I love the original Evil Dead trilogy and its splattery slapstick charms, so you’d better bet I was down for a marathon of the whole shebang at the legendary Hollywood Avondale this weekend, featuring an introduction by producer and honorary New Zealander Rob Tapert.
Tapert was right there, along with his mates director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell in the Tennessee woods when the extremely low-fi 1981 original was shot, and has since gone on to be a producer of many great flicks in the years since – and also created a little character called Xena The Warrior Princess and married a Kiwi named Lucy Lawless, so he’s got some serious Kiwi bona fides.
Watching five hours of Evil Dead flicks on a rainy, windy Saturday night is my idea of a good time. Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II (1986) and Army Of Darkness (1992) form a trilogy which starts off as a group of young folks facing evil in a cabin in the woods and ends up with an army of skeletons battling knights in armor while a blustery guy with a robot hand eggs them on.
I recommend a strong stomach and plenty of caffeine if you’re going to mainline all three movies at once, but it’s also fascinating to watch how different they are – the original is more straight existential horror, while the second almost remakes it but with a much more comic eye, while the third almost abandons horror and gore entirely for a straight out slapstick parody of all those old Ray Harryhausen flicks with sword-fighting skeletons. In these days of carefully plotted cinematic universes and decade-long “phases,” the Evil Dead trilogy is a monument to just making up shit as you go along.
The only constant through it all is Ash, swaggeringly portrayed by Bruce Campbell. Images of Ash with a shotgun in one hand and his chainsaw taking the place of his other hand are iconic in comic horror, and his adventures have continued long after the original trilogy in plenty of comic books and videogames – and the surprisingly great 2015-2018 Ash Vs Evil Dead series that gave us everything and more the long-promised Evil Dead IV could have.
Continuity is not a strong suit in the Dead trilogy – the success of the dimestore-cheap production of Evil Dead led Raimi and company to make a sequel, but it’s kind of bolted together with what Tapert called a “condensed” recap of the original in the first 10 minutes or so that reimagines the movie and streamlines it, then picks it all up again with Ash still battling those demons in the woods.
And yet, watching the whole trilogy is also like watching Campbell and Ash find their way into a character. The catchphrase-shouting arrogant Ash we all “think” of when we think of Evil Dead only really comes into focus halfway through Evil Dead II, and becomes his most ideal self in Army Of Darkness.
When we first meet Campbell in Evil Dead, he’s a bland non-entity sitting in the back seat of the car heading to that infamous cabin in the woods, a sidekick to his more extroverted pal Scotty. You think Scotty’s going to be the big hero but then it’s quiet background Ash who ends up the “final girl.” It’s always a shock rewatching Evil Dead to see an almost shy Ash at first, who barely cracks a joke and who becomes the series’ focus only by his lucky knack for surviving the demonic chaos that consumes his friends.
How did Ash go from shy boy in backseat to the alpha male in Army Of Darkness spitting out lines like “Gimme some sugar, baby” and “Yo, she-bitch! Let’s go!” The endearingly choppy nature of storytelling in the Evil Dead trilogy ignores rather than tries to fill in the contradictions of how Ash became, well, Ash, but in my own mental backstory I like to paper in the cracks of it all to be a tale of how Ash survives the incredible trauma of having his girlfriends, best pals and total strangers literally torn to pieces in front of him, of having to chop off his own demon-possessed hand and horrors that would drive anyone bonkers.
In my head canon, Ash was the shy college boy when all the Deadite doings started – he’s actually repeatedly rather a coward in the climax of the original Evil Dead – but when the evil never stopped, he forces himself to become what he thinks of as a hero. Trauma remakes Ash, body and soul.
By the time Army of Darkness rolls around Ash is stranded in the year 1300 surrounded by “primitives,” and has completely reinvented his own personality to be the hero he probably saw in lots of late-night zombie movies. You can’t imagine Evil Dead 1981 Ash lecturing crowds of peasants about his superiority like Army of Darkness Ash does. He spouts bull-headed cliches and romances the pretty girl and stomps around with his “boomstick” but it’s all a bit of an act, really. He’s putting on the Ash, savior of humanity act to survive.
That’s my theory, anyway. It could also be that the Evil Dead trilogy, as wildly entertaining and inspirational to creative folks as it is, is also just a slapdash bag of gags, gore and grit stapled together from film to film with no real deep concerns about how the cliffhanger end of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness literally don’t mesh together at all, or whatever happened to Ash’s friends in the car in the first movie who’ve been erased from history by the second. I thought as I watched all three movies back to back that if they’d come out in this social media age of endless fanboy dissection, every clickbait website in the cosmos would be bashing out hate essays about the canon “mess ups” and “Evil Dead contradictions EXPLAINED!!!” videos.
But whether or not it all makes a lick of sense or not, I do love how Bruce Campbell turned the gawky background guy in the back seat into a towering icon of horror movie heroism. As he’d put it – it’s pretty groovy.
Nik Dirga 