31 Days of Halloween 2013: 'The Evil Dead' (October 19th at the Capitol Theatre)

[THE EVIL DEAD screens Saturday October 19th at the Capitol Theatre as part of 12 Hours of Terror. Event starts at 8:00 pm and goes until 8:00 am the next morning.]

R.J. Justavick

Being a child of the seventies, I was fortunate enough to grow up in the second golden age of the horror film. I wasn’t quite old enough to see the first runs of pictures like DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), HALLOWEEN (1978), or FRIDAY THE 13th (1980) in the theater, but thanks to the combination of the VHS boom of the early eighties and liberal parents who understood that my love of the horror genre went beyond mere bloodlust, I was able to feed my horror movie addiction with almost no interference. I would wander through the horror section of Visual Adventures, my local video store, always in search of the latest and greatest in horror, hoping to find a diamond in the rough. I may as well have come across the Hope diamond of horror when THE EVIL DEAD made its VHS debut in my town in 1983.