Boy Movies #2
A festive Sam Raimi issue
Welcome back to Boy Movies. I didn’t say so in the debut issue, mostly because I did not want to hubristically commit to a schedule before guaranteeing anyone other than my mom would be interested in reading this, but I can now officially announce that new issues will be released every Tuesday until the end of time, or until Amazon buys me out, whichever comes first. I refuse to compete for your attention with House of the Dragon, and everyone knows that Tuesday is the most boyish day of the week. (Tuesday? More like Dudesday! That’s an example of something you might say when you see a new issue of Boy Movies in your inbox on Tuesdays.) Onward!
I have always been a huge weenie. I wasn’t born with the gene some possess that allows me to enjoy being afraid, and it doesn’t help that I’m easily frightened: I spent the summer of 2012 having vivid nightmares after seeing Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which many people have since informed me is “not even scary.” (Okay, thank you.) But after Boy Movies took the world by storm1 last week, I was told by several readers that I must do a seasonally appropriate installment in October, despite my controversial belief that Halloween is a children’s holiday and that I would probably pay an annual fee if it meant I never had to hear the words “spooky season” spoken aloud ever again. In any case, call it a willingness to suffer for my art, because I decided to take this challenge in stride.
She’s a Raimaniac
Earlier this year, I bought a ticket to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. (Jk, I didn’t buy anything, I used one of the three allotted weekly reservations included with my AMC A-List membership. Boy Movies is not sponsored by AMC Theaters, but we’re literally begging to be.2) I have nothing to say about the film because I remember very little about it. But it’s a testament to the involvement of director Sam Raimi that I put my butt in that seat at all (perhaps naively, I don’t blame him for whatever was going on in Multiverse of Madness — though, again, I don’t remember. I think the wretched John Krasinski was there?). Like anyone who loves his perfect, seminal Spider-Man trilogy (all boy movies), I have a deep appreciation for Raimi’s go-for-broke style and the irresistible glee with which he approaches the dark themes threaded through his films.
While ruminating on what to discuss this week, I sent my good friend, noted horror fan, and real-life boy Quinn a shortlist of scary movies I assembled through scientific deduction3, asking him which, in his opinion, was the most boyish. Quinn immediately singled out Raimi’s The Evil Dead, which I’d never seen for weenie reasons. He hailed it as “the perfect boy horror movie” by virtue of the fact that its final girl is, in fact, a boy.
Maybe you knew that already. Congratulations, if so — I did not. The concept of the final girl was important to this issue; blindly throw a dart and you'll probably hit a horror movie that’s “secretly” a metaphor for gender and/or sexuality. (Also, remember when every horror movie was “secretly” a metaphor for grief? Enough.) The genre is also famously dude-heavy: Many of our most famous final girls have had their stories helmed by male directors and writers, and there’s a question of who is allowed to put women through unspeakable pain and trow-ma before rewarding them with the opportunity to live. I’m not saying anything new or groundbreaking here, and I’m honestly not interested in unpacking any of those points anyway.
What I’d rather talk about is Sam Raimi letting Bruce Campbell wield a chainsaw in The Evil Dead.
The Evil Dead was Raimi’s second feature, an anarchic early ‘80s gorefest about five friends (two straight couples and one single girlie — relatable queen) who take a trip to a remote cabin with severely bad vibes. As the night goes on, the spirits they’ve unwittingly awakened begin terrorizing them. One by one, each member of the group goes down, leaving Campbell’s strong-browed everyman Ash in a solo fight for his life.
The chainsaw comes late-ish in the story, an audaciously wacky image in a movie almost entirely composed of audaciously wacky images. I’m aware the chainsaw returns across the franchise this film spawned, but I was delighted to see its introduction during a scene in which Ash is plagued by an internal conflict as he (I’m about to lightly spoil a forty-year-old movie, please get over it) debates whether to kill the demon possessing his girlfriend by dismembering her body. It’s an unusually grounded moment (well, as grounded as a moment that involves someone hefting a chainsaw over their head can be), maybe the only one in the film driven purely by emotion: What would you do if you were the last one alive in a supernaturally cursed cabin, surrounded by the gnarled remains of your haunted friends? Ash chooses sentimentality and decides to bury her instead, which obviously ends up being a dumb decision when the demon reanimates and ambushes him again.
