Braindead

Peter Jackson's early films are made from Raimi's, and he has said so repeatedly: Evil Dead was the proof that a very small crew with no money could make a horror film that looked invented rather than cheap. What carries: the camera as a physical object thrown through the set, splatter pushed so far past plausibility that it becomes comedy, practical effects built in a shed, and a single house that fills with the dead. Filed MEDIUM. It is a stated debt of method and tone rather than borrowed material, and Braindead's lawnmower takes the idea somewhere Raimi did not.

Jackson has talked about Romero as formative, and Braindead is what happens when a young film-maker takes Dawn of the Dead's gore effects as the point rather than the cost. The inheritance is the infection rules, the boarded-up house and the practical splatter; the departure is tone. Romero played it straight and let the satire sit underneath; Jackson puts a lawnmower in the third act and lets nothing sit underneath at all.