History Trivia / TheEvilDead1981

* RetroactiveRecognition: The woman in the film's publicity materials, including the iconic poster, is Creator/BridgetHoffman, today best known for her anime voice work. She was apparently a good friend of Sam Raimi's that also attended Michigan State.

* UnbuiltCastingType: Bruce Campbell is best known for being a comedic badass, in this franchise. But in the first film in the series, Ash starts out as a normal guy who spends a lot of time getting trapped under bookcases and being something of a DistressedDude. Essentially he becomes an ActionSurvivor as opposed to a RatedMForManly badass.

* AmateurCast: None of the actors had ever done a movie before. Creator/BruceCampbell and Ellen Sandweiss were frequent collaborators with Sam Raimi in the short films he'd been making for years, but had never been in a professional production of any kind, and the other three actors had only done commercials before Creator/SamRaimi recruited them through an ad in ''The Detroit News''. Everyone except Campbell quit acting after ''Evil Dead'', although the three women all returned to the craft in the mid-2000s and have made decent careers for themselves. Richard Demanicor did another movie in 1985, quit, then made a short in 2013 and quit again. [[spoiler: Ellen Sandweiss returned to the series for a few episodes reprising the role of deadite Cheryl/Cheryl's ghost.]] Also, Sandweiss, Richard Demanincor (Hal Delrich) Betsy Baker, and Theresa Tilly all returned to lend their voices to their original characters in Evil Dead The Game.

* ActingInTheDark: Ellen Sandweiss claims that the script only read "Cheryl is attacked by the woods" and that they kept adding more to the scene when they were filming. So she didn't realize it was a rape scene until she saw the final film.

* TropeNamer: FakeShemp.

* AmateurCast: None of the actors had ever done a movie before. Creator/BruceCampbell and Ellen Sandweiss were frequent collaborators with Sam Raimi in the short films he'd been making for years, but had never been in a professional production of any kind, and the other three actors had only done commercials before Creator/SamRaimi recruited them through an ad in ''The Detroit News''. Everyone except Campbell quit acting after ''Evil Dead'', although the three women all returned to the craft in the mid-2000s and have made decent careers for themselves. Richard Demanicor did another movie in 1985, quit, then made a short in 2013 and quit again. [[spoiler: Ellen Sandweiss returned to the series for a few episodes reprising the role of deadite Cheryl/Cheryl's ghost. Also, Sandweiss, Richard Demanincor (Hal Delrich) Betsy Baker, and Theresa Tilly all returned to lend their voices to their original characters in Evil Dead: The Game

** Creator/BruceCampbell, from a personal standpoint, mentioned in a commentary track that its about 30 or so minutes into the film when he can watch his own performance without cringing.

* AmateurCast: None of the actors had ever done a movie before. Creator/BruceCampbell and Ellen Sandweiss were frequent collaborators with Sam Raimi in the short films he'd been making for years, but had never been in a professional production of any kind, and the other three actors had only done commercials before Creator/SamRaimi recruited them through an ad in ''The Detroit News''. Everyone except Campbell quit acting after ''Evil Dead'', although the three women all returned to the craft in the mid-2000s and have made decent careers for themselves. Richard Demanicor did another movie in 1985, quit, then made a short in 2013 and quit again.

* OldShame:
** Creator/SamRaimi has expressed shame over the tree rape scene. Doesn't seem to have stopped it from reappearing in the remake though.
** Creator/BruceCampbell admitted to regretting the scene where he repeatedly and violently slaps Linda.

* TheForeignSubtitle:
** Argentina: ''The Evil Dead: Diabolical''
** Brazil: ''The Evil Dead: Death of the Demon''

* LyingCreator: Sam Raimi is known for telling tall tales regarding the production of the movie, which - given the genuine and notorious TroubledProduction - many people end up willing to believe. He once claimed that, while filming the final shot on a bicycle, he crashed straight into Bruce Campbell and broke Campbell's jaw, which he absolutely did not; on another occasion, he claimed that the cabin used for filming had previously been inhabited by a family whose mother and grandmother suddenly died of natural causes on the same night during a lightning storm, which may possibly be true but certainly seems implausible.
* MovieMakingMess: A crew discovering that feature films are much harder to make than short films, NoBudget, unsavory work conditions and a director [[EnforcedMethodActing making sure the actors are really frightened]], and you got what Creator/BruceCampbell described as "a comedy of errors".
* NoBudget: The film was financed entirely through small-level investments by various wealthy Detroit residents, such as doctors and business owners, most of whom proved difficult to entice. To drive the point home: before production began, Rob Tapert, Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi's ''best-case'' scenario was producing it for $150,000, while their absolute lowest, worst-case-scenario budget was $90,000. When it came time to start filming, they had only ''$85,000'' to work with. It was for this reason that much of the [[FakeShemp Fake Shemping]] was required: they ran out of money to pay the cast and crew long before filming was completed, so they had to film the rest by themselves for free, with whoever they could persuade to help.

