Tag: horror-comedy

Taking Laughter Away From Slaughter: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Imagine you got the Naturom Demonto, and use its pages of finely cured human flesh to go back in time to 1981. A year later, New Line Cinema acquires the distribution rights to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, but even as it makes the film successful, it denies him and his crew the rights to make a direct sequel: one Evil Dead and the Army of Darkness.

But the Book in your hands is a Monkey’s Paw, and the mere existence of you here at this time in history changes everything. Evil Dead is released in fifteen theatres, but all the people that saw it in the original timeline do not see it. Or Stephen King doesn’t write a review of the film, and someone else creates an article that attracts another distribution company. Or producer Irvin Shapiro didn’t help screen the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. Maybe the film goes underground and builds a large following over time. Or it becomes a rare oddity horror fans talk about in small viewings: pondering just how something that looked like The Exorcist piggybacking on The Night of the Living Dead just could not have caught on? Perhaps if you told these hypothetical film students and watchers that it might have been different had there been a sequel, and some Three Stooges elements – which is hilarious as Raimi directed a short film in 1978 called Shemp Eats the Moon – injected into the high energy, insanely paced cinematic monstrosity, with more of a callback to his proof of concept work of the same year Within the Woods. 

Yet there is a demonic force, a demented genius, in Evil Dead that could not be ignored. It wouldn’t just end with one weird, incredibly gory, disturbing high octane aberration. Certainly, the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, if it were called that, would not allow it to be so, and that Kandarian Demon is restless as fuck once you mess with that Book in general. Yet if that first film had a different set of reviewers or critics, another distributor, or if Raimi and his crew gained more capital in those early years, could the Evil Dead franchise have evolved differently?

I think about what would have happened if Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn hadn’t existed and we simply gained a direct continuation from the first film. Maybe Raimi attained the fame and influence needed to convince New Line Cinema to let him make the film he planned, or simply produced and distributed it himself that early on. What would we have seen?

It’s more than possible that we might have gotten Army of Darkness almost immediately, placing Ash in a medieval era surrounded by Deadites. Whether or not Army of Darkness would have had different production scale, or practical effects in 1987 instead of 1992 is anyone’s guess as temporal manipulation goes, but perhaps Ash would be a different hero entirely. 

When you look at Ash Williams in Evil Dead, he is fairly toned down from the loud-mouthed ultra-masculine chainsaw wielding badass that we all know in popular culture. He genuinely seems to care about his friends, and especially his sister Cheryl and his girlfriend Linda. Ash isn’t the one that turns on the tape recorder in this movie, but it’s his obnoxious friend Scott that does it just out of some morbid curiosity, or to freak out the rest of his friends. Ash is a young man that wants to do right by his girlfriend, and his sister: and even after being forced to do horrible things to the bodies of his possessed friends and loved ones in order to survive, the magnifying glass necklace he gave Linda keeps him going. He destroys the Naturom Demonto and the Deadites boil, sizzle, and die away in putrefaction. Everything is horrifying in this film, and there is no respite: and even at the end, when everything seems finally put to rights, the Kandarian Demon – whose perspective we’ve seen as it violated Cheryl with the trees and attacked the others – lunges at Ash, and ambiguously kills him.

But what if the Kandarian Demon, without the anchor of the Book – which isn’t called the Necronomicon at this point, the name borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but rather the Sumerian version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead – uses the last of its waning power, which had been latent in the Knowby cabin and its grounds even before Scott played the recording along with the energies of the Book’s destruction to send Ash back in time to kill him, and therefore save the Book and continue its reign of terror on humankind?

What I’m trying to get at here is what if a serious Ash, without the Three Stooges comedy of Evil Dead II, went back to this medieval era in what might be a version of Kandar Castle? What would the characters look like? What would the franchise look like going forward from that?

I do not have the Necronomicon with me, sadly, to tell me about the dark pasts and futures that could have been. But it is possible that there could have only been two films as a result of this lack of comedy, or very little of it. On the other hand, this version of Evil Dead II might have been a major hit of a darker Ray Harryhausen variety, and inspired the need to make more of itself, and gain more profit. It is also possible that, like most popular horror franchises that start out with darker and grimmer tones, that so many sequels would have resulted in the work eventually parodying itself. You don’t have to look far when you consider Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. So it is possible that Raimi may have led the series to the camp and black comedy it was meant to go into itself, or someone else directing the future films would have begun that process with varying results of quality. 