In my initial criteria for what makes a boy movie, I said that if a film doesn’t spotlight the power of the male body it should instead spotlight the power of the male brain. There are no rippling biceps in The Evil Dead, but the male brain at its center isn’t powerful either. Ash’s brain is operating at like, -15% at all times. He's a hot idiot. He gets trapped, not once but twice, under fallen bookshelves, and blinks cluelessly in the background as his buddies are gruesomely picked off. In my limited experience, an important quality of a final girl is her ability to evade her pursuer for so long that she ends up gaining some kind of intelligence, allowing her to not just survive but outsmart. It feels patently masculine to decide that someone who is truly just some guy gets to make it, just ‘cause. Should Ash be alive at the end of The Evil Dead? There’s no reason for him to be, but Raimi has so much self-assurance that you’re like, “Wait, maybe he is special?” He’s not! It’s the male confidence of it all, coloring the narrative and hanging over the film’s production.
The production section of The Evil Dead’s Wiki is one of the most insane things I’ve ever read. It details a laundry list of OSHA violations, from crew members burning props to stay warm in the freezing conditions to Raimi poking Campbell’s broken leg with a stick. “Raimi enjoyed ‘torturing’ his actors,” this Wiki notes in an incredible understatement. I for real think it’s beautiful that Raimi and Campbell are still lifelong boy best friends after all that (they met in high school and are now both in their 60s, which is adorable to me), but there’s no way this thing could get made today. The Evil Dead makes the Don’t Worry Darling brouhaha look like Sesame Street. (Is Sesame Street harmonious? I don’t care. Do not tell me if any of those puppets are feuding!!!!!!) I kept thinking about Looney Tunes, casting Raimi as a (more) sadistic Bugs Bunny and Campbell as a handsome Elmer Fudd, constantly being lured into elaborate traps that do nothing but make him look like a court jester, putting him through the ringer in front of and behind the camera.
Raimi was only 20 when he shot The Evil Dead, and although his macabre exuberance can even be seen in something as lifeless as Multiverse of Madness, The Evil Dead is him at his most boyish. To be a boy is, in part, to be utterly carefree. You could view The Evil Dead separately from its production, but why? Doesn’t it enhance the experience to know that the actors were getting all their eyelashes ripped out? Understanding what it took to get this movie into the world is what makes it the sort of cinematic shot in the dark only men would have enough blind faith in themselves, plus flagrant disrespect for humane working conditions, to take. (Men don't have a monopoly over experimentation, but I do have a feeling that if a woman put a tree rape scene4 in a movie that movie would probably not be looked back on as a classic.) Or, as Quinn put it, “A bunch of boys went into the woods to make a movie and they had no idea what they were doing. The ultimate boy thing to do.”
I’ll leave you with one final question: Is Sam Raimi Baz Luhrmann for straight people? What’s great about having your own newsletter is that you can just say anything. Good day.
Girl talk
Friend of the newsletter Daniela and I recently, borderline accidentally, ended up at the first-ever New York screening of Freaky Farley (total boy movie in so many ways), a B horror-comedy from 2007 that can best be described as “random,” about a boy weirdo who meets a girl weirdo and is emboldened to start killing people who have wronged him. I live in fear of post-film Q&As, which no one aside from the “I have more of a comment than a question” crowd actually enjoys, but I thought about an answer the film’s star-writer-hype man Matt Farley gave while I watched The Evil Dead. I searched in vain for a recording of the event to get the exact quote, but it boils down to this: It’s not fun when a film tries to mimic or mock low-budget aesthetics, but it is fun when a film tries to make itself look good and it still ends up looking kind of bad. And that’s on camp!
I’m not, hm, what you might call “excited” to see Armageddon Time, but rest assured that the Jeremy Strong Oscar campaign will be a months-long Boy Movies extravaganza.
Last Tuesday’s episode of Straightiolab was an instant classic and a defense of my community (people who hate turning on lights).
My coworker Liam Mathews wrote a nice salute to Industry, an unsung series you should invest in right now so it gets a third season.
And finally:
A sincere thank you to anyone who said something nice about this silly project, even if it means you’re all partially responsible for enabling my ongoing mental breakdown. I am thrilled and overwhelmed!
At the showing of Tár (girl movie) I saw on Friday, the two men sitting next to me kissed in celebration when the Nicole Kidman ad started. You just don’t get that kind of communal elation anywhere else.
I searched “best Halloween movies” on Twitter and found many posts from many men.
I’m sorry if any of you are learning about The Evil Dead’s tree rape scene, which is exactly what it sounds like, from this newsletter. I had to find out about it in real time!