Director Sam Raimi and good friend Bruce Campbell set out to make a real scary movie…although filmed on 16mm, The Evil Dead is good enough to be your next nightmare and a hell of a lot better than your run of the mill slice and dice. Campbell plays Ash Williams, one of five college friends set out to have a wild weekend in the woods. Two guys…three girls journey to a remote cabin, of course in the middle of the woods. And the woods whisper “Join Us”. The group stumbles upon a book and a tape recorder belonging to the previous inhabitants, warning of evil spirits lurking in the woods. When the dead come out to play, the newest victims turn into horrid ghouls. Ash, who at heart is a cowardly pansy, turns out to be the macho, macho man to the rescue. It takes courage, a shotgun and a chainsaw.

When the flesh-eating demons start their attack, the blood doesn’t just ooze; it splatters, gushes and flows by the bucketful. And there is the scene where one of the girls is beckoned into the woods only to be attacked and raped by a…tree?! Cheap special effects galore decorate this vacation to a little north of Hell. The comedy was unintentional. It is a product of bad acting by actors with little or no experience. But still, Raimi as writer and director has stumbled upon something here. The Evil Dead more than deserves its youth restricted rating.

The term cenobite is an archaic word meaning simply “a member of a communal religious order”. Indeed, the original novel mentions the Cenobites as “Theologians of the Order of the Gash”; they are also referred to as Hierophants. They can reach Earth’s reality only through a rupture in time and space (referred to as a “Schism”) which is opened and closed using certain unearthly artifacts. The most common form for these artifacts is an innocuous-looking Chinese-style puzzle box called the Lament Configuration.

The Cenobites all have horrific mutilations or body piercings. The best known of the Cenobites in the Hellraiser films is Pinhead. Pinhead’s mutilation consists of pins that have been hammered through his flesh into his skull in a grid pattern and six open wounds on his lower torso with the flesh peeled back, and also fish-hooks embedded in the back of his head.

Pinhead; the Dark Prince of Pain, Angel of Suffering, Leviathan’s Lord of the Damned. During the first World War, Captain Elliot Spenser witnessed many atrocities, his appetites were indulged, but it was through the Lament Configuration that a world of experience beyond limits would open up to him and eventually become his domain.

Originally enforcers for Leviathan, Lord of Hell, Cenobites were charged with retrieving anyone who solved the Lament Configuration, also known as the Lemarchand Box, a wood and brass puzzle box, which if solved opens a gateway between our world and Hell, highly sought after by the greatest of hedonists for its promise of unparalleled pleasures. The Cenobites were then directly responsible for the pleasure/pain torture of said individual.