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# Evil Dead (2013) | 50 Days of Horror, Day 46
- URL: https://www.tomdahm.com/0-days-of-horror-day-46-evil-dead-2013/
- Published: 2026-10-26T13:26:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-26T13:26:38.000Z
- Description: Day 46 of 50 Days of Horror: Fede Álvarez's Evil Dead trades Sam Raimi's slapstick for pure punishment, and proves a remake can be brutal, practical, and strangely sincere.
- Author: Tom

*A note before we go in: this film is extremely graphic, and it includes a supernatural sexual assault scene (carried over from Raimi's original) and a lead character in the grip of heroin withdrawal. If any of that is a hard stop for you, no one will blame you for skipping tonight.*

Here's the thing about remaking Evil Dead: the original isn't one kind of movie. Sam Raimi's 1981 film was a raw, scrappy shocker, and by the time [Evil Dead 2](https://www.tomdahm.com/50-days-of-horror-day-35-evil-dead-2/) rolled around, which we covered back on Day 35, it had mutated into slapstick cartoon carnage with a chin the size of a canoe. So when a first-time feature director named Fede Álvarez got the call, he had a choice about which Evil Dead he was going to be. He chose none of the above. He chose cruelty.

Álvarez co-wrote the script with Rodo Sayagues, and, funnily enough, because English wasn't their first language, Diablo Cody reportedly came in to polish the dialogue so it sounded American. Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Robert Tapert, the trio behind the original trilogy, produced it, which gave the film something most remakes don't get: the blessing of the people who made the first one. Lily Collins was originally cast as the lead and dropped out in early 2012\. Jane Levy stepped in about a month later, and the film pivoted around her performance.

The story is simple on purpose. Five friends head to a remote family cabin so Mia, played by Levy, can quit heroin cold turkey. Her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), Olivia (Jessica Lucas), and Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) are there to help. In the basement they find a book that should have stayed closed, and, as horror fans will tell you, nobody ever learns to leave the book alone. The smart part is how the setup works. When Mia starts hearing and seeing things, the friends have a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. They've all seen withdrawal, they all assume it's the drugs, and so they ignore the one person who knows something's wrong. Screen Daily noted that the film only briefly toys with that idea, but I think that's enough. The mistaken diagnosis is what drives the first act.

Everything from there is about touch and texture. Álvarez has said, "Everything that you will see is real, which was really demanding," and that his team researched magic tricks and illusion tricks to pull it off. Reportedly, no CGI was used except for touch-ups. Principal photography began in March 2012 and wrapped in May, outside Auckland, New Zealand, and you can feel the damp. It rains constantly, and then, late in the film, the rain turns into blood, an apocalyptic downpour that, as Screen Daily put it, drenches the climax. The injuries are specific and wince-inducing, the kind where your own body flinches in sympathy.

And yes, it was nearly unreleasable at first. Álvarez said on Twitter in January 2013 that the film initially got an NC-17 rating and had to be cut to reach the R that his contract required, while the BBFC passed the uncut version at 18\. It premiered at SXSW on March 8, 2013, opened wide on April 5, and took first place at the box office with $25.8 million. On a budget of $17 million, it earned about $97.5 million worldwide. Critics were a little divided, at 64 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 57 on Metacritic, and audiences were cooler, giving it a C+ on CinemaScore. That doesn't surprise me. This is a movie that refuses to wink at you. One review put it as dropping most of the humor and playing up the cruelty, trading Raimi's cartoonish taunts for something blunter and nastier. If you came for the laughs, you're in the wrong cabin.

Stay through the credits, though. Bruce Campbell shows up with a very short, very grin-inducing reminder of where all this started. And if you want to see where the franchise went next, Evil Dead Rise, directed by Lee Cronin, hit theaters in April 2023.

It's also useful to see this film in the context of its era. It arrived at the tail end of the great remake boom, the same wave that produced [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)](https://www.tomdahm.com/50-days-of-horror-day-40-the-texas-chainsaw-massacre-2003/) and [The Hills Have Eyes](https://www.tomdahm.com/50-days-of-horror-day-29-the-hills-have-eyes-2006/) redo we covered earlier. A lot of those films felt like imitations. This one feels like a handmade tribute that's also its own animal, sincere and mean in equal measure.

If that blood-and-barbed-wire, black-and-red aesthetic is your language, the [Nightmare Logic](https://tomdahm-shop.fourthwall.com/?ref=tomdahm.com) line is built from the same stuff: monochrome, high-contrast, and distorted in a way that looks like it was scratched into the back of a cellar door. It's gothic horror for people who like their gear a little bit cursed.

So here's what I keep wondering. Evil Dead (2013) asks whether the fear of losing a person to something you can't see is worse than the monster itself. Do you think the film is at its best as a supernatural story or as a story about an addiction nobody believed in?

Part of the [50 Days of Horror](https://www.tomdahm.com/50-days-of-horror/) series.