The Evil Dead

Five students, a cabin, a tape recorder and a book bound in human skin. Raimi financed it by screening a short to Michigan dentists, shot it in Tennessee over twelve weeks in winter, and put the cast through conditions they still complain about.

The camera is the film. Raimi mounted it on a plank carried by two runners to get the forest chase, shot through doorways at floor level, and used stop-motion for a finale that looks handmade because it is.

In the UK it was the most prosecuted title on the DPP list. Palace Pictures lost a couple of early trials, then fought the rest with a full defence and won, which is the best demonstration that the list had no consistent logic: the same film, the same print, convicted in one court and acquitted in the next by a different jury.

The tree scene is indefensible and Raimi has said so.