Courtesy of Sony Pictures
When conversation began to remake Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead,” Raimi only had one director in mind to head the project: Fede Alvarez.
Alvarez, a relatively unknown director whose best works come from his short films, recently talked to a group of college journalist to discuss his tackling of the 1981 cult hit.
The film follows a group of young coeds as they venture to a secluded cabin in the woods to help a friend overcome a crippling drug addiction.
However, when one of the group’s members finds a tattered, demonic spell book, evils demons are summoned from the woods and infiltrate their trip.
The resulting action is a limb-cutting, head-turning bloodbath rooted in grit and gore.
Alvarez believes that achieving such grit and gore requires the entire cast and crew to brave the elements and shoot beyond the stage.
“I think my job was kind of like exposing them [cast and crew] to real things all the time. That’s why we decided to make the film in 100% practical and not just CGI and all that.
“It was not just because I love horror films that looks real, but also because I knew that the way the actors were going to be exposed to real things,” Alvarez said.
“That’s why I decided also to shoot the film in a real forest when sometimes with films the first instinct is always to just build it on the stage. And I thought that was going to be a betrayal to the spirit of the original film, so I felt that we had to go and be in the woods and spend long nights in the woods and everybody was freezing to death, but that’s the way I think movies should be