Evil Dead

The Cabin in the Woods is Raimi's film taken apart on screen. Goddard and Whedon built it to ask why the story keeps happening, and the story it uses is this one. Everything the first half needs is lifted whole: five young people drive to an isolated cabin, find a cellar nobody sent them to, and read aloud from a book that should not be read aloud. The Latin, the cellar hatch, the possession and the friend who has to be fought are all 1981. The second half is the argument: the cellar is a menu, the five are chosen to fit archetypes, and somebody upstairs needed them to pick the book. That only lands because the audience already knows the film it is talking about.

Peter Jackson's early films are made from Raimi's, and he has said so repeatedly: Evil Dead was the proof that a very small crew with no money could make a horror film that looked invented rather than cheap. What carries: the camera as a physical object thrown through the set, splatter pushed so far past plausibility that it becomes comedy, practical effects built in a shed, and a single house that fills with the dead. Filed MEDIUM. It is a stated debt of method and tone rather than borrowed material, and Braindead's lawnmower takes the idea somewhere Raimi did not.