Jessica Lucas Talks Evil Dead: "It's Just a Gorefest!"

On the heels of a couple of jaw-dropping red band trailers, there’s a lot of buzz building for Evil Dead, the new version of the Sam Raimi/Bruce Campbell horror cult classic directed by Fede Alvarez. While speaking to one of the film’s stars, Jessica Lucas (Cloverfield) about her upcoming new TV series, Cult (look for more on that soon), I also asked her a bit about what to expect in Evil Dead, which included the involvement of Raimi and Campbell as producers.

Jessica Lucas in Cult.

IGN: The Evil Dead trailers are promising something pretty hardcore and intense.

Jessica Lucas: It’s crazy. I’ve only seen little bits of it through doing ADR, but some of the stuff I’ve seen is just out of control -- but so exciting. There’s always that apprehension when you’re rebooting something that’s so beloved, because you’re like, “Oh God, are people just going to hate it?” But we’ve done our own spin on it, while still having nods to the original that I think will keep people very happy. It’s just a gorefest! And Fede [Alvarez] was not afraid to go there at all. He pushed us really hard, and I think everyone is going to love it, I really do.

IGN: Just those glimpses of the blood, the gore, the projectile vomiting, it looks like it must have been a very interesting and messy set.

Lucas: It was! It’s actually funny because we shot it pretty much in sequence, so for the first four weeks we were just kind of shooting the story leading up to everything. It was quite a tame, happy set -- I mean, we’re dealing with dark stuff anyway -- but we were all quite relaxed. And then we got into doing the horror, s**t hit the fan so quickly -- and that quickly changed on set. The atmosphere changed really, really quickly. So that was fun to see. We all went from being happy to being miserable because we were so uncomfortable.

IGN: As you mentioned, when you’ve got hardcore fans of something, they’re always going to have their trepidations and be weary of something new. Has it been nice for you to see this shift with the more footage you show? I feel like a lot of naysayers are now being more open to it. People thought it was going to be this glossy version of the original.

Lucas: Yeah, I’m glad. It isn’t going that route at all. It’s funny, too, because in talking to Sam and Bruce, what they maintain is that, when they made the original Evil Dead, they intended for it to be really scary. It ended up being kind of unintentionally hilarious, I guess. This was the movie they were originally trying to make, so that’s what we’re sticking with. I think visually it just looks so amazing. I think our cinematographer did an amazing job.

IGN: You mentioned Sam and Bruce. Having them there, did that really help as far as knowing they were basically godfathering this project?

Lucas: Absolutely. I don’t think you could do it without their blessing. But I have to say the great thing about them was that Bruce was a part of the audition process, so I met him through that, and he sent us this great email before we started just telling us, “Do your own thing. Don’t worry. Don’t feel the pressure to recreate something that’s already existed, and just make a great movie.” He was always very supportive from the get-go. Sam I’ve worked with before, but also, he firmly believes in letting the director have free reign. So he wasn’t actually there [on set], but I think that was good. We’d get notes from him that he’s so excited and seen the dailies and loving every minute of it, but he let Fede do his thing, which I think was really important as well.

Evil Dead opens April 5th.

Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @EricIGN, IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman.


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