Reading this made me raise my eyebrow so high in intrigued skepticism that it nearly broke off my face. Back in October, Fede Alvarez, the director of Evil Dead, did an interview with io9. But the most interesting bit of that interview didn’t start making the rounds of the movie news websites until just recently. Here’s that relevant bit, which comes when Alvarez is asked about the use of computer-generated special effects in the film:
We didn’t do any CGI in the movie. There’s no CGI in the movie. Everything you will see is real, which was really demanding. This was a very long shoot, 70 days of shooting at night. There’s a reason people use CGI it’s cheaper and faster, I hate that. We researched a lot of magic tricks and illusion tricks. [Like] how you would make someone’s arm disappear.
There’s a moment where a girl goes through her arm with a kitchen knife — spoiler alert. And we knew since day one the camera would start wide, she goes for the knife, you see her arm, she starts going for it. And you think they’re going to cut away at any moment, but we don’t. She just goes for it and screams and the arm breaks and falls. So we really pushed the boundaries there, trying to create those illusions… It has a particularly bloody ending. The last scene is just… I want it to be the bloodiest scene, ever. And I think it is.
No CGI? Seriously? In a day and age where even the films with the most mundane settings and stories are likely to make some use of it? That moment with the snaking tree branch in the trailer for this film certainly looked like it. But if it’s true? Then that’s pretty cool. And it’s totally in keeping with the handmade spirit of the original Evil Dead (albeit still with millions more dollars in the budget).
Evil Dead comes out April 12th. We’ll see what the effects look like then.