I first read about Within The Woods in a second-hand copy of Cinefantastique magazine (Vol.23 No.1 - August 1992), around 1995, having seen The Evil Dead & Evil Dead II a few years earlier in 1992 when I was twelve. In February 2000, I ordered six NTSC VHS tapes from a US bootleg website, including Faces Of Death 6, Guinea Pig 1 & 2, along with the making of episode, a Night Of The Living Dead 90 workprint, a George Romero rare material compilation tape, Tom Savini's SFX behind the scenes camcorder footage from both Killing Zone & Necronomicon, and Sam Raimi's Super-8 Shorts & Trailers compilation tape. I can't recall what was on that tape, beyond Within The Woods. I do recall the quality was dire, but this was my first experience of the Sam Raimi Shorts & Trailers Compilation tape. You can download a section of that issue of Cinefantasique below. You'll find Within The Woods on page 26. As an aside, that above consignment of US VHS tapes was intercepted by UK Customs & Excise officers. I received a letter stating that the package had been checked and two of the tapes were considered to be obscene, therefore all six tapes were liable for seizure and destruction. I decided to push my luck and appeal, even though that posed the risk that they may take a greater interest in me and what other films I might own, or even take me to court. I wrote back stating somewhat disingenuously that I was using the tapes as research material for my Theatre & Media college course, and set out a number of examples comparing the contents of the tapes to films passed uncut by the BBFC. After another letter requesting evidence that I was using the tapes for "research" (their quotes), I photocopied a pile of my work and posted it back to them on a shot to nothing. Surprisingly, I received all six tapes a few weeks later, and heard nothing more from them. For anyone interested in reading it, I've scanned & uploaded the full letter exchange as a PDF Here. There are a number of slightly varying bootleg shorts & extras collections generally known as the 'Sam Raimi Shorts & Trailers' compilation, although this isn't really a reflection on who directed or was involved with each short, but simply an easy moniker taken from the most well known member of the group. A statistically more accurate title would be the Scott Spiegel Shorts & Trailers, as he directed far more of the shorts here, than Sam. Just to add a little context, the first DVD version of The Evil Dead was only released in the USA in March 1999, there weren't any documentaries devoted to the trilogy (apart from the odd Laserdisc featurette), and the first book devoted to the trilogy; The Evil Dead Companion wasn't released until 2001. Beyond Sam Raimi & Bruce Campbell, the remaining cast & crew were far less well known than they are today, and some had been out of touch with others for years. Within The Woods had been mentioned here & there in passing in various magazines since the early 1980's, but was probably most heavily featured in Cinefantastique Magazine (Vol.23 No.1 - August 1992), with photos and a full page story on the short. Beyond that there really wasn't much else out there, until Anchor Bay widely publicized Within The Woods inclusion on their forthcoming Book Of The Dead DVD in late 2001, and it became far more well known, before it was mysteriously pulled from that release and hasn't been given an official release since.

Every bootleg copy of Within The Woods comes from the same ultimate source. The story goes that back in the late 1990's, Tom Sullivan lent his shorts tape to Scott Spiegel. Scott was having a party and showed it to some friends, but his VCR chewed-up the tape. Tom's damaged tape had three break-ups; over the opening titles at the beginning, when Bruce is found dead in the woods, and when Ellen is searching for a weapon to attack possessed Bruce after coming out of the cellar. Every known bootleg version out there is from that ultimate source tape and has those three break-ups.

