Because I'm such a huge fan of stop-motion animation, I know in the original "Evil Dead" trilogy — out of necessity because you couldn't lean on digital effects — you utilized stop-motion animation. Having said that, I think that's why the original "Evil Dead" films are classics, because some key effects were stop-motion animated. Stop-motion is timeless. With that, I'm wondering if there's anything in "Evil Dead Rise" that Lee did using practical effects that shows that same sort of ingenuity.
Tapert: Look, the elevator blood thing was not even a miniature — it was full-scale, no digital, no nothing. And the camera [moving] out in the woods that opens the movie was old-school stuff. Going back to the stop-motion question or references ... We love it, but the guys that do it, they're going — there aren't many of them left. There are guys on YouTube doing it, and I guess you could reach out to those guys. But that stop-motion, I also love it. There's now a trailer done featuring Batman LEGOs, which [when I saw it], I went, "Oh, that's cool."
Raimi: We were fortunate enough to work with Tom Sullivan and Bart Pierce on the first "Evil Dead" movie, and [on] the second one and the third one, Tom. His artistry is the flavor of the "Evil Dead," not just the makeup that he designed, but The Book of the Dead and the Kandarian Dagger. His unique blend of his creatures melting down — the stop-motion animation that Tom did in those movies — is part of the "Evil Dead" flavor now.
You also mentioned the ingenuity. Yes, Lee understood that this audience wants to see the practical effects. They didn't want to see a lot of CGI stuff, so he spent a lot of time — and to Rob's credit, Rob gave him that time — to pull off those very hard-to-pull-off mechanical effects. But it pays off with the audience. They know the difference. I don't think it was so much about ingenuity in crafting camera devices and techniques because he couldn't afford them, which is the situation we were in on the first "Evil Dead." It was more about taking existing technology and his ability as a puppet master of suspense and combining them in ingenious ways to make a crackerjack horror picture.
The situation was different. We had resources for him this time, so we didn't want him to stop on the set with a crew of 40 around and think, "What device could we make to move this camera in a unique way?" It was more like, "That point of view makes sense when you only have a crew of six people and you're not paying tens of thousands of dollars per day to keep them on payroll." That ingenuity thing takes time — the ingenuity of the camera devices — and it wasn't as necessary in this film as it was in our "Evil Dead" film, when we simply did not have anything to move the camera in the way that we needed to.
