shot and it looked just like the original and I felt like I had no soul, I was miserable. But I didn't put most of those scenes in the cut, and thank god Sam backed me up on those. But there are some, of course the camera will fall to one side at some point. But it's because it's the way you tell the story of five guys in a cabin. You have to make the place look bigger and crazier, otherwise it's just a room.