Yet Raimi, when he did get Stephen King’s aid, along with Dino De Laurentiis, did something truly amazing. Not only did Raimi make a soft reboot of his original concept, removing or not mentioning the existences of Scott, Shelly, and Cheryl, and take a cue from Within the Woods where Ash actually gets possessed, he takes the comedy and ridiculous parody that might have happened to his franchise anyway, and institutes in the second movie. It’s almost as though he, and his crew, anticipated this change in tone, or mythology. Horror, more than a lot of cinematic genres, loves to reinvent its own continuity if only to create and propagate more of itself. Ash becomes more belligerent and arrogant, even absent-minded. There is an aggression there that is exaggerated as opposed to the PTSD-fuelled fight and flight of him and his companions in the other film iteration. The chainsaw arm, of course, its utter madness makes its appearance. The other companions that come in afterwards are all antagonistic until they work together, and then they don’t.

And Henrietta Knowby, played by Ted Raimi, changes the relation of the Deadites not only to Ash and his companions such as Annie Knowby, but to the audience as well. Before this, we saw a group of friends turn on each other as the invisible turned tangible and monstrous through their bodies. And while this does happen in Evil Dead II, we have the presence of the tangible malformed evil of Henrietta locked in that horrible cellar. The Book is now called the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis as well, and more about Kandar itself is revealed through missing pages, and the Dagger. After this, we see Ash sent through a portal into the medieval period: even though by the time we get to Army of Darkness, the beginning is different from the Evil Dead II ending. 

The change in continuity would not have phased Raimi and his crew either, or even the tone of the series. Raimi himself had background in comedy films, and it is more than possible that he not only paid attention to Friday the 13th and A Nightmare, but also Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm: a franchise that constantly reinvented its own mythology in hallucinogenic, dreamlike ways.

But I keep on thinking about what would have happened if Evil Dead II had been made the way Raimi originally intended, or if the comedy simply hadn’t entered into its sequels. I wonder about which film I like more: Evil Dead, or Evil Dead II. The second film does add a lot more to the Evil Dead Mythos: with the Book, the Dagger, the Pages, a terrifying being in Henrietta who we don’t see transform into a Deadite like the others but is well into her advanced stages, Ash facing his own dark self through possession and also his severed hand, the chainsaw prosthetic, the portal into the past, and the whole iconic insanity of this world.

Yet there is a simplicity in the first film that I greatly appreciate. It is straightforward horror with suspense, and tension. Evil Dead II has us laugh at the hijinks that happen, helping us with moments to release the tension that has been wound throughout every mad action and gore scene while wincing at the weirder moments, but the first Evil Dead makes us sympathize more with the people in that cabin. The sequel lets Ash survive, while the first one seems to kill him off, and it just hits harder in my opinion. 

But if the franchise continued without the comedy, what would it look like? The closest thing I can think about, when I consider alternative paths, is The Evil Dead remake directed by Fede Álvarez, but also produced by Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Robert Tapert. It is, arguably, another soft reboot of the original but there is no comedy in it whatsoever, or tongue in cheek references – popular-cultural or otherwise – and it is genuinely unsettling, and upsetting. David Allen is an Ash Williams analogue, a throwback from the first Evil Dead film, who actually dies at the end. And Mia Allen, a drug-addicted artist, is like a darker version of Cheryl Williams who actually survives and is freed from her possession in a ridiculous but clever way, as well as some mutilation on her part. The other characters are almost different versions of the ones from the first film, and the Book is called The Naturom Demonto again. Mia does take that chainsaw, but she doesn’t make it into a prosthetic, and I can’t help but wonder that even with the Ash Williams cameo at the end, what a sequel to this film would have been with that evil Book of the Dead still in existence. In some ways, I think a sequel to this 2013 remake would have answered a lot of my speculative questions.

As it is, Evil Dead Rising, written and directed by Lee Cronin, with our usual suspects as producers might provide another possibility: with a girl named Beth going back to her sister Ellie and her family, and finding that damned Book. The funny thing is: Ash’s love interest in Within the Woods was called Ellen. And maybe Mia Allen’s journey, this Cheryl WIlliams analogue that survives, is continued at least spiritually by Beth in a world of Deadites and Kandarian Demons without laughter for humans, but plenty of slaughter for their enemies. 

The Terror of Mathematics: Angry Video Game Nerd’s Polybius

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

October 27, 2017. I was on YouTube, navigating through the site, when I noticed an uploaded video in Cinemassacre Plays.

