Equinox

• The whole thing started as a 1967 short called 'The Equinox: A Journey into the Supernatural,' made for around $6,500 by Pasadena City College business student Dennis Muren and his friends. After distributor Tonylyn Productions took interest, producer Jack H. Harris brought in editor Jack Woods to shoot roughly 11 minutes of new footage, and the patched-together feature was released as Equinox in 1970 with a final budget near $8,000.
• Dennis Muren went on to become the most-decorated visual effects artist in Oscar history, winning six competitive Best Visual Effects awards for E.T., Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Innerspace, The Abyss, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park, plus Special Achievement Awards for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. He holds the record for most VFX Oscar nominations. The cheap monster movie in the woods was his launch pad.
• The stop-motion came from Muren himself and his friend David W. Allen, both chasing the Ray Harryhausen creature-feature tradition on pocket change. Jim Danforth handled cel animation, matte paintings, and set work (and appeared as extras) rather than the stop-motion; he and Allen both later worked on Flesh Gordon, where Danforth animated a giant monster much like the ones in Equinox.
• Director Jack Woods didn't just shoot the new footage, he cast himself as the villain, the smiling park ranger Asmodeus who turns out to be a winged demon stalking the survivors. Before Equinox, Woods worked as an editor on John Cassavetes' films Faces (1968) and Husbands.
• The doomed geologist Professor Waterman was played by pulp-fantasy author Fritz Leiber Jr. Frank Bonner, billed under his birth name Frank Boers Jr., made his screen debut here years before he became Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnati. Filming locations included Big Tujunga Canyon near Tujunga and Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.
• The Criterion Collection released Equinox on June 20, 2006 as spine #338, packaging both Woods' 1970 theatrical version and Muren's original 1967 student cut, with a video introduction by Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J Ackerman.

The Evil Dead owes this movie a debt nobody can fully pin down. Kids in the woods, an isolated cabin, an ancient book of evil bound like the Necronomicon, demonic forces unleashed by reading it, even possession and bodily decay. Effects artist Tom Sullivan has admitted seeing Equinox before working on Raimi's films. Read it as the unacknowledged blueprint for the cabin-in-the-woods possession subgenre, made thirteen years early by teenagers with no money.

Asmodeus the park ranger is the whole engine, and he's the genre's purest expression of authority-as-predator. He's the man in the official uniform, the figure you're supposed to trust in the wilderness, and he's actually the devil collecting souls. The horror isn't the giant stop-motion beasts, it's that the rescuer is the trap, and the institution sent to keep you safe in the woods is the thing hunting you.

The book is the real monster and the creatures are just symptoms. Nothing attacks until it's opened; the demons are a contagion that spreads from the act of reading forbidden knowledge. Frame it as a Lovecraftian fable about curiosity as the original sin. The kids didn't wander into danger, they manufactured it by wanting to know what the geologist knew, and the wilderness only turns hostile once human hands crack the seal.

Four young people drive into the canyons outside Los Angeles to visit a geologist who's gone missing, and find his cabin smashed, his notes raving, and an ancient leather book nobody should have opened. The thing is a key. Open it and the wilderness answers back with a green-skinned, fur-clad giant and a winged ape-demon, all stop-motion menace lurching across real California dirt. A grinning park ranger keeps circling the survivors, and he is not a man at all but Asmodeus, come to collect what the book set loose.