* UrbanLegendOfZelda: It's rumored that the Finnish cut of the movie - dropping nearly twelve minutes of footage - was done by Creator/RennyHarlin.

* GeorgeLucasAlteredVersion: More recent home video releases have made some minor digital alterations to the footage, primarily to remove flubs such as crew members being visible on screen or jump-cuts in the middle of scenes. The most noted alteration is the deletion of a particular special effects shot of a lightning strike, which looks quite poorly done; it was removed in the 1999 DVD release, but returned in most subsequent versions.

* RetroactiveRecognition: The woman in the iconic poster, as well as other promotional images for the film, is Creator/BridgetHoffman, known to anime fans as [[Anime/DigimonTamers Jeri Katou]] and [[Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann Nia Teppelin]].

* AmateurCast: None of the actors had ever done a movie before. Creator/BruceCampbell and Ellen Sandweiss were frequent collaborators with Sam Raimi in the short films he'd been making for years, but had never been in a professional production of any kind, and the other three actors had only done commercials before Creator/SamRaimi recruited them through an ad in ''The Detroit News''. Everyone except Campbell quit acting after ''Evil Dead'', although the three women all returned to the craft in the mid-2000s and have made decent careers for themselves.
* AshcanCopy: "Film/WithinTheWoods," a short film made primarily to get the first true ''Evil Dead'' film financed. Richard Demanicor did another movie in 1985, quit, then made a short in 2013 and quit again.

* AshcanCopy: "Film/WithinTheWoods," a short film made primarily to get the first true ''Evil Dead'' film financed.

* {{Bowdlerize}}: The British Board of Film Classification would not approve the release of the film without some of the goriest moments being edited out, and after it became public enemy number-one of the VideoNasties controversy anyway, they demanded further cuts in order to allow it to return. While the censored version was still incredibly gory (there wasn't really any way around that), the impact of the violence was lessened somewhat by removing all moments where one character stabs or strikes another repeatedly, and all shots of [[HighPressureBlood blood gushing from wounds]] were edited out.

* FollowTheLeader: The creative team preferred making comedies in their amateur Super-8 days, and in fact, Sam Raimi didn't even like horror movies; they chose to make one anyway after doing some research and determining that the most commercially successful low-budget independent films of the recent past had been horror flicks, like ''Film/TheLastHouseOnTheLeft'', ''[[Film/TheTexasChainsawMassacre1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre]]'', and ''[[Film/TheHillsHaveEyes1977 The Hills Have Eyes]]''.

* KeepCirculatingTheTapes:
** For a period of five years starting in 1985, the film was completely unavailable commercially in the UK, thanks to the moral panic driven up against it and the other Video Nasties. Even after it was re-released in 1990, it had been censored by more than a minute's running time, and it wasn't until 2001 that the uncut version was finally included.

* AshcanCopy: "Within the Woods," a short film made primarily to get the first true ''Evil Dead'' film financed.

** The film itself is an example of a group of friends, fresh out of film school, going out and making a movie together [[NoBudget with little to no money,]] [[TroubledProduction and a completely hectic and miserable filming experience]]. [[TropesAreNotBad Their efforts ultimately paid off]].

* WorkingTitle: Creator/SamRaimi originally wanted to title this film ''Book of the Dead'', but producer Irvin Shapiro changed the title to ''The Evil Dead'' for fear that kids would be turned off seeing a movie with a literary reference.

* ActingInTheDark: Ellen Sandweiss claims that the script only read "Cheryl is attacked by the woods" and that they kept adding more to the scene when they were filming. So she didn't realise it was a rape scene until she saw the final film.
* AmateurCast: Creator/SamRaimi assembled a cast by putting an ad in ''The Detroit News''. Only Creator/BruceCampbell went on to have a prominent acting career.