AUSTIN, Texas — Director Fede Alvarez still remembers the very first time he saw The Evil Dead. He was a 12-year-old living in Montevideo, Uruguay, and he begged a clerk at the video store for the scariest thing they had — despite the fact that he was way too young. Eventually, the clerk slid Sam Raimi’s 1980s horror classic across the counter. What Alvarez saw on that VHS tape became burned into his impressionable brain.
“I had to,” the director told WIRED following the premiere of Evil Dead at the South By Southwest Film Festival. “Because it’s payback; hopefully the grandchildren of the video store guy will see it.”
When fans of Evil Dead first heard that Alvarez — a director with no feature film credits to his name — would helm the remake, pretty much everyone presumed it would suck. Most reboots do, after all, and it seemed impossible to recreate the magic that made the 1981 flick a cult favorite. Even Bruce Campbell, the star of the original film who also co-produced the new version, acknowledged the uphill battle for fan approval.
“It was a tough sell,” Campbell told Wired. “We knew people were very opinionated, but we didn’t know how opinionated until this [remake] came up. Then it was like, ‘Jesus Christ, is it that serious?’ And they’re like, ‘Yes, it is.'”
One thing is clear after watching the film: This isn’t your older brother’s (or father’s) Evil Dead. The original movie, with its low-budget effects and occasionally flat (OK, bad) acting, became a classic because it embodied the schlocky greatness of horror movies of the early 1980s. 32 years later, Alvarez — and producers Raimi, Campbell and Robert Tapert — have more to work with. This isn’t a movie trying to recreate the past, but rather one that envisions what Evil Dead might have looked like if Raimi had made it with today’s technology (and a bigger budget).
It may not please all fans — in fact, it probably won’t — but the thrillingly gruesome reimagining should appease most of them, while still attracting younger fans who think horror films started with the first Saw movie. As Ain’t It Cool News noted, “You can say a lot about the Evil Dead reboot, but you can’t deny that Fede Alvarez and his team swung for the fences. This is hands down the goriest big studio film since District 9 and Neill Blomkamp’s brilliant sci-fi tale looks like Bambi in comparison to the kind of fucked up (and mostly practical) shit we see in this film.”
“The good thing about Evil Dead fans is if you can tip ’em, then they’re all in,” said Campbell. “And I think [this premiere] may have been the tipping point. … We just want to get them in the theater, and then we really feel they’ll be OK.”
Bruce Campbell on the red carpet at the premiere of Evil Dead at SXSW. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired 
Alvarez was hand-picked by Raimi to take over the franchise after releasing a short film on YouTube called Panic Attack! that got every studio in Hollywood calling. One of the meetings Alvarez took was with Raimi, and as Campbell notes, “Sam had a gut instinct” about the untested director. “They kind of hit it off. [Alvarez] was a big Evil Dead fan… You can tell when someone’s bullshitting [about that].”
Alvarez outlined the story for the film with Raimi, Campbell and Tapert, and then wrote the script with help from writing partner Rodo Sayagues Mendez (and some eventual punch-up work from Diablo Cody). The movie was filmed mostly in New Zealand and Detroit with young actors like Suburgatory‘s Jane Levy (Mia), Cloverfield‘s Jessica Lucas (Olivia), and Thumbsucker‘s Lou Taylor Pucci (the demon-summoning Eric).
For the most part, Raimi told everyone to leave Alvarez alone to do his own thing, but there was one point of contention: the effects. Alvarez wanted to use as many practical (read: not computer-generated) effects as possible, while producer Tapert preferred the easier-to-manage (read: cheaper) CGI. In the end, Alvarez got what he wanted.
“It’s honoring a cult classic – three cult classics — and that means that you want to add a new movie next to those that survives the test of time, and CGI gets old too fast,” said Alvarez. “It doesn’t matter how good it is today; in five years it’s going to look bad. In 10 years it’s going to be embarrassing.”
The result is a relentless, fantastically gory flick that pays homage to its original while offering a fresh start to the franchise. (Alvarez is already writing a sequel that he says will diverge significantly from Evil Dead II.) Full of white-knuckle tension, demonic thrills, quick laughs, and buckets of blood (seriously, so much blood), the new Evil Dead is everything a great popcorn-ready horror flick should be. And while its familiar elements may call back to nostalgia, Campbell says he hopes its new twists will deliver a kick in the ass to horror that he feels is necessary in these post-Saw times.
“When Evil Dead came out you had the Nightmare on Elm Streets, the Halloweens. Nightmare on Elm Street put it on the funnier, kitschier side. Then you get into the torture porn [of horror films today], which is a god-awful phase that I just hope… It’s like goatees, I want it to go away,” Campbell said. “Horror always needs to be reinvented.”
Evil Dead hits theaters April 5.
