Unhappy Endings and What Comes Next

This post contains spoilers for Evil Dead Rise, but I mean…it’s an Evil Dead movie, you know how this goes.

Evil Dead Rise is a by-the-numbers Evil Dead movie. If you’re not familiar with that particular formula, stop reading, go watch one, then come back. (I’m very fond of the reboot from 2013, but you can’t go wrong with the original or its sequel.) To sum up: an evil spirit infects an innocent bystander, bloody chaos ensues as other innocent bystanders struggle to figure out what’s happening and then realize then can do eff-all to stop it.

Evil Dead Rise distinguishes itself by adding kids of various ages to the mix — parents tell me that this one was a little hard for them to watch, so fair warning — and setting the events in a condemned apartment building as opposed to a cabin out in the woods. I liked the familiarity of the surroundings, even if the building in question is about as “movie fantasy version of an apartment” as it gets. Vents big enough for an adult to move through. Interior French doors and Bakelite doorknobs. Pocket doors and clawfoot tubs. Oh, but the gate to the parking garage doesn’t always work! Honey, for that kind of square footage, I’ll shimmy up a drainpipe to get home.

Anyway, EDR also addresses a question I always bring up in these kind of possession stories, after someone takes some buckshot straight to the chest and keeps on coming: why are you not trying to dismember these things? Look, I don’t care how malevolent the thing controlling you like a meat puppet is, you can’t do much without a head. Or hands. EDR tackles that head on and comes up with an answer — namely that the spirit will just move on to the next body it finds. But if it can do that, why terrorize everyone? Why not just infect them all immediately, have meatsack army? I think we’re supposed to go with the idea that the terror is the point, and the possession is just a means to an end. *shrug* Ok.

So what does any of this have to do with Gen X, given there’s nary a member of that age group in the entire movie? I was talking to someone recently about early video games like Zork and Maniac Mansion and many of them included the possibility to not just lose, but lose in dire ways. I believe that’s at least partly due to the influence of the Cold War.

When I was a kid, I was absolutely certain that I was going to die as a result of nuclear war. I was too young to understand the hows and whys, I just knew it was a very real threat. But I also knew there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Even if someone did launch missiles, there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. It was just going to happen and then we’d all be dead. So there was this background dread that Today Might Be the Day but also this apathy about it because…well, whatcha gonna do?

I feel like that duality taught my generation that sometimes you can try to do everything right and yet it all might go horribly wrong anyway. We accepted early on that there wasn’t always a happy ending and that wasn’t your fault, but you would have to deal with it anyway. Keep in mind we didn’t have the internet or even cable television, so our access to information was severely limited. You know the trope that our parents didn’t even know where we were all day…well, they didn’t. As long as we were home for dinner, they didn’t care all that much unless we came home bleeding. The message that we were on our own and that most everything was beyond our ability to influence came through very loud and clear. To sum up: shit happens, kid. Deal with it.

Evil Dead Rise has a happy-ish ending, in that two of the family members get away, but the demon just infects someone else and then does what it does best (this time at a cabin in the woods, just to stay on theme). Bad things happen despite our heroes’ best efforts. The bad thing is there, will always be there, and sometimes the best you can do is just get far enough away from it so that it stops hurting you and the people you care about. You can’t save everyone. Hell, sometimes you can’t save anyone. Shit happens, kid. Deal with it.

This gets branded as “cynical” or “nihilistic” sometimes, and when it comes up in horror movies, people tend to get really upset. They want their conflict resolved and their final girls and guys to live happily ever after. That’s a fair thing to want, but it’s not terribly realistic. You might find fault with me for even bringing up the word “realism” in a post about an evil spirit infesting people one by one, to say nothing of an apartment building in that neighborhood that hadn’t been gentrified yet. (Seriously, the crown molding alone would get you $6k a month rent.) But for me, part of the horror experience is fighting the good fight, even if you don’t win. Knowing that if you go down, at least you went down swinging, has a lot of value for me. I do think that’s partly because of those metaphorical nukes hanging over my head for my entire childhood.

Horror reflects the fears of the people who make it. Go back into the ‘50s and you’ll find more than a few “atomic” threats: giant insects, mutated monsters — all representations of the public’s nuclear trepidation. (Now that I think about it, Oppenheimer might be indirectly responsible for the creation of more horror media than any other single person in history.) Horror movies hosted more than a few not-terribly-subtle metaphors for the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and early 90s. It makes me wonder how current societal fears will shape the future of horror. We’ve already seen some of Gen Z’s concerns reflected on the screen as various bad things happen to influencers or others obsessed with social media. What will Gen Alpha’s boogeyman be? Crushing debt? AI? Technology-driven lonliness? A dying planet?

Whatever it is, I hope they get their happy ending.