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Love takes many forms. For ‘Deadites’, mega-fans of The Evil Dead, the horror trilogy is an all-encompassing obsession, the reason the sun comes up and, more importantly, the reason it goes down, allowing manner of evil sprites to make mischief in the night time.
In fact, two of the fans in this feature-length documentary about said fandom bonded through a shared love of the franchise, got engaged at a horror convention (with the proposal aided and abetted by Dead special effects artist Tom Sullivan) and were married at an endearingly ghoulish ceremony themed around the movies.
Delightfully grotty cabin in the woods horror flick The Evil Dead was released in 1981, charting the adventures of Ash (Bruce Campbell) and pals, who unwittingly release an ancient evil from gnarly old book The Necronomicon. A jokey follow-up, Evil Dead 2 – part-remake, part-reimagining – amped up the slapstick humour in 1987, while 1992’s Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness ventured further into rubbery fantasy territory. As Deadite Chris explains: “It’s really hard to pin [the fandom] into one entity – they’re so diverse, depending on which film they gravitate towards more.”
Yet Hail to the Deadites, directed by horror hound Steve Villenueve, does a very thorough – too thorough, perhaps – job of taking a 360-degree look at Evil Dead fans, circling around the self-confessed obsessives like one of Raimi’s freewheeling tracking shots.
There’s Adam, a Bruce Campbell lookalike who journeys through the American horror convention scene dressed in Ash’s trademark tattered and blood-splattered outfit; Brie, who was crowned Ultimate Evil Dead Fan in an online competition, despite having been told that a woman could never win the title; and Denis, who’s collected so many fragments and keepsakes from the cabin in the original movie that he basically owns a house within a house. This is a heartwarming portrait of the madness of mega-fandom.
Bruce Campbell himself appears frequently, bequiffed and bejewelled with heavy rings, his shirt buttoned low beneath his powder blue suit, looking like a B-movie Morrissey. He seems fond of the Deadites, if a little weary too, sighing that some fans at the conventions wait in line for hours to meet and greet him, but say nothing when they’re face to face. “Some of them don’t even make eye contact!” he complains, before softening with the acknowledgement that “a lot of them live vicariously through Ash”.
The film’s most powerful moment arrives when we meet AC, whose son was born with a heart defect: “We gave him the name Ash [because] no matter what he’s fighting, he’s gonna fight it with everything he’s got… Even at the end of his life, when they pulled him off the life support machines he still fought for 15 minutes, when the doctors said it shouldn’t take him any time at all.” It’s a heartrending reminder of the strange and unexpected ways in which stories become woven into our lives, helping us to make sense of ourselves and those we love.
It’s true, though, that this moment of beauty is couched by many much less compelling testimonials. At an hour and 19 minutes long, Hail To The Deadites suffers from the typical blight of the mega-fan: loving your subject so much that you can’t pick apart the good from the bad.
Details
- Director: Steve Villenueve
- Starring: Bruce Campbell, Tom Sullivan, the Deadites
- Release date: August 20 (Fantasia International Film Festival)
The post ‘Hail To The Deadites’ review: a bloodstained love letter to the madness of mega-fandom appeared first on NME Music News, Reviews, Videos, Galleries, Tickets and Blogs | NME.COM.
