Owens 1 Jared Owens Prof. Collier RIM 4570 27 June, 2023 Film Sound Analysis: The Evil Dead (1981) The Evil Dead is a horror film about a group of five college students who take a vacation to a run down, secluded cabin in the woods of Tennessee. In the cellar of the cabin, they find a flesh bound book of demonic incantations and a tape recorder of an archaeologist chronicling his findings in the area. In the tape, the archaeologist reads the incantations recorded in the book and through playing it back, the friends resurrect ancient Sumerian demons who attack and brutalize them in a multitude of different ways throughout the remainder of the film. The only survivor by the end of the film is Ash Williams, who continues to appear in the other two films of the series. In relation to previous and contemporary films within the horror genre and particularly, the sub-genre of zombie films, The Evil Dead took an unprecedented approach to the two techniques of film scoring that most films were using at the time. The classic approach to film scoring usually involved either orchestral music, which mainly utilized acoustic instruments, and/or the use of preexisting canned music. A notable example of this would be the soundtrack for the original Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968, which featured a classic, completely orchestral soundtrack. Night of the Living Dead is considered to be the first ever film that utilized the modern depiction of zombies. Most films that fall under this sub-genre are directly influenced by this film. In the late 70s, horror films began to use the growing prominence of synthesizers and electronic effects to explore a wider range of soundscapes and provoke emotion and reaction in Owens 2 their audience in a different way and to save money by not having to pay for extra instrumentation. An example of this include the soundtrack for the original Halloween (1978) which uses only synthesizer patches which mimic classical instruments like strings and piano. According to an article written in Fangoria, Joe LoDuca used a Prophet synthesizer and a ‘primitive drum machine,’ (Fichera). The Evil Dead uses different textures of sound to illustrate different points of perspective. From the beginning of the film and throughout, there is a certain type of shot that races through the terrain, observing the students from afar, that is thought to be from the perspective of the main demon itself. During these shots, the audience can hear what is commonly referenced as the film’s iconic “monster sound”. This sound is an amalgamation of different sound techniques including Sam Raimi’s voice, a harmonizer, delay and what sounds like some sort of droning synth sound. The film’s director, Sam Raimi elaborates in a brief interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “We took out the natural sounds and created a track that was part voice, part music, part sound effect—the voice of the evil. We didn’t show what it was; we used these sound tools to plant the seeds in the minds of the audience of what this horror could be,” (Giardina). As Raimi explains, the low budget of this film introduced a lot of limits for what was able to be done visually. Because of this, Raimi used technology to create an unfamiliar, unsettling sound to feed the audience’s imagination sonically and illicit a feeling of horror and uneasiness that way. Another example of the use of different sound textures to portray different perspectives is during the possessions. During the scene where Cheryl begins calling out the names of cards during the Spades game, she is fully possessed, which is reflected in the effects that alter her Owens 3 voice. Her voice is transposed down to a lower octave and distorted. This ‘alternate’ voice is the perspective of the demon possessing Cheryl’s body. Moments where the audience is observing the human characters’ point of view is when the classical, orchestral score composed by Joseph LoDuca comes into play. For example, a bright, romantic classical piece is heard in the scene where Ash gifts his girlfriend Linda a necklace, which is arguably the most positive point in the film, apart from the ending scene when Ash leaves the house. Other examples of when classical acoustic music plays are when Cheryl’s hand is possessed while drawing the clock on the wall and the scene where Ash explores the cellar, looking for Scott. There are two instances of preexisting songs that appear in the film. In the opening scene, the group sings the song “Old Baby Moses and the Thrillers,” in the car on the way to the cabin. The other instance is in the scene where Ash is in the cellar and a film projector turns on by itself and plays a library music track titled “Jazz Traditional – Charleston.” LoDuca references where this must have come from in the Fangoria interview stating, “I know they had edited in New York and raided a sound library there,” (Fichera). The score begins to incorporate synthesized sounds once Ash is shown to be the sole survivor out of his original group of friends. Specifically, when he walks back into the house from a failed attempt to bury Linda and finds that the possessed Cheryl has escaped entrapment inside the cellar. What exactly the introduction of these new sounds in the score signify is unclear, other than the paranoia that befalls Ash, now that he is clearly left alone to fend for himself. These synth patches are still used fairly minimally, decidedly standing out in comparison to the shrieking strings that sequentially encompass them. Owens 4 Apart from the musical aspects of the film, the soundtrack in The Evil Dead focuses a lot on sound effects. The film does not exert a lot of effort creating ambience or putting a focus on the natural environmental sound. Instead, it carefully designates particular sound effects that directly reflect actions that are prominent in the foreground of the shot. An example of this is in the scene towards the beginning when Cheryl is drawing the grandfather clock on the wall. The collection of shots at the start of this scene put show the clock and Cheryl sitting closely by the open window. There are no sounds other than the ticking of the clock, its pendulum rocking back and forth, and the sound of Cheryl’s pencil scraping across the page. As soon as the clock strikes the hour, the bell sound it makes becomes a direct focal point. When the shot cuts back to Cheryl, the dramatic howling sound of the wind blowing through the curtain and the hanging bench on the porch knocking against the wall appear seemingly out of nowhere, signified by nothing other than the clock. The loud wind and knocking sounds are interpreted to signify that some sort of eerie, in this specific case, demonic activity is about to occur, as you can also hear the deep, rumbling vocal effects of the previously mentioned “monster” sound reverberating in the distance. One can infer that these sound effects, which one would assume would already be there, appear suddenly in order to create a juxtaposition between the moments where nothing particularly exciting is happening and the various horror sequences. This gives these eruptive instances more of a dramatic effect in which to evoke a more sensational reaction in the audience when they occur. In summary, The Evil Dead soundtrack was an innovative take on the typical horror film soundtrack that existed at the time in that it combined the classic technique of orchestral film scoring with the contemporary technique of synthesizers and electronic sounds to give the film a more diverse soundscape. Its use of classical music served as the main score, which portray the Owens 5 dramatic emotions of the human characters, while electronic and synthesizer sounds to convey the alternate points of view of the demons and demonically possessed humans. The film toys a lot with the dichotomy of near silence accompanied only by the necessary, yet sensational, and almost over the top sound effects with the haunting and dramatic horror sequences that involve the monster sounds and the piercing moments of the orchestral score Owens 6 Works Cited Campbell, Bruce, et al. Evil Dead. Renaissance Pictures, 1983, https://play.max.com/movie/b57c983e-1e69-46fc-8dfd-fd966a6f4d43. Accessed 27 June 2023. Fichera, J Blake. “The Evil Dead: Still Sounds Good after 40 Years.” FANGORIA, 15 Oct. 2021, www.fangoria.com/original/the-evil-dead-still-sounds-good-after-40-years/. Giardina, Carolyn. “Sam Raimi Reveals How He Created the Monster Sound in ‘Evil Dead.’” The Hollywood Reporter, 27 Feb. 2016, www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movienews/sam-raimi-reveals-how-he-869649/. Romero, George A, director. Night of the Living Dead. Image Ten, 1968, https://tubitv.com/movies/675222/night-of-the-living-dead?start=true&tracking=googlefeed&utm_source=google-feed. Accessed 27 June 2023.
