For Fans of Evil Dead

Raimi had a budget the second time around, and he used it to push every idea from the original to its breaking point. The slapstick becomes full Looney Tunes. Bruce Campbell performs comedy, tragedy, and action simultaneously in the same frame. The hand-going-evil sequence is one of the great set pieces in American horror. If you only know the first film, Evil Dead II is where the franchise found its voice.

Fede Alvarez's 2013 Evil Dead strips all the comedy out and commits to being a relentless body-horror film. It is not trying to be Army of Darkness with better effects. It has its own logic: a woman trying to get clean in a remote cabin, genuinely terrible timing with a cursed book, and a group of people who make every wrong decision for understandable reasons. The practical gore is extraordinary. Taken on its own terms, it earns its place in the franchise.

Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake (2010) is the most direct spiritual descendant of Evil Dead in games. A writer, a remote location, a supernatural force possessing people through a creative work, and a protagonist who survives through stubbornness rather than skill. The darkness-as-enemy mechanic even echoes Raimi's famous roving-camera monster perspective shots. Alan Wake 2 pushes the meta-horror further and earns comparison to the best of the series.

Mark Z. Danielewski's novel is a horror text that reads like a cursed document: unreliable narrators, footnotes that contradict each other, and a house that defies physics. If the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis were a modern American novel, it would look something like this. The experience of reading House of Leaves produces the same creeping wrongness that Raimi's cabin footage produces in viewers, by entirely different means.