The Big Picture

Sam Raimi’s film
The Evil Dead
had a major impact on the horror genre with its unique story and characters.
Scott Spiegel’s
Intruder
takes place in a grocery store, offering a fresh and terrifying setting for a slasher film. It also features cameos from Raimi and Bruce Campbell.

Intruder
stands out with its shocking kills and lack of a masked killer, creating an intense and immersive horror experience.

In 1981, writer and director Sam Raimi changed horror with his film The Evil Dead. It may have come out during the year that the slasher boom ignited, but The Evil Dead, despite taking place in a cabin in the woods, is anything but. Instead, it’s a wild, over-the-top story about a man named Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) going to war with demons after they are unleashed by the opening of a book called The Necronomicon. It was such a different movie that it took the high praise of none other than Stephen King to help it get distribution. The Evil Deadstarted as a short film in 1978 called Within the Woods, with Campbell in the lead, and a friend named Scott Spiegel in a supporting role.

Although Spiegel wouldn’t play a part in The Evil Dead, he was instrumental in the production of 1987’s Evil Dead II because he co-wrote the script. Two years later, Scott Spiegel got to direct his own movie for the first time, one that he also wrote based on his own short film titled Night Crew. Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell had parts in it, and would return when it was made into a feature, 1989’s Intruder. The slasher era was coming to a close, but Intruder ended up being one of the best entries of the genre thanks to its cast, the disgusting kills crafted by the KNB practical effects team, and its clever setting. Intruder didn’t take place in the usual woods or suburban locales — the mayhem happens in the aisles of a closed grocery store at night.

Intruder Release Date January 27, 1989 Director Scott Spiegel Runtime 83 Minutes Writers Lawrence Bender , Scott Spiegel

Scott Spiegel Made a Short Film Called ‘Nightcrew’ at a Grocery Store He Worked At
In his youth, Scott Spiegel was a kid making Super-8 short films with his friends. Then he met Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell in school, who became film collaborators as well. In an interview with Book of the Dead, Spiegel said he knew Campbell from junior high and Sunday school, adding, “We both loved movies (I remember Bruce telling me all about the coolest movie he just saw, Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure) and we discovered that we both made movies. Bruce came over to my house and we watched each other’s films and decided to make films together.” They started out making Three Stooges movies, before expanding their horizons to horror.

Speigel spent his youth working at a local Michigan grocery store called the Walnut Creek Market. Spiegel told Book of the Dead, “I shot Nightcrew, the prototype for Intruder there.” If you’re going to make a slasher about a killer on the loose, why not use the settings you have and know well? Both Raimi and Campbell acted in Nightcrew, but they then went on to bigger things, making The Evil Dead. Why wasn’t their close friend, Scott Spiegel, part of it? The reasoning was one that would come back up later in his career. Spiegel explained to Daily Grindhouse, “I had a lucrative job as a store clerk back in Detroit that I just couldn’t leave at the time, I was just making some good bank. Sam and Bruce were always calling me and saying “we need you, we need you” but I just couldn’t drop that gig. At least I got Evil Dead 2.”

Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell Both Have Small Parts in ‘Intruder’

Scott Spiegel loved his grocery store job so much that he refused to give it up to make a full-length movie with his best friends. Thankfully, after The Evil Dead became a success, Spiegel came to his senses and co-wrote Evil Dead II, a film that’s both a sequel and a bit of a wild reboot with a bigger budget and somehow even more bloodshed. Two years after Evil Dead II, Spiegel got to combine his love of working at a grocery store and horror movies for Intruder. It was an expanded version of Nightcrew, with the same premise of a killer set loose in a grocery store at night, which he lovingly named the Walnut Creek Market. Sam Raimi, his brother Ted, and Bruce Campbell are all in the movie, but even though marketing pointed them out to help sell the film, their presence is minimal. Sam has a small role as a clerk, Ted a brief cameo, and Bruce Campbell doesn’t show up until the last two minutes as a cop.

Related 10 Great Horror Movies That Started As Short Films, From ‘Evil Dead’ to ‘Saw’ Before they were classics, they were passion projects from young creatives.

But Intruder isn’t about them. Elizabeth Cox (Night of the Creeps) is the true star as grocery store clerk Jennifer Ross. The first time we meet her, it’s near closing time, and she’s being harassed at her register by a psychotic ex-boyfriend, Craig (David Byrnes). When he gets physical and refuses to leave, it’s up to the rest of the store crew to try to throw him out, but he instead runs away and hides in the store. With the Walnut Street Market now closed, the employees go about their night while also keeping an eye out for Craig. It’s then that the killings start in the darkened aisles. Is Craig behind it, or is there another madman running around inside the locked store?

‘Intruder’ Has Some of the Most Shocking Slasher Kills

Intruder is a slasher that sets itself apart from so many others in a few different ways. Most notable at first is its intriguing setting. So many slashers return to the same locations. If you’re watching a Friday the 13th movie, it’s almost always Jason running around the woods of Camp Crystal Lake. If you’re watching Halloween or one of its sequels, Michael Myers is lurking in the shadows of suburbia in Haddonfield, Illinois. Slasher clones loved to copy the formulas and settings of these two popular franchises, leading to a subgenre that wasn’t often known for its fresh takes on a story. A grocery store is immediately relatable and scary because we’ve all been inside of one (could a killer be lurking in ours?), and the darkened aisles and the sharp instruments in the back hint at danger and violence at every possible turn.

Many of Intruder’s characters aren’t particularly that different from other slasher cookie-cutter victims-to-be, but Intruder switches it up by not putting its killer in a mask. We’re not going to reveal who it is here, but we see their face; they emote, and they speak, so that we can see and feel that insanity. We don’t usually watch slashers for fascinating characters anyway but for scares and body counts. Intruder has that, thanks to the work of the KNB practical effects studio, created just one year earlier by Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger. Intruder was their very first film, but it doesn’t look like it. Scott Spiegel’s fright fest has some of the most stomach-churning kills you’ll ever see, including one where a head is cut in half by a band saw with a fake head that looks so real that for a second you might wonder if you’re watching a snuff film. Spiegel told Book of the Dead that in Nightcrew he used a simple styrofoam head for the stunt, but for Intruder, “the KNB guys sold me on a very realistic gelatin head and that we should saw him face up right though the middle of his face and I agreed.” The end result looked so real that the actor who played the killer’s victim told Spiegel, “My Mom can never see this.”

If you haven’t yet, you should see Intruder. Heck, get your mom to check it out too. It might have some big-name stars in the background, but it’s such a fun and chilling slasher that you forget they’re around and stop looking for them. Instead, you’re looking over your shoulder to make sure the killer isn’t standing right behind you… next to the canned goods.

Intruder is available to watch on Tubi in the U.S.

WATCH ON TUBI