PrimeWire

The film is a cult classic for a reason. It’s like Night of the Living Dead, in that it was made on a small budget with very basic equipment in one location. It’s bare-bones filmmaking at its best: Sam Raimi and a small cohort of friends (like Bruce Campbell, a personal friend of Raimi’s since high school). It’s maybe less obvious today when anyone can make a “movie” on their iPhone, but making a decent low-budget film outside the studio system in 1983 took some real guts and commitment to the craft for an aspiring young filmmaker like Raimi.
It’s also very famous due to the timing. The film received an X rating, which would have been a cinematic death sentence for a purely theatrical release, but thanks to the explosion in popularity of videotapes in the 80’s, the film spawned a huge following outside of the traditional cinema. It got a lot of attention for being so unabashedly gory and was banned in Britain as a “video nasty,” in addition to being censored in several other countries.
What might seem tame or cliche now was incredibly risky and even groundbreaking, thanks to Sam Raimi’s commitment to make a full-on gory horror flick with no f*cks given about the studio or ratings systems.
I think if one just watches this (or indeed, most older films) in a vacuum without the historical context, it is easy to get stuck on how “primitive” or “slow” a lot of them are. The value as art lies not in how it stacks up to our modern concept of film making, but in how films like this broke new ground to create a space for the other films to follow. But then again, we live in a time where everything is being remade or rebooted to fit our current sensibilities/attention spans, so it is rather difficult to maintain any sense of historical context for the value of these early innovations. A film like “Halloween” can be remade twice but the new versions will never match the ingenuity and simple charms of the original.