Halloween 2K25 – Discovering Evil Dead in an AOL Chatroom

So much of my early internet memories are wrapped up in horror movies. I previously wrote about House of Horrors, but there were two other places I obtained my horror education at: alt.horror and AOL’s Horror Chatroom.

Some of my first memories of alt.horror was reading posts about how much Scream sucked and how it was a disgrace to horror movies. It’s funny, now Scream is pretty much universally loved, but when it was released it was hated for doing everything different than an 80s slasher film. I guess, it just goes to show, the internet has always been toxic, it’s just more toxic on a larger scale these days.

The newsgroups were fine, but where I really found myself enjoying horror movie discussions was on AOL’s Horror chatroom. In the mid-to-late 90s, there wasn’t a ton of chatroom options on AOL, but horror was one of them and I spent hours hanging out, chatting with folks, and learning about horror movies I’d never heard before. It was a place where I could go and ask about a specific movie I ran across in the video store and get some feedback before renting it. It was also a great place to learn about horror movies I didn’t know anything about.

I’ll never forget discovering Evil Dead from this chatroom. See, back in the 90s Evil Dead was out of print. It’s sequel and Army of Darkness were readily available at most video stores, but finding the original film was almost impossible. Having worked in a video store, I’ll let you in on a secret, usually when films were out of print or hard to find, people just stole them. If they weren’t stolen, then eventually they wore out from being rented and watched so often.

Anyway, whenever you’d log into the AOL Horror Chatroom, you’re IMs would lit up.

“Do you have a copy of Evil Dead?”

“I got tons to trade for a copy of Evil Dead”

“I’m willing to send you cash for a copy of Evil Dead”

Fans were clamoring for a copy of Evil Dead and even if you did run across the rare person who had a copy, it was a copy of a copy of a copy, and was barely watchable.

I rushed out and rented Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness but it would be a couple of years before I finally got my hands on Evil Dead. Thankfully, Anchor Bay obtained the rights and released it on VHS. I found copy at Walmart and being that I was still a young teenager, I ran across the store to plead with my father to buy me a copy. I tried to explain how rare and hard to find it was, and how I’d been looking for a copy of it for years, but his eyes just glassed over and I think he agreed just to get me to shut up about the history of some random horror film that came out before I was born. 🙂

Anyway, Evil Dead lived up to it’s reputation and I’ve watched it dozens of times over the years. I’ve also bought it probably a dozen different times over the years. Currently, I own the Evil Dead box set which includes the first and second film in 4k, along with Ash vs. Evil Dead. Of course, I also have Army of Darkness in a 4k steel book!