‘Tis the Season: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead Trilogy - an Appreciation

Ahead of the second Dr. Strange movie coming out next year, it seems appropriate to celebrate All Hallows’ Eve with Sam Raimi’s seminal Evil Dead Trilogy. 

A lot’s been written already about Raimi’s contribution to genre filmmaking, particularly this series. it’s not too much of a stretch to say that he and his team came out with one of the most assured feature debuts in a decade full of them. But there’s something special about “Evil Dead”.

As Bill Hader said recently, it’s punk rock. Raimi paid tribute to his predecessors like John Carpenter, and Wes Craven (with a little Roger Corman leavening?) and he brought a sensibility that can only be described as Stoogerific. There is a slapstick element - more pronounced in the sequels - that is as destabilizing as the scares; but there’s also Raimi’s command of context. 

In the lists of Lovecraft-derived horror movies, the Evil Dead mythos ties itself to Old Ones by using the Necronomicon as a driving plot point. We get Ash and his friends in the first film subject to the mercies (or lack thereof) of chthonic Sumerian deities conjured up by playing a recording of the archaeologist whose cabin the vacationing kids were using. Already, the archetypes are in place: Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell in his career defining role) as our hero (not so heroic until the third act) and final…guy, his sister Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss, who would revisit the role in the sequel and in Fede Alvarez’s “Evil Dead”, as well as “Dangerous Women”, “My Name is Bruce”, and the series “Ash vs. the Evil Dead”), and his girlfriend Linda (Betsy Baker) Richard Manincor adds a solid turn as Scott (the jock/asshole) and his girlfriend Shelly (Theresa Tilly). Come to think of it, none of the women are necessarily so easily slotted as the types they’d be in other, more formulaic movies. They’re actually pretty well more defined as characters than types. Even saying Scott is a jock or asshole isn’t quite fair. This might be the first element that separates Raimi’s opus from others of its genre.

Creepiness abounds when the gang gets to the cabin and only escalates once Ash discovers both the book and the tape recorder with the archaeologist repeating an invocation that calls the demons out. It is glorious. 

There is far too much in terms of detail of each bit of horror and madness that unspools. Raimi keeps the run time to under 90 minutes and makes each of those minutes count. It would be foolish to expect Shakespearean turns in performance because you simply don’t need them. You just need utter terror and utter terror is what everyone experiences in the first entry. 

In a film full of gory death, dismemberment and demonic tree rape, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a wholly grim and gritty flick along the lines of later slasher films or the so-called “torture porn” of the the early 21st century. Oh, to be sure, it is grim! But Raimi uses a fairly bright color palate that only seems to amplify the gruesomeness of the proceedings. There isn’t a lot in the way of psychological nuance because everything is front-loaded with dread and death. In this way, Raimi serves up something like a horror/giallo hybrid. There’s an operatic dimension to what he brings to the story and it lands with every beat.

It is by now well-known that the script flips the gender of the “final girl” to the “final boy”. That said, the final shot is a perfect end to one of the cult masterpieces of the era. The inventiveness in the camera work that was established at the outset continues through the last tracking shot as the POV zooming in on him leads straight and seemingly definitively, to the end.

But then a funny thing happened; six years later, in 1987, “The Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn” premiered. It’s not a sequel per se, as much as it is a retelling with Ash and his girlfriend Linda venturing to the anthropologist’s cabin again and this time, the others are the anthropoligist’s daughter, a colleague and a backwoods couple, all of them fodder for the demons called into existence by the recording of the translation of the Necronomicon…again.

This time around, Raimi flips the recipe. If the first entry was more horror and gore with some comedic elements tossed in, he’s given us an even split of viscera, visceral thrills, and visceral comedy. The Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello are not far from the set and ideas and visual madness fly fast over a fleet hour and twenty minutes (or so). 

Sarah Berry as Anna Knowby, the archeologist’s daughter doesn’t take kindly to Ash, assuming that he’s murdered both her parents (and Ash has already had the literal Night from Hell already), but it doesn’t take long before the demons are released and the latest snack food devoured in a variety of unappetizing ways, unless you really appreciate special effects and slapstick and then, my friend, you are in for a treat.

I vacillate between which of the first two films I prefer. In many ways, “The Evil Dead 2” is far more assured and the heavy leaning into comedy heightens the awfulness of what’s going on and then subverting it and turning it into something unlike anything else seen at the time. Raimi created a new horror-comedy hybrid here with sequences that wouldn’t be out of place in Bunuel’s early work or Jodorowsky’s. 

The scene where his right hand attempts to kill him (he’s been invaded by a demon that he’s been able to more or less control…but the hand is a real pain in the ass…) repeatedly and Bruce Campbell’s unhinged laughter and eventual dismemberment of the pesky five fingered limb is one for the annals. It’s amazing that it’s only one of several set pieces that top each prior one. 

We learn from this iteration of the book that there was a savior who fought off the horde of the Evil Dead in the fourteenth century. The drawing looks uncannily like a man with chainsaw for an arm… It’s not a giveaway to say that time travel is a part of this movie, but getting there is a kaleidoscope of plot machinations that are increasingly logic defying but nonetheless expertly conceived. You are along for the ride of your life and everyone else’s death, except, of course, Ash’s. 

