PETERSBURG Mariinsky Ballet (Kirov) www.mariinsky.ru The iconoclastic Soviet-era choreographer Leonid Jacobson based his ballet "Shurale" on a Tatar folk tale and poem about the bird-maiden Syuimbike, the intrepid hunter Ali-Batyr and the evil wood spirit Shurale.
At the end of the 1982 TV movie "Mazes and Monsters," a troubled gamer, played by a pre-fame Tom Hanks, loses touch and starts to believe that he really does live beside an evil wood in need of heroes.
The film is being produced by Ghost House, one of a number of new all-horror production banners, though Ghost House has a pedigree: it is a joint venture between Joe Drake and Nathan Kahane of Mandate Pictures, on the one hand, and on the other, Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, who more than 20 years ago made the seminal vacationing-teenagers-stalked-by-evil-wood-spirits film, "The Evil Dead".
"They're painting with this very broad brush that basically says any big practice must be evil," Dr. Wood said.
It's not that fire is evil and wood is good.
One of my theories about Twin Peaks used to be that fire is evil and wood is good.
Raimi is the director of one of the greatest 80s comedy-horror ventures of all time, the fabulous cabin-in-the-woods film Evil Dead II (don't bother with the humourless first instalment: it's highly overrated).
Unlike slasher movies that bask in the explicit threat of violence, this faux documentary about an evil presence in the woods around Burkittsville, Md., succeeded in making its audiences afraid of something they couldn't see.
It has a king and a queen, a castle and a dark woods, an evil fairy, grinning nastily, and a good fairy who, though she cannot countermand the bad fairy's curses, can introduce modifications, arrange for second chances, the way God does in the New Testament.
A story of possession set in a cabin in the woods, "The Evil Dead" was part of a wave of low-budget independent horror films in the late '70s and early '80s that used crude effects and guerrilla filmmaking techniques to tell a scary tale saturated in outrageous gore.
