More than gore?

IF HOLLYWOOD can be said to have a preference for remaking and re-marketing old films--partly to avoid paying for new ideas and partly out of wanting to create commodities already proven on the market--then this predilection has been taken to ghoulish extremes in the industry's approach to horror movies.

This tendency, combined with the genre's inborn penchant for sequels and predisposition for style over substance has produced a seemingly endless flood of adaptations of "classics." This thoughtless, battle-tested, money-making method is now such a reflex on the part of the studios that genre-partisans have become numb, cynical or left cleaving to our hope that some hapless executive might green-light a Sleepaway Camp remake without realizing the mind-bending consequences of such a slip.

This depressing state of affairs meant that when rumor circulated that cult hit Evil Dead was slated to be the latest flick plucked from the dusty shelf of '80s horror legends and given a contemporary gloss, a chorus of skeptical scoffs could be heard resounding off the walls of hundreds of dank basements lit by the lonely glow of computer monitors.

But when it was officially announced that Sam Raimi, the original's director, and Bruce Campbell, the chin-tastic face of the franchise, both agreed to oversee the reboot, horror-geeks across the Internet suspended their disbelief and dared to hope that this time things would be different. And in some ways, the new film does not disappoint: what Raimi, Campbell, and director Fede Alvarez have achieved with their remake is a modern day re-imagining featuring a remarkable fidelity to the spirit of the original.

With all of the bells, whistles and bottomless budgets for makeup and effects that come along with a major Hollywood production, Alvarez is able to transform the camp of his source material into the believable skin-crawling stuff of which nightmares are made. On the purely visual level, this is realized in terror-inducing mastery, and represents a very respectful nod to what the original could have done if its creators had even two nickels to rub together.

The remake even improves on some of the weaknesses of Raimi's script by giving the reboot a plot and what could, on some levels, be called an attempt at establishing character motivations.

WHILE 2013's Evil Dead excels in the scares, bloodletting and visual effects departments, there's a deeply unsatisfying element to this film that it's inherited from its predecessor. For those of us who want our gorefests to mean something, including those of us who love the original, it's the new version's deep appreciation for, and faithful reproduction of, Evil Dead's immediate generic antecedents that is its chief weakness.

If Raimi's film was a sticky, blood-soaked love letter to Wes Craven and John Carpenter, it goes without saying that the present ode is addressed mainly to Raimi himself, but its verses also spare no affection for Eli Roth and the current state of the horror genre. A case can be made that this is appropriate since the original Evil Dead very much anticipated the revelry for broken teeth, flayed skin and gushing bodily fluids which audiences have come to expect from the dime-a-dozen torture porn films being churned out in recent years.

The disappointment is that Alvarez's vision offers little more than the increasingly boring worship of violence and gore for their own sake and stays true to the steadfast focus upon the grisly details of bodily dismemberment that comes along with it.

Seeking out features to distinguish this film from Hostel and its cohort requires a twisted, though familiar, calculus of weighing the relative creativity of the particular forms of murderous violence to which the characters are subjected--an enterprise whose novelty is wearing thin in a context where this is essentially the only aspect of the genre being regularly updated within the mainstream.

Speaking as a onetime enthusiastic practitioner of such logic, I can honestly report that Evil Dead pushes these boundaries, such that they are. It features not only a disgusting scene in which a character slips on a slab of mangled flesh hewn from the face of his recently zombified friend (her first act of zombification was, naturally, to take a shard of glass to her own face) but also a separate sequence in which a character forks her own tongue by licking the blade of a knife as the camera forces the eye to the incision. To name only two examples.

Every scene shares in this same sadistic enthusiasm for violence, making Evil Dead much more at home with Rob Zombie's Halloween than with Carpenter's original masterpiece. In a certain respect, this infatuation with brutality has always been a defining feature of the genre, but the recent narrowing of thematic scope in the post-Saw era has drained all of the life from this obsession even before Joss Whedon's Cabin in the Woods drove a stake straight through its heart.

The problem is that the corpse won't rest. Reanimated and dripping fleshy gore it stalks around unaware of the embarrassing state of its own decomposition, forcing us to watch uncomfortably as it bleeds all over the carpet.

THERE IS a second aspect of Evil Dead which deserves sharp criticism from those of us who love the horror genre and also happen to be interested in the struggle for human liberation: Namely it's sexism. The torture-porny elements are failings largely passed on from the original, though cast in sharper relief by the recent global resurgence of activism in response to rape and sexual assault.

In some ways, the remake engages in meager attempts to improve upon the original's problems in this area. For example, it includes a departure from the '80s version that both challenges the prevailing moralism toward women's personal choices and makes at least one of the female characters into more than a passive vessel for demonic forces to possess and for the male characters to chop into pieces.

Laudable as these changes may be, the more perniciously misogynistic features far outweigh any of the (only passingly) progressive elements.

To begin with, the disturbingly iconic tree rape scene reproduced from the original. Though slightly altered in some glimmer of self-consciousness, there's no way to get around the fact that this scene, as Lindie West points out at Jezebel is still very much a rape.

