Scary Shangrila 2023 - An Evil Dead Retrospective

It's Halloween time again, so my blog is featuring all the thrills, chills, and scares of the season. Today, let's take a look back at Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series:

The Evil Dead

This one is the OG, the low-budget classic that created the template for everything that followed. Sam Raimi melded the gore of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the isolation of Night of the Living Dead, and the demonic possession of The Exorcist with a healthy dose of Michigan pluck. Here, Bruce Campbell's Ash is not the wisecracking badass he would become in later movies, but merely one of five college students who have the misfortune of being trapped with the Deadites.

Rating: 8/10

Evil Dead II

Evil Dead II is my personal favorite, a near-perfect blend of horror and comedy that also started the series' penchant for "sequels" that gently retcon prior entries - we again follow five people under siege from the Deadites. To me, this is probably Bruce Campbell's best performance as Ash, who flips the switch from victim to psychotic hero in one iconic scene. The movie underwhelmed at the box office...I think audiences just weren't ready for its surreal mix of gore and humor.

Rating:8/10

Army of Darkness

Army of Darkness asks an interesting question - is it possible for a horror franchise to switch genres? In this one, Ash is transported back to the Middle Ages to fight an army of Deadites, and there's comparatively little gore (Raimi tried to edit Army of Darkness to get a PG-13 rating, something that would have been impossible with the first two movies). To me, it feels like the Back to the Future Part III of the Evil Dead series, which might be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who you are.

Rating: 7/10

Evil Dead (2013)

Twenty years after Army of Darkness, Raimi ceded writer/director duties for the Evil Dead remake to Fede Álvarez, who was an up-and-coming horror director at the time. Álvarez does a great job of capturing the spirit of the very first Evil Dead while adding some modern flourishes, and the box office success of this movie ensured that the franchise would continue (a post-credits sequence reveals that this was not a remake at all, but a sequel).

Rating: 7/10

Ash vs. Evil Dead

The Evil Dead made the leap to the small screen on Starz, running for three seasons before being cancelled in 2018. Somewhat confusingly, this show was a sequel to the original Sam Raimi trilogy rather than a continuation of the remake. Ash vs. Evil Dead followed an older, fatter Ash in his crusade against the Deadites, with new sidekicks and villains aplenty.  As one might expect from an episodic TV series, the comedic elements were given center stage and the horror bits were de-emphasized (can't maim and murder a regular cast, after all).

Evil Dead Rise

2023's Evil Dead Rise tried to do some interesting things with the classic formula, including by changing the setting to a condemned L.A. apartment and thrusting the protagonists' children into danger. I thought some parts worked well and some didn't, but you can't accuse them of phoning it in.  Happily, the movie made bank at the box office, so we're definitely getting more Evil Dead in the future.

Rating: 6/10