How Sam Raimi and his friends shot The Evil Dead, 1981.
Raimi wanted an unseen force tearing through the woods, and had no money for a crane or a dolly. Cinematographer Tim Philo remembers one idea they dropped as too unsafe.
“We considered riding atop a bulldozer.”
What they built instead, in Bruce Campbell’s words, was “a three-foot hunk of two-by-six board with the camera bolted in the middle.” A person held each end and ran, jumping over logs and stones.
The opening glide over the swamp was a rubber raft, with Raimi leaning out the front holding the camera and Campbell standing in the water behind him, pushing.
The vas-o-cam slid down long wooden platforms. The Ram-o-Cam put a T-bar in front of the board, so a window would shatter before the camera reached it. The film’s last shot was a camera mounted on a bike, driven fast through the cabin.
They tried Raimi’s hometown in Michigan first, then chose Morristown, Tennessee, and found a cabin several miles from any other building. It had phone lines and no plumbing, and the crew of 13 stayed in it during pre-production, several to a room.
They shot on Kodak 16mm with a rented camera, on a budget Raimi later put at $375,000. By the last days the crew were burning the furniture to stay warm. Campbell called it nearly “twelve weeks of mirthless exercise in agony.”
The crew mixed gallons of fake blood with Karo corn syrup. Effects artist Tom Sullivan added coffee to the usual corn syrup and food coloring, and it took Campbell hours to get off.
They also swapped the paraben and Photo-Flo in Dick Smith’s formula for non-dairy creamer. It gave up a little realism, but the cast could take mouthfuls of it and spit it out.