To date, there have been three Evil Dead fans & collectors I've come in to contact with, as owners of noteworthy VHS compilation tapes either in terms of high quality or rare inclusions. Of the total five source tapes they collectively own, three came directly from The Evil Dead cast/crewmembers, so are as high a generation bootleg as is possible to track down. Each tape has been loaned and transferred personally at least twice over the years, with the highest quality setup I had at the time. They were all transferred most recently in 2022 for the creation of this Blu-Ray set. In January 2008, US fan Cliff posted on the Deadites Online Forums, that he had been sent two VHS tapes of material following an interview he did over AOL instant messenger for 'Ash's Evil Dead Page' (to later become Deadites.net) back in late 1999. I tried contacting him but to no avail. A friend of mine; James/DJSmokingJam, was contacted out of the blue by Cliff in September 2009 regarding an Evil Dead DVD project he was working on. James arranged for me to borrow and transfer both VHS tapes to DVD personally, using an ATI All-In-Wonder AGP 128 TV Tuner/Capture Graphics Card (which I bought back in 1999 to capture my own VHS & Hi-8 camcorder footage for editing). That same September after reading a few capture forums & recommendations, I bought a PAL JVC HR-S7600 VCR from eBay for £40, which I still use today. The capturing was a real headache, as the PAL-only card needed to use hacked drivers to capture PAL-60 (which is the hybrid PAL/NTSC signal generated when an NTSC tape plays in a PAL VCR) which still left me with a washed-out image, any screen jumps would give a green screen, and it and would drop hundreds of frames on any screen break-ups, meaning I had to rewind and begin capturing again just after the break-up. Capturing issues aside, those first transfers were compiled together onto the 2009 Sam Raimi's Super-8 Short Films DVD Boxset, only the second DVD set I had created at that point, and the first to contain any personally captured footage. The same footage was also recycled on to my 2012 Book Of The Dead DVD. I borrowed Cliff's tapes for the second time in 2018 to re-capture them with my then current-better setup. In November 2017, I was contacted by US fan Kevin/DeusExMachina to trade some DVDs. After a few messages I twigged that this was the same person who I'd tried to track down in 2008 with a view to trying to get a copy of a shorts VHS tape I was told he owned. As his story goes; In 2002, following the exclusion of Within The Woods from Anchor Bay's Book Of The Dead DVD, three forum users from the USA & Canada; DeusExMachina, RXFiend & Charliesheen, went on a hunt to try and track down their own copy. DeusExMachina managed to get in in touch with Tom Sullivan's assistant Patrick, who made a copy of Tom's tape behind his back for his help in re-connecting them with Ellen Sandweiss, along with some Evil Dead stills & copies of a few pages from the Book Of The Dead DVD. By that tape copy it was 3rd/4th generation, but it still looked pretty decent. Using this tape, along with a second he bought off eBay (eBay was like a bootleg paradise back then), Kevin created & traded his own shorts VHS compilation. His tape was recorded from scratch each time using a list of time-codes to preserve the VHS generation. After exchanging a good few emails, Kevin agreed to loan me his original tape for transfer. While I had since swapped from the 1999 ATI capture card, to another PAL-only Asus My Cinema ES2-750 card, knowing the issues I'd had with hacked drivers on a PAL card, in January 2018 I bought a second-hand Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro PCI Express capture card for £80 from eBay. I'd used one of these in an editing suite for a few projects prior to this, and knew it could capture both PAL, NTSC and even PAL-60. Along with that I bought a JVC HR-S9500U US NTSC VCR for $260, which I could run at 120v using a Goldsource ST-1500 1500w Voltage Converter I bought in July 2016 for £75.

Kevin's tape arrived in April 2018. I discovered that as the Blackmagic card was intended to be used with professional equipment with a stable signal, the screen would strobe black in and out whenever the signal degraded even slightly during break-ups. I found I need a Time Base Corrector unit connected between the VCR and the card to stabilize the signal. I opted for a Datavideo TBC-1000 which I got for £160 on eBay the same month. That addition gave me a constant signal and Kevin's tape was certainly a step up in quality from Cliff's tape. It remains the best quality source tape I have transferred to date. The third tape owner got in touch in April 2018. British Filmmaker Keith Robinson (Other Dimension Films) first read about the Shorts in 1994 through a British fanzine called Ohh my brain hurts (issue 11). The shorts reviewed included Six Months to live, Attack Of The Helping Hand, The Sappy Sap, Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter, & Torro, Torro, Torro!. Interestingly, the reviews also included Clockwork & It's Murder, but no mention was made of Within The Woods. Dan Auty; the editor of that fanzine recalls "That Raimi stuff was on a bootleg VHS that my pal Ben borrowed from a guy called Steve around 1993. Steve used to get bootleg stuff - all the nasties. We didn't even have that tape for long, it was just to watch for the zine piece". As an aside, Ohh my brain hurts wasn't the only British fanzine to review the shorts; Killing Moon #1 (September 1991) gave a full page review to Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter, Killing Moon #2 (Spring 1992) covered Torro, Torro, Torro!, and Killing Moon #3 (Summer 1992) had short sections on The Blind Waiter & Attack Of The Helping Hand. Around 1996, Keith managed to track down a copy of that VHS shorts compilation tape. He ordered it from a UK bootleg tape trader in York called Rich, advertising in the classified section in Dark Side Magazine, combined with a Japanese laserdisc transfer of Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash on the same tape. Rich stopped trading tapes after a later police raid, he became the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for having a copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and was fined £1200. I did ask, but Rich no longer has the source tape that Keith's copy was made from, nor does he remember where he got it.