I have to stop here and acknowledge that Bruce Campbell deserves every accolade he’s ever received for this role. He also deserves a better career, as well, but I think he’s fine with his legacy. He bring’s shades to Ash in all three movies that range from utter terror-possessed cowardice to angry, vengeful pissed-off demon slayer in the second entry to outright hero in the third. While each iteration of Ash Williams varies slightly in execution, there is a core to the character and a fullness to the characterizations that justifies his tale being worthy of a trilogy. 

Raimi is not going to beat us over the head with the hero’s journey like Lucas did with Star Wars; for one thing, Ash isn’t the most noble of heroes. He may have more in common with Gibson’s Max in George Miller’s original trilogy than anyone else. Even then, there are salient differences. While both figures are or became revenge machines, and while both become the reluctant heroes fighting for the set-upon, Ash is far more manic (and funny) and embraces becoming a full on badass by the third entry. One gets the sense that he didn’t quite want to vanish into the horizon like his Australian counterpart.

This comparison brings into relief some grounding aspects of masculinity that Raimi is interrogating, not to get too heavy about the themes of the trilogy. However, it’s difficult to avoid following where the script takes us and looking more deeply at the simplicity of Ash’s odyssey from “final guy” to something like an American Testuo. Phew, once he replaces his hand with a chainsaw, we are into some serious mecha adjacent cinema. As I think of it, Tsukamoto’s film came out after Raimi’s second entry; nevertheless, the manic surrealism that courses through Raimi’s epic does have echoes in much of Japanese cult hybrid horror films and their attendant sub-genres. 

I’d be tempted to argue that Raimi may have been influenced by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi‘s “Hausu” and it’s perverse and perversely funny madness. Raimi’s execution is far more disciplined and the effects more convincing and unlike Ôbayashi, Raimi has a more coherent tale to tell.

“Army of Darkness” polishes off the trilogy and not without issues. Where the other two entries popped along relentlessly and seamlessly, the third has some lags and bumps in the road. Believe me, this is probably only noticeable if you watch it hot on the heels of its predecessors like I did recently. It’s still very much worth the effort. 

In contrast to how “Evil Dead 2” ended with Ash landing in the middle of an onslaught of Deadites and being elevated to a hero by the knights around him, he lands in “Army of Darkness” as a hapless clod with a car in nowhere and no heroics to keep him from being taken hostage and enslaved. Again, I’m not going to recap the flick here; suffice it to say that the tables turn and Ash’s fortunes change.(1)

To be sure, it is a joy to watch Raimi work with a bigger budget and larger cast and know that “Army of Darkness” was the film he really wanted to make as the follow up to the first Evil Dead. And it does have some splendid moments; from the homage to Harryhausen of stop action skeletons to his fighting with his Siamese Twin doppelgänger and their eventual split for starters, to a Gulliver’s Travel reference that has to be seen to be fully appreciated. Additionally, the ramping up of Ash growing increasingly fed up with the tribalism of the warring factions and his bringing them to heel to his turn from self-absorbed heel to reluctant hero over the course of the film works because Campbell is so heavily invested in the character. 

It also helps that the rest of the cast is all in; Embeth Davidtz is a revelation as Sheila, who starts out convinced that Ash is responsible for her brother’s death but who warms to him once he proves her wrong and rises to the occasion. When she turns bad, she becomes a scenery chewer with the best of them. The dialog is chock full of one-liners and quips that would shame Tony Stark in the MCU’s jokiest moments. 

If “Army of Darkness” doesn’t quite measure up to the previous two, it still provides enough thrills and remarkable practical effects to match them. Of the three, it is also the most thoroughly comedic. The more outré aspects of the first two movies haven’t completely exited, but the emphasis in more on a kind of adventure/horror film that presaged Verbinski’s “Pirates of the Caribbean.” 

I would argue that had the other films not existed, “Army of Darkness” would be better considered. The ending brings us back to Ash returned to the twentieth century in his department store, telling his tale to barely interested co-workers (he could have been king, but considers himself a king in his own domain) before a latter-day Deadite shows up and meets her doom.  

We have a few more days until Halloween and I feel remiss if I don’t offer up a couple of more seasonal pictures to share. I have a couple more ideas…

Note:

1. On the other hand (so to speak), you can get a pretty good recap from Ash’s opening monologue to “Army of Darkness.”

From IMDB: 

Ash: My name is Ash and I am a slave. Close as I can figure, the year is thirteen hundred A.D and I'm being dragged to my death. It wasn't always like this, I had a real life, once. A job.

Ash: [now Ash is in a flashback] Umm... Hardware aisle twelve, shop smart, shop S-Mart!

Ash: [back to monologue] I had a wonderful girlfriend Linda. Together we drove to a small cabin in the mountains. It seems an archeologist had come to this remote place to translate and study his latest find: Necronomicon-ex-mortis. The Book of the Dead. Bound in human flesh and inked in blood, this ancient Samarian text contained bizarre burial rights, funeral incantations, and demon resurrection passages, it was never meant for the world of the living. The book awoke something dark in the woods, something evil.

[something crashes through the window of the cabin and Linda screams] 

Ash: It took Linda. Then it came after me, it got into my hand and it went bad, so I lopped it off at the wrist.

[Ash is seen cutting off his hand, laughing and screaming in pain] 

Ash: But that didn't stop it, it came back big time.

Ash: [Ash gets pulled into a vortex conjured by the book holding onto the doorway] For God's sake how do you stop it?

[the wood breaks and Ash falls into the vortex and the opening credits start] 

Keeping an eye out for you in Evil Dead 2