There’s a lot for the cast and crew of Evil Dead to be excited for. The film is a bloody thrill ride that leaves everyone dead or broken. Yet, not everyone was initially excited to join in. “No, I didn’t want to do it at all,” Lou Taylor Pucci admitted, who plays Eric and is the one responsible for unleashing the Necronomicon’s power. “I thought it was a terrible idea. I mean why would you remake The Evil Dead? [My agent] was just showing us the Rotten Tomatoes and it still has 100%, the old The Evil Dead, because it’s a perfect freaking movie in some ways.” He paused, and then added that the original was written with the cabingoers in their 30s, and that he was not right for the part. Then he got a callback, and found out Bruce Campbell was going to be there in the flesh. “So I just wanted to go meet Bruce Campbell and then shit happened,” he added, laughing.
One point of pride that the actors take in the film is the fact that the effects are practical. That even got Pucci’s unreserved seal of approval: “When I found out they were doing it all practical I was like, ‘This is it! This is going to be so cool.’ Because I can’t believe they even came up with that idea. They have such good taste.”
Meanwhile, cast members Jessica Lucas and Elizabeth Blackmore, who play Olivia and Natalie, respectively, had much more time in the makeup chair. “My stuff was pretty practical,” Lucas said, referring to a scene in which half of her cheek is torn to shreds. “It was a prosthetic piece on my face that was blacked out in the middle and then they put white dots to be able to follow it. It was three and a half hours of makeup.” Blackmore had even more time, saying, “I think my most was six or seven hours. I also spent a day in New Zealand about a month before we started shooting just getting casts [of my face and chest].”
As is common with horror films, the mood on set wasn’t scary, but more relaxed. The most difficult part for the cast seemed to actually be coming up with scared faces each take. “That’s really the hardest job the whole time, having to do that scene where you look scared again,” Lucas said. “And how many ways can you look scared,” Blackmore asks. “We got to day three and I was like, ‘I’m not.’” Lucas laughs: “What other faces do I got?”
They also had praise for director Fede Alvarez‘s foresight. “The biggest thing when we got there was that he wanted rehearsal time,” Pucci says, adding, “and he wanted to get us able to work with these people sort of interpretive dance, yoga zombie training so we could learn to move with our bodies as if we were marionettes or something.”
When asked to clarify that there was a teacher they worked with, they all seemed to have different names for the person. “A zombie teacher,” Pucci chimes. “A movement teacher,” Lucas says. “She was a choreographer,” Blackmore adds. One thing was for certain, though: There’s a tape out there, which Lucas hopes doesn’t get out, of them “doing crazy, weird stuff with our faces and bodies.”
“But how cool was that,” Pucci adds. “That’s what they thought of to do for us. We didn’t ask for it, we just got there and they were like, ‘OK, zombie class is tomorrow at one.’” “Which was great because I think we all felt kind of anxious about that,” Lucas says. “‘How do you be a zombie?’ And we were trying to figure that out.”
There’s a gruesome scene between a crowbar and a hand, and Blackmore had a particularly interesting story about shooting the scene. “That was awesome,” Blackmore says. “I really hurt the stunt guy that day. I bruised him so bad.” When the others gave her an incredulous look, she felt compelled to explain. “Well they gave me a crowbar, it was foam but the core of it is still metal and they’re like, ‘OK, beat the shit out of him’ and this guy, you know stunt guys, is just, ‘Do it,’ and I did and I cracked his hand. I had contacts in so I couldn’t see what I was doing but I didn’t want to hit his head.” Putting it all in perspective, Lucas laughed and exclaimed, “No way! That’s funny. I didn’t know that story.”
Evil Dead hits wide release this Friday, April 5th.