The Evil Dead (1981)

evil-deadThe legend. The big one. The ultimate movie about kids who go into a cabin in the woods and ain’t never comin’ out. The movie that has more blood than The Poseidon Adventure has water. The movie that holds up even after you’ve seen it nineteen times. The one with the eye-gouging scene, the girl cutting off her own hand scene, and the demon girlfriend dismemberment scene. The one where a girl gets raped by a possessed tree. The movie that makes you unable to write anything but sentence fragments after you’ve seen it. You know what it is. It’s Evil Dead. The must-see of the 80s.

It’s almost hard to believe (or maybe not, since this is so well-made) that director Sam Raimi went on twenty years later to be a Hollywood big shot making Spider-Man Nintendo game movies, but this will remain his signature film.