No movie had a bigger impact on my love for films and film-making than Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. The sequels got bigger, funnier and more off-the-wall, but my heart belongs to the original film, which is a lunatic fun-house of scares, gore and truly inventive camerawork. In fact, on re-watching it I was struck with just how much energy the film-making brought to what was really a very standard tale of a group of young people being attacked by some malevolent force. While Bruce Campbell would become a cult icon, here he’s just a kid, but takes the massive punishment dished in his direction like a champ even while his friends are possessed, (controversially) molested by a tree, or dismembered. There’s a wild sense of freedom on display, a sense that anything can happen, that few films have been able to match, and the consistent inventiveness on display inspired an entire generation of horror filmmakers – and eventually made Raimi a blockbuster filmmaker. And while it’s funny – sometimes screamingly so – it remains at heart a true horror film, and a very effective one.