Village Voice and IndieWire writer Aaron Hillis was one of the first to see the hotly anticipated EVIL DEAD at SXSW last night and he kindly submitted this review. Keep reading FANGORIA.com over the next few weeks to get other critiques from FANGO staffers....

More often than not, when the name EVIL DEAD is invoked (like the nefarious, blood-scrawled writings in the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis), it's actually shorthand for the more maniacally funny EVIL DEAD II, writer-director Sam Raimi's nutty 1987 horror landmark that served as both polished sequel and camped-up remake of his equally beloved 1981 debut The EVIL DEAD. Both films have similar setups, as soon-to-be-cult-hero Bruce Campbell and others visit a remote cabin in the woods and accidentally unleash a demonic force, which takes turns possessing and transforming its victims into absurdist, homicidal caricatures of Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST. Though the original film's budget was only a fraction of its successor, the franchise's hardcore fans know its ratio of horror-to-comedy errs more on the side of unnerving terror, its grisliest sequence depicting a young woman raped by the forest itself.

In their first major horror acquisition, Drafthouse Films has snagged EL Katz’s nasty, subversive debut.

It’s not often that products marketed toward young children prominently feature actual monsters, so Andi Green’s WorryWoo Monsters is definitely something to celebrate. Parents and children alike can find much to love in this series of books and their accompanying plush monster dolls.

(FANGORIA memoirs will return in the next blog; meanwhile, here’s a taste of things to come…)

A kid with a shovel whacks the protagonist around the head, not realizing a zombie is shambling up the street toward them.

Gunfire.

The dead thing drops.