Messy and Maximalist: An Evil Dead Approach to Chicken Wings
Resourceful doesn't have to mean simple or boring
Watching The Evil Dead (1981, dir. Sam Raimi), it’s hard to separate the movie from the making of it, even if you don’t know the story.
Famously, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, childhood friends, scrounged together just enough money to shoot their first feature on a shoestring, dragging the assembled cast and crew to the middle of the Tennessee woods for an arduous and occasionally dangerous shoot. Injuries were sustained. Hardships incurred.
In the finished movie, some of the shots are out of focus, some of the heads or hands obviously belong to prop dummies, and when a character “levitates” it’s in front of an open window, conveniently allowing for some sort of hoisting apparatus. In other words, the seams show.
Despite this, or because of it, the movie’s got an infectious can-do spirit. It never limits itself. It gives you tracking shots over the water and through the woods, stop-motion assaults and decomposition, vivisection, trees crashing through windows, blood coming out of power outlets and light bulbs and drain pipes, close-up and gruesome slashings and stabbings, a mangled bridge…
It hits you with as much as it can.
This is true even on a scene-by-scene basis. We open on a group of friends driving down a country road. Nothing inherently dramatic. But here we get our first demon-POV tracking shot closing in on the car, we get ominous shots of a truck coming down the road in the other direction, portending a collision – this sequence culminating in a near miss. Immediately following we get a rickety bridge that the car nearly falls through. That’s all in the first few minutes, before we get to the cabin, and the movie never lets up from there.
This maximalism is a lot of fun. Just because it’s fun, though, doesn’t mean the movie isn’t effective as a horror experience. It’s not as overtly comedic as its sequels. The deadites are genuinely menacing. There’s a certain bleakness to the inescapability of the situation and the implications of the book’s curse.
Thinking of all this in the kitchen, I started to wonder how to make something that captures a similar sense of maximalism and fun while still being delicious.
The movie’s delivery framework – the skeleton around which the rest of the movie assembles itself – is the isolated cabin in the woods. So simple and effective that it's now a well-established genre trope. I thought I’d start with something in the same spirit. Something simple enough to provide a blank slate.
The chicken wing. Just about as common on appetizer menus as the cabin in the woods has become in horror movies.
There are a million variations on chicken wings. For mine, I wanted to reflect The Evil Dead’s splattery, DIY vibe, and its sense of being right on the verge of spinning out of control.
To accomplish this, I decided that, in the spirit of the movie, I’d make do with whatever I happened to have around. Fortunately for me, I live within shopping distance of all sorts of international markets and grocery stores, and my fridge and pantry are usually stocked with interesting ingredients.
A quick inventory of what I happened to have on hand that caught my eye:
I wanted to use a lot of this stuff. But I wanted to use it smartly. The movie doesn’t hit you with every single thing in every single scene. The cumulative experience relies on sequence. I could achieve something similar through layering.
Rather than toss everything together in a sauce, I’d use some ingredients in a marinade, others in a seasoning blend, still others in a sauce, and the rest in some kind of finishing garnish.
Now, I realize that not everyone’s pantry is stocked with this stuff. If you want to make these wings, you’ve got a couple options. You can either pick up these ingredients (most are readily available online, if you’re not near an international grocery store), or you can make substitutions.
In the recipe below, I’ll describe in further detail what each ingredient is providing in terms of taste, texture, etc., so that you can make informed substitutions, if you go that route. As long as you taste as you go and keep balance in mind, there’s no reason you shouldn’t swap out my ingredients for whatever you have on hand.
Anyway, here’s what I decided on. Camera angles inspired by a young Sam Raimi.
Marinade:
Spice rub:
Sauce:
Garnish:
As with the movie, there’s a certain method to the madness. After all, the movie’s many tricks aren’t simply for their own sake, they’re in service of a coherent story – the tracking shots establish the demon’s predatory nature, the blood effects embody the danger, etc. – and I wanted my wings to reflect a similar intention.
The marinade tenderizes the wings and provides a base level of peppery, gingery heat. The seasoning blend adds complexity, with grains of paradise adding a woody, citrusy element to the Old Bay. The sauce brings acidity, sweetness, umami, and a more spice-oriented heat. Finally, the garnish gives the wings crunch and a vegetal note.
Just as The Evil Dead’s cast and crew had to figure things out on the fly, putting this together involved a lot of tasting and adjusting along the way, making sure the various elements remained in balance.
These wings are a little messy, like the movie that inspired them. And they’re nothing fancy. But they’re really good, and perfect for your next informal get-together with friends.
Recipe and demo video below.