I’d been following James Rolfe as the Angry Video Nerd for over a decade. His persona as a raging, scathing nerd stereotype that neatly eviscerates terrible video games, with nineties gross-out humour and profanity, really hit a nostalgic factor in my heart. When James Rolfe plays the Nerd, to me he’s both a figure to laugh at, but also to sympathize with as a child of the eighties and nineties. In fact, a lot of the time I laugh at the Nerd I am laughing at that part of myself. 

Seriously, for me the tone of the Nerd was set when I first watched his video episode on the Nintendo Entertainment System’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game. I saw a deadpan humour, a story being built up about how he encountered this “vile piece of goat shit,” as he put it so poetically, a slow building dread in the narrative that he created, followed by the denouement of a game that arbitrarily hurts and kills the protagonist almost instantly. It’s so absurd, and so ridiculous that you can’t even believe it is an actual interactive game with rules or any sensibilities. Towards the end, he creates character as he just can’t help but laugh, but at that point I was so invested in the whole “What the Fuck” lead up and conclusion, that I just — again — laughed with him. 

It’d been a long time since that episode, however. Rolfe had been busy working on his AVGN film, and a lot of the day to day posting had been given to Mike Matei, with some appearances by Rolfe. After a time, I became more interested in Rolfe’s Monster Movie Madness episodes, and of course his interview with Joe Bob Briggs whose work I didn’t know I would become so invested in at the time. Mostly, I just listened to James Rolfe and Mike Matei talk about games and movies. I began to truly become interested in Rolfe outside of his AVGN role, perhaps more so than even the AVGN episodes themselves.

And then one day on October 27th Cinemassacre Plays, which was a channel dedicated to both Rolfe and Matei playing games and Matei in particular having rage-sessions, a short video was released. It was the Angry Video Game Nerd, who I hadn’t seen in a while, except he was talking about a whole other kind of game. Now, for those who don’t know, the Nerd’s whole theme is that he plays the worst-made video games ever created, and he critiques them and swears at them a lot while going as far as to even destroy hard copies of that game. 

But this time, the Nerd was talking about Polybius. 

This was when I knew we were going to be in for a wild ride. Polybius is a video game urban legend about an arcade game that apparently could affect the minds of those who played it: inducing seizures, insomnia, dementia, and pure insanity in those exposed to it. I have nothing to add to the urban legend itself, as many people have delved into it far deeper than I can at this time. I did think about doing something with the Roman historian Polybius and his possible relation, of that of his work, to the game as an attempt at a creepypasta: a copy and paste internet attempt at an online and electronic urban legend of my own creation.

As a bit of background, there was a time when I was fascinated with creepypastas — you can thank my late partner Kaarina, and Kris Straub’s Candle Cove for that — and I wanted to make one myself: to create a story so compelling, and seemingly real, it could become viral. It’d be the perfect test of my abilities. I never got there myself. I went as far as a few ideas, some notes dealing with eighties nostalgia, and getting some concepts rejected by the SCP Foundation.

James Rolfe went farther, utilizing this idea that has existed online since the early aughts. It’s funny how horror and humor relate to each other. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but just as fantasy and the macabre share the same road and branch off, comedy and terror tend to share similar pacing, unexpected beats, and familiar ends. 

Rolfe released his Polybius episode in a five-part serial. He controlled the pace right off the bat. Each part was divided into Days, and he filmed it in the found footage format that I love so much. Day One is great because it starts off with him sitting in front of the camera like any other AVGN episode, and giving a detailed run-down of Polybius and the rumours, and legends surrounding it. And that’s it. He says that he found a lead on a possible cabinet with the game, and he leaves it at that. 

Already, it piques interest. You want to know what he finds. It is a line between knowing it is fictional, to the meta-narrative point of practically winking the viewer, but also playing it straight as if the character of the Nerd is genuinely pursuing this venture into finding this potentially terrifying game. He finds bad games, but generally not deadly ones. By Day Two, we are in a warehouse with old game cabinets, and eventually we find the Polybius cabinet itself. We follow the Nerd from his camera as he shows us what is going on. Of course, the caveat is that he isn’t going to reveal the game and its graphic “because it might be dangerous,” though he claims it is all probably just a hoax. They do say that showing less of the monster in a horror film is more after all. 

Most of the time and throughout the rest of the Days, we watch the Nerd play Polybius and not the gameplay itself. He downplays a lot of it initially, stating that it’s mediocre at best, but he weaves little snippets of facts, an email of warning that he laughs off, and the realization that the Nerd is spending more and more time playing the game. His estimation of the game changes during these periods, his esteem for it rising from mediocre, to good, to one of the best games ever made … and the slow realization that he is becoming addicted, and that his senses have become, well … unreliable at best. 

