Watch the Evil Dead director's short film, Panic Attack

"Now...where did I put my boomstick?"

Fede Alvarez's rebirth/reboot/remake/revamp of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead is the current US box office No.1, and was released here in the UK yesterday [read our ★★★★★ review here]. It's doing pretty darn well for a film with such a relatively low budget ($17 million).

But before he made Evil Dead, Alvarez made an even lower budget movie, Panic Attack (Ataque de pánico! - embedded below), a short film about a giant robot invasion of Montevideo, the capital of his native Uruguay. It was this YouTube upload that brought him to the attention of Hollywood, and eventually led to Raimi handpicking him for the Evil Dead sequel/spin-off/whatever-it-is.

Here's a transcription of Alvarez talking about his call up on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's BBC Radio 5 Live film review show:

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a crazy story, but I think three years ago I finished a short - one of many shorts that I did, living here in Montevideo - and I did an alien invasion movie with $300 that became this overnight success on YouTube. That was Panic Attack. I uploaded it, and literally the next morning I had, you know, 250 emails from Hollywood people saying, 'hey, we loved your short - we want to meet you'.

So I think one week after that I went to L.A. and I met a lot of people and, you know, among all the people I met, I met Sam, and I was a huge Sam Raimi fan (and I still am, of course). And he gave me the chance, you know, to make a movie together. He said, like, 'I just want to produce your first film, whatever that is, and we'll start working first on a feature version of [Panic Attack] first,' and then, in time, he offered me Evil Dead.


The wonderful music used is from John Murphy's score for 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle). Add it to your gym playlist, you know, right now.