In April 2019, I borrowed & transferred Keith's one source VHS tape. While the quality was poorer than the others' tapes, it did contain a number of previously unseen entries such as It's Murder & Clockwork. It also seems likely that a higher generation of this same tape was used to create the PAL VCD versions of the same titles, which are the best quality transfers around today. As an aside, this was only one of two VHS tapes I've transferred to date, in which the TBC on the VCR or as a separate unit, actually degrades the signal and needed to be transferred without it. A few years passed and I was reading up on the extensive capturing guides & recommendations on the DigitalFAQ.com forums in May 2020. The most highly recommended capture option there was the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB. I got in touch with one of the admins; LordSmurf. He offered to sell me a spare one he had for $128 USD, which I got in June. I was a little suspicious of a USB stick, as that tends to be the sort of idiot-proof poor quality item you find in supermarkets, giving dire quality transfers to people who don't know any better. I have to say I was utterly wrong! I spent an evening capturing the same opening 10 minute section of The Evil Dead on PAL & NTSC, on each of my three capture cards, both with and without a TBC unit, giving me twelve captures. This also allowed me to test out & compare my August 2021 addition of a new JVC HR-S7900U NTSC VCR (as my old HR-S9500U had given up the ghost).

Comparing identical frames; The top in terms of quality was the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB without the TBC. Only a slight second was the same with the TBC. Third was the Asus My Cinema ES2-750 Card with & without the TBC, and very much bottom was actually the 'professional' Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro Card with & without the TBC. The difference wasn't vast, but when you're transferring a poor quality tape, every little bit of quality really counts. Below you can see some comparison frames from my various capture workflows each time I captured Within The Woods from two tapes over the last 13 years. The frames marked are the current best transfers done in 2022. They illustrate that the quality you can get from the same tape with different equipment, really does vary. The last frame is a DVD-R transfer I got from US forum user eKent in 2008, which was taken from a duplicate of Kevin/DeusExMachina's tape. I was also able to test the merits of changing the 'Picture Control' modes on the VCR, as I had read up on this on the same forum. By default this is set to 'AUTO', which smooths a noisy picture for better viewing. This is what I had been using up to that point. 'EDIT' mode removes all picture processing which does give quite a noisy picture. Using ABSoft Neat Video's noise reduction filter in Adobe Premiere, gives a better result than the VCR managing the noise itself in 'AUTO' mode. You can see from the below frames, ABSoft's NR reduces the noise quite neatly without removing detail, whereas 'AUTO' mode seems to smear the noisy pixels to the right smoothing & blurring the image, especially on the softer background. Again not a huge difference but every little helps. With the above in mind, I thought I could make a better stab at re-transferring all the above tapes, and combine them into one standard definition Blu-Ray compilation box set. I re-borrowed Cliff/Demonovation's tapes in November 2021, then Kevin/DeusExMachina's & Keith Robinson's in January 2022. Each three collectors' tapes were split on to their own discs running around four-hours each. You can see the entries on each tape, and the running times below; A fourth 'best of' compilation disc was compiled, drawing equally from all three owners' source tapes, either in terms of the best quality of the pick, or as the only source for an entry. As Keith's tape was in UK PAL format, his 'best of' footage could not be mixed with the Disc 4 NTSC footage without being re-encoded to NTSC. As my objective was to preserve every last bit of quality from the source tapes, and converting them to NTSC would reduce this somewhat, I combined Keith's PAL tapes transfer and his 'best of' footage together on Disc 3. While a fair number of the thirty-five 'best of' entries above are far superseded by the Super8Shorts.com DVD releases, along with some further entries superseded by other bootleg DVDs & VCDs available, there are still twelve here which are the best quality version available anywhere today. This fortunately includes the best currently available transfer of Within The Woods. You can see a gallery of screenshots for each below. The cover & disc art was a fairly simple idea, to remain in keeping with the bootleg VHS roots of this project. I converted a scan of a Scotch brand VHS slipcover into the Blu-Ray cover, and further adapted that into the disc art. If you own a Sam Raimi Shorts tape which is either better quality or has different entries to the above examples, or if you're interested in any of my fanmade projects, you can contact me via email at , or through the Rob's Nostalgia Projects Facebook page. Check out & 'like' that Facebook page to see the latest in-progress updates to any current projects, and check out my Wants List to see if you can assist me with any future projects or upgrades.