Time to laugh your head off … literally

Almost 34 years after Bruce Campbell first starred in cult horror-slapstick splatter-fest The Evil Dead (1981), he returned to recreate the role of Ash Williams – the demon-dicing man with a chainsaw hand – for TV series Ash vs Evil Dead (2015-2018, now streaming on Showmax).

And the film’s original director Sam Raimi returned as the series executive producer and to direct the show’s pilot episode, setting the tone for the franchise’s return from its eerie cinematic grave. That tone, according to Bruce, is gory, terrifying and yet terribly funny.

“Come for the humour, stay for the gore!,” Bruce jokes. “We do exuberant gore. We do joyful carnage. But our monsters are not funny. We do not let our directors make them goofy or whatever. They’re dangerous and they’re lethal.”

Happy returns

The series is set in the same universe and continues the story from where Ash left off in the final film of the Evil Dead trilogy – Army of Darkness (1992).

“He hasn’t been up to that much in the years since we last saw him in Army of Darkness. It’s been 25 years since Ash has reared his ugly dumb head. And we embrace that. He’s middle-aged. He’s out of shape. He wears a man girdle. He dyes his hair and he wears dentures,” reveals Bruce. “And at a point in his life when he’s no longer interested in doing anything responsible, greatness is thrust upon him and he has to save the world from something that he caused.”

Just what has this trailer-park Lothario and all-round swaggering idiot “caused”? Well, it turns out that during his drunken poetry reading with a hooker, he accidentally read to her from The Necronomicon Ex Mortis – an ancient and cursed Sumerian text with the power to raise the dead and turn them into demonic vessels. Um, sorry about that?

Book of the Deadites

But you don’t have to be a Dead Head to get into the action.

“The show is definitely focused on moving forward and we aren’t exploring the missing 30 years in the first season,” says Sam. There are loads of fun details that will come up during the episodes to guide viewers into the Evil Dead world. But if you’re a skip-to-the-end kind of reader or viewer, we’ve prepared our own quick and dirty A-Z below.

Ash

Ashley Joanna Williams (no wonder he goes by Ash) might be an idiot, but he’s our idiot!

Sam explains: “Ash’s intelligence is challenged and he’s really backward socially. He’s got a lot of real human flaws. It’s kind of like we tell the audience that there are four different monsters that want to destroy them and one human who will fight for them. Who do they want to identify with? Well, the human is an idiot and an egotist, but he’s all you’ve got. The audience is left in a horrible position, but for some reason, they like being stuck with him.”

Boom Stick

Even if a shotgun blast can’t kill a Deadite. Ash has found that a round from his “Boom Stick” discourages them for long enough for him to get the upper chainsaw hand and chop them to bits or, if outnumbered, flee to holy ground.

Chainsaw hand

In The Evil Dead II (1987), Ash’s hand became demon possessed after his reanimated girlfriend bit it. He lopped off the hand with a chainsaw when it tried to kill him. He later adapted a chainsaw to lock into place on the stump left by his severed hand, which is quite useful for dismembering Deadites.

Deadites

A being or living entity (like a tree) possessed by a Kandarian Demon looks like an evil dead person with bloodless skin, hazed-over eyes, sharpened teeth, claw-like hands and a vicious, snarling face.

But they can also resume their host’s normal appearance to set a trap. Deadites who’re possessed at roughly the same time share their senses and a hive mind, along with all the memories and mental capacity of the original hosts – your mom, for example.

They can levitate, move at super speed and have superhuman strength and agility. Over time, they can continue to change and even grow extra limbs and wings, and they can pass on the possession to anyone or anything they touch. Far from mindless, they seem to have a malicious and gory sense of humour.

Delta

Ash still has his classic car, a 1973 Oldsmobile Delta ’88, that he had in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness. The car has even gone back in time with him to the Middle Ages, so he’s quite attached to it.

“The ’72 Delta 88 is the same car that’s been in all the movies, it’s the exact car, it’s not a different car, which is pretty incredible. We had it put on a boat and shipped to New Zealand,” reveals Bruce.

Dismembering Deadites

Deadites are hard to kill. It’s not enough to chop the head off, it’ll just end up biting your ankles. And a lopped-off hand can scuttle off on its own while giving you the finger. The Deadite has to be hacked limb from limb and the head destroyed. Overkill is the name of the game.

Kandarian dagger

This is one of the few weapons that can kill and burn a Deadite simply on contact with the blade.

Kandarian Demon

Named after an incident in the 1300s in which one of these demons possessed Kandar Castle in Great Britain – as shown in Army of Darkness. These bad boys are evil entities that can possess living entities like plants, animals and people.

A Kandarian Demon was even shown to possess a shattered mirror in Army of Darkness. Once possessed, the living being or object mutates into a Deadite form, and the demon draws strength from its soul. They cannot stand sunlight unless they have consumed a vast number of souls. Once they have run out of soul energy to draw on, they can send their host into a hibernation state until some luckless fool passes by and the feasting can begin again.

Necronomicon

This roughly 3000-year-old book was written by The Dark Ones in ancient Sumeria. It contains spells and incantations for controlling and suppressing demonic forces, particularly the “Evil Dead” known as the Kandarian Demon.

But there are also passages within the Necronomicon that grant the demon permission to possess the living. If called through an incantation or even a recording of one, the demon is able to feed on the souls of anyone close to where the incantation was spoken.

Slashy Ashie

In Ash’s home town of Elk Grove, he’s known as Slashy Ashie because of the incident in which he dismembered his friends and his sister (in the first Evil Dead film). They’re not buying his stories about Deadites, demon-possessed trees or the book that caused it all. They just think that he’s a homicidal maniac… and not that bright.

Value Stop

Evil Dead fans will be wondering why Ash isn’t working at S Mart – the superstore where Ash originally bought his shotgun – since he was so taken with it in the films. The answer has to do with Hollywood’s labyrinthine licensing issues surrounding Army of Darkness. So Value Stop is S Mart by a different name. Ash’s Value Stop colleagues Pablo (Ray Santiago), who was raised by a shaman, and Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo) are drawn into his battle against the Deadites.

Zombies?

While the Deadites might look like zombies and some are reanimated corpses, because of their active intelligence, hive mind, supernatural abilities and agility – and the desire to devour souls rather than brains – they don’t really fit into zombie genre.

Did you know?

Lucy Lawless plays Ruby in the series. Her husband Robert Tapert dropped out of university to help Bruce, Sam and Sam’s brother Ivan to produce the original Evil Dead film!

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