This violation of a female character serves as both the most explicit example of the film's recurring sexualization of violence, as well as the first (and most odious) instance of sex being used to transmit satanic possession.

Whether through rape or the projectile eruption of (gallons worth of) bodily fluids, each of the film's women is subjected to some sexual act before transforming into an undead husk. There are any number of plausible interpretations for what the filmmakers intend this to mean, but it's difficult to imagine even one reading that reflects positively upon women.

If all of that weren't enough, Alvarez's Evil Dead also peddles a number of well-worn tropes that are not only insulting to women in general, but also to the intelligence of anyone who watches the film. Let's take, for example, the vacuous blonde character who is addressed almost exclusively as "babe" throughout, and whose only role is to serve as the protagonist's girlfriend. The most significant thing she does in the movie is to absent-mindedly play with a dog and then later to cut her own arm off using an electric carving knife.

Less obvious, though more damning, is the way in which the emotional center of the film's fright factor relies on the recycled "hysterical female" cliché in its various forms. Mia, the central female protagonist, has brought everyone else along to this isolated cabin in the wilderness to help her try to kick her heroin addiction. Before the plot turns macabre, we're offered the insight that her drug problem likely relates to the fact that her brother ran off to the big city while she was still young, leaving her with the solitary responsibility of caring for their institutionalized mother.

This cinematic elision between madness and demonic possession hooks our sympathy to Mia's anxiety, making the capture of her earthly body by some nether spirit all the more terrifying--and all the more predictable. The filmmakers never expect us to ask her brother David doesn't similarly bend to the will of whatever force assails his sister, despite a similar personal history. We're left to assume that he's merely made of sterner stuff.

Add to this the low-angle shots and unnecessary objectifying pans that have become the rote features of every Hollywood movie marketed to male audiences. These are all the conventional and utterly predictable features of the sexism found in the industry, so, especially in light of more violent examples of misogyny found in the film, these things can go almost unnoticed.

BAD AS it may be taken in isolation (and it is quite bad), the movie's refusal to see women as anything but sacks of flesh, and the genre's tendency in this direction, is actually more disturbing in relation to what such views nurture within its audience. To be clear from the outset, this is not to suggest, as some moralists and politicians frequently do, that watching movies featuring brutal violence against women produces crazed sociopaths who want to cut people up and make dresses out of them. There is absolutely no one-to-one correlation on this stuff.

That said, there is at the very least a connection between the degraded (and decomposing) status of women in horror movies and the hysterical sexist Internet rage that bubbles to the surface so often among horror fanboys and geeks in general.

The response to Annalee Newitz's review of Evil Dead at i09 is the perfect demonstration of this knee-jerk disrespect in action. Newitz made the mistake of very evenhandedly and matter-of-factly arguing that this remake is a humorless torture-porn film. She was rewarded for her efforts with a horde of frothy-mouthed nerd-splainers who descended on the comments section within minutes.

While the replies to Newitz's article are no where near as appalling and degrading as other recent examples of the unbridled behind-the-keyboard fury directed against women who dare to criticize geek fetishes (such as the attacks on Annita Sarkeesian for her critique of video games), they're no less sexist.

It's no accident that this kind of condescension is most frequently directed against women, and in this case the unshakable confidence expressed by these posts is all the more insulting since it's directed against someone who demonstrably knows more about the horror genre than the overwhelming majority of i09's readers.

Not only is she on record as a fan and intelligent defender of The Human Centipede and an editor of one of the leading science/science fiction websites, but Newitz is also the author of Pretend We're Dead, a brilliant book about the ways in which the contradictions of capitalism have shaped the monsters in modern American horror movies.

In other words, if anyone is in a position to opine on whether or not a particular film fits the torture-porn mold, it is probably her, and it is hard to imagine that, once brought to light, these credentials would be brushed aside so easily if she were a man.

WHERE DOES all of that leave those of us who are both horror fans and radicals? Should Alvarez's Evil Dead simply be denounced as misogynist trash and avoided by anyone with an ounce of political awareness? Likewise, should left-leaning horror fans relegate the 1981 classic to the sexist dustbin?

Given the current state of the genre's mainstream--Cabin in the Woods not withstanding--we could have expected much, much worse from this Evil Dead remake on both the political and the aesthetic levels. That's said, self-respecting horror fans owe it to themselves to demand something more than the empty, repetitive carnivals of dismemberment that have come to dominate the movies we love, and to which Evil Dead proudly stands as a monument.

Moreover, every self-respecting radical horror fan also needs to continue to fight the Sisyphean battle to reach a point where the most notable aspect of a woman's role in horror movies is no longer merely whether she takes off her shirt, or how exactly she's mutilated.

This remake does not help in this effort. But it does hang together as an entertaining, terrifying, brainless romp that will probably please fans of the original. Does liking the movie despite all of its contradictions reveal a certain false consciousness? Maybe it does.

Something about the horror genre continues to be extremely compelling for millions of people--some of whom are socialists--and our task should be to honestly and clearly confront the political failings of our cultural obsessions, especially those to which we are personally attached. As Marx said, socialists should stand for the ruthless criticism of all that exists--even the things we love and are invested in.