Of all the holidays celebrated worldwide, no single day is more loved by the UTG staff than Halloween. With the arrival of the year’s best month, the time has finally come to begin rolling out a plethora of features and special announcements we have prepared in celebration of our favorite day, including the one you’re about to read.

Now in its third year, 31 Days Of Halloween is a recurring feature that will run throughout the month of October. The hope and goal of this column is to supply every UTG reader with a daily horror (or Halloween-themed) movie recommendation that is guaranteed to amplify your All Hallows’ Eve festivities. We’ll be watching every film the day it’s featured, and we hope you’ll follow along at home.

[Warning: the material within is likely NSFW]

Day 28: Evil Dead II (1987)

My love for Evil Dead II does not end at its place as an arguably perfect horror film, but continues with its influence on my interest in even more absurd ’80s films with a terrifying premise masking their absurd intentions. Before we get there, though, let’s start from the beginning.

Sam Raimi’s 1981 debut cult-classic, The Evil Dead, was a terrifying fusion of genuine horror with a splash of campy goodness. The acting had enough self-aware goofiness placed between mildly disturbing demon possession scenes to maintain the movie’s twisted version of a lighthearted nature. A much different composition made up its 1987 sequel, Evil Dead II, though, as it turned up the campiness to full blast while upping the gory violence to an equally high level. With one scene featuring the series’ protagonist, Ash, watching his stop-motioned animated girlfriend come back to life and put on a dance in clay zombie form to another of Ash replacing his bloody stump of an arm with a chainsaw, the film demanded every aspect of its structure to be exaggerated to the fullest extent.

The overwhelming character made this movie the deserved cult classic sequel it functions as. Entertaining the audience was made a priority, and thus, it became the first film experience that truly opened my mind to the vast expanses of thematic territory horror films could explore. Rather than representing a form of pure terror inducement through a hyper dark nature, they could be conscious of the ridiculousness of certain tropes (a la revival of very dead girlfriends) and exploit them to create scenes worthy of equal levels of screams and laughs.

Here I am, years later, an avid believer in the 1988 The Blob remake as a masterpiece of genuinely amusing horror among many films with similar approaches. I owe it to the colorful nature of Evil Dead II when it comes to an aspect of my film taste I value greatly, especially come Halloween season.

Editorial written by: Michael Giegerich
Last year’s Day 28 film: Jacob’s Ladder

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Mike Giegerich

Mike Giegerich is a freelance journalist with an affinity for the hip-hop scene. His top-five favorite records of all time are Future's last five releases. Feel free to blow up his mentions on Twitter.

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