Rolfe’s AVGN episode plays off of the Video Game Panic of the late twentieth century, of the medium affecting the minds and health of children, and those who play them. Video game addiction, like most addictions, is also real and has been discussed in that context. When you also add to the fact that Polybius was supposedly released by the American government as limited and localized experiments in mind-control, and you see the place in which Rolfe is playing. The way the Nerd described playing Polybius “like watching a waterfall” reminds me of the Star Trek The Next Generation episode “The Game” where there is a virtual reality simulation that creates mental geometric shapes that interact specifically with the brain, and induces pleasure in those interactions. 


In Rolfe’s Polybius episode, we see the Nerd’s addiction become his fear as he realizes he can’t rely on his own senses, or personal judgment anymore. But in one Day, one installment, we see a shape rise, look at us from the reflection of another cabinet screen, and run away: drawing us into the hallucination, or the supernatural element involved as well. It is reminiscent of those terrifying Easter-eggs in Ghostwatch. 

But it becomes clear that Polybius doesn’t just want to be played, but it wants others to see it be played as well: like a Let’s Play version of Ringu. The torment and exhaustion in the Nerd builds up, and gets real. In the last installments of the serialized found footage made a web miniseries, he struggles against Polybius — even working in the historical Polybius’ mathematical grid in an attempt to escape — but to no avail. What I think is fascinating is how Rolfe manages to play on the Nerd’s general frustration, on his sense of unfairness in dealing with games that break their own rules, and douses these traits with fear, and despair. Even though you know this is fictional, and the Nerd is a persona, you get invested in his genuine distress because Rolfe builds it all up to that point: from one to eleven.

In the end, after shifting the camera away and back from the screen, he relents — apologizing to the viewer — as he knows the only way he will escape this fate, like Ringu again, is to show us the game. And we see it, and the geometrical graphics warp and change, and we get a demonic jumpscare. Personally, I think it was a good lead up, and I really like the emulation of  YouTube’s “This video is unavailable screen … though I think we could have done without the second jumpscare.

AVGN’s Polybius episode is a very tough and cheek construct that plays with the found footage webseries format, with that electronic serial epistolary place, with hints of images, glances of the “monster,” rumours and accounts sprinkled through, and a slow, insidious, psychological sense of horror that grows into a jumpscare or two, with some realistic technical hoax elements. The serial drop made it, in my opinion, and I looked forward to seeing what happened each day a new installment was uploaded onto Cinemassacre Plays.

But, there is another element at play too. When I was looking for a “Making Of” episode years later, I realized that there was more to this episode. AVGN’s Polybius was filmed and recorded at TNT Amusements. And while Polybius was a more horror-based found footage version of an AVGN episode, made epistolary, THE ANGRY VIDEO GAME NERD films POLYBIUS at TNT Amusements is more of a mini-documentary of sorts … that leans towards humour. Their endings tie into each other well. Todd N. Tuckey, the President of TNT Amusements, is great.

I do think that there was another missed opportunity. You see, at the end of the episode it seems as though the Nerd is changed forever by this experience with Polybius. Perhaps he is either dead, or transported into another world. James Rolfe himself has created a few continuities, where not only is the Angry Video Game Nerd is own person, but there is another figure named Board James: a madman who plays board games with his friends, and his reality is constantly shifting like the dreamlike sequences in the Phantasm series. If James Rolfe could have gotten a lot of his original crew from that series back together, and we know from continuity that the Nerd and Board James have interacted, the ending to the Polybius episode could have been a fine crossover back to Board James, or something like it. But the logistics on that might not have been feasible, for a variety of professional and personal reasons: not the least being that James Rolfe is a busy man. I also think it might have been amazing if this had been the end of the Nerd for a while, as though he died or worse, but he was inevitably coming back with the cartoon resilience most recurring characters in weird worlds have, though there is overlap between AVGN episodes at times, and him being affected by this after the fact could have been an interesting aspect to explore.

But anyway, here is the AVGN Polybius Episode, and THE ANGRY VIDEO GAME NERD films POLYBIUS at TNT Amusements. I am so glad this exists, and I love the experimentation with the medium and the times that Cinemassacre reinvents AVGN, just as I wanted to do something new for this Friday the Thirteenth. Have a terrifying weekend, my fellow subjects.