It’s been a pretty unlikely road to Hollywood for Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez.

The 35-year-old director of the forthcoming horror remake “Evil Dead” – an ultra gory reimagining of Sam Raimi’s cult 1981 movie of the same name – came to the attention of the major studios after his short film “Panic Attack” went viral on YouTube. The short, which was made on a budget of just $300, depicts Alvarez’s hometown of Montevideo being utterly destroyed by giant robots.

“Panic Attack” was exactly the sort of do-it-yourself project that Hollywood could really get behind, but the micro-budget short couldn’t be further away from Alvarez’s feature film debut. In classic horror tradition and much like the original film, “Evil Dead” follows a group of twenty-somethings who retire to a creepy cabin in the woods for the weekend. But instead of the conventional college-age pursuits of sex, drugs, and alcohol, the group is actually holing up at the cottage to help their drug-addicted friend Mia ("Suburgatory" star Jane Levy) get clean once and for all. Unfortunately for the group, Mia’s sobriety is the least of their problems after the friends unwittingly summon a demonic force by reading from a book they find in the cabin. Go figure!

Yahoo! Movies Canada spoke to “Evil Dead” director Alvarez about horror movie-induced childhood trauma, remaking a cult classic, violence on film, the potential for “Evil Dead” crossover sequels, video game movies he’d like to make, and more.

After the viral success of “Panic Attack” (the short currently has over 7 million views), Alvarez fielded and subsequently turned down a number of directing opportunities from the major studios.

“Most of my friends were saying I was crazy back then, like how could I say no to a Hollywood movie?” Alvarez recalled. “But for me it would have been pointless to make a bad film.”

Then director/producer Sam Raimi (“Spider-Man,” “Oz the Great and Powerful”) came along, and convinced Alvarez to helm the “Evil Dead” reboot that was in the works.

“I chose [“Evil Dead”] and ended up working with Sam because I knew he was a filmmaker before he was a producer.” Alvarez said, adding that he knew Raimi’s background as a director would help foster an atmosphere of “respect” and “freedom” while making the movie.

The director’s relationship to Raimi’s original “Evil Dead” movie may have also played some part in him taking on the franchise reboot. Alvarez called his first exposure to the 1981 version starring Bruce Campbell “really traumatic.”

“I watched the original ‘Evil Dead’ when I was twelve,” Alvarez said. “I was really looking for the hardest horror movie I could find... ...but I was way too young to watch that film.”

The director remembered his frustration at how comedic some horror movies were becoming in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“’Nightmare on Elm St.' and even the 'Friday the 13th' series' were incorporating too much humour in them, so for me they weren’t scary anymore.”

“The Evil Dead,” on the other hand, did not disappoint the young Alvarez.

“I have sort of a love/hate relationship with the film; at first I hated it because of how much it scared me.”

Alvarez said that his love of the original movie made adapting the film for modern audiences a real challenge.

“It would have been a mistake just to remake the movie and tell the same story again – I don’t think have worked for a new audience,” Alvarez declared, referring to the clichéd “cabin in the woods” horror trope. “It just felt like we’d seen that movie so many times that it wasn’t going to work, so we had to come up with a new story and setup.”

“We have a lot of elements from the original, but here they’re used here in a completely new way,” the director said. “Part of the process was to really challenge the ideas from the original film, to really put them to the test of time to see if they were still relevant or not.”

Sure, Alvarez’s film has iconic “Evil Dead” paraphernalia like the chainsaw, the shotgun, and the icky human skin-covered book of the dead, but the director cited the audio cassette recordings from the original as something that simply wouldn’t fly with modern audiences.

“There’s this whole thing in the first movie about the tape with the incantations, and we got rid of that,” Alvarez said. “I thought it would be better if the actors were the ones reading the incantations from the book because they’re the ones who pay for it later.”

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