In Sam Raimi’s splashy 1981 film “The Evil Dead,” a group of five college students from Detroit travel to a remote cabin in the Tennessee woods for a quiet vacation. In the basement of the cabin, they find a mysterious reel-to-reel tape recorder left behind by the previous tenant. When they play it, they hear a professor recite a dark spell from an evil grimoire, summoning demons from the lower realms. The tape recorder causes the demons to return, and most of the film is devoted to the students fighting – unsuccessfully – the evil Deadites from beyond. The last survivor of “The Evil Dead” attack is the reckless Ash (Bruce Campbell), the luckiest of the lot.
When Sam Raimi directed “Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn” in 1987, he repeated the premise, unashamedly. Ash (Campbell) goes to the same cabin in the woods, this time with his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler), for a similar vacation. He finds a tape recorder in the basement again, plays it again, and summons demons again. Like the first, most of the film involves Ash fighting monsters, while slowly being driven insane by their ungodly shenanigans.
Given that the 1987 film is called “Evil Dead 2,” one might reasonably assume that it’s a sequel, but in practice it’s actually a remake. Raimi and his team had a lot more money to work with the second time around, so they essentially remade their original film in sleeker (and also more comedic) language. “The Evil Dead” cost $375,000. “Evil Dead 2” cost $3.5 million.
In a 1992 issue of Cinefantastique magazine, Bruce Campbell wanted to clarify something explicitly. “Evil Dead 2,” he said, is 100% a remake and 0% a sequel.
Evil Dead 2 is a remake, not a sequel, of The Evil Dead
Many films had been remade when Campbell spoke to Cinefantastique, but they were much less common than they would be in the 2000s. As such, there was a little confusion as to how “Evil Dead 2” worked on a narrative level. Why, some fans might ask, would Ash return to the same cabin in the woods a second time, given how horribly the first film went? It turns out that neither Raimi nor Campbell cared much about continuity. Campbell even admitted that Raimi changed everything on purpose, saying:
“We faked the beginning and the backstory of the second part. […] In part one, five kids go to a cabin and I die, for all intents and purposes. But, as Sam says, Ash has been resurrected thanks to a positive response at the box office. For the second part, we were unable to obtain the rights to the images from the first part, because they were made by different companies. So we thought: not many people have seen “Evil Dead”… We’ll just have Ash accompany a girl. But this has been misinterpreted by many people. They thought Ash was stupid enough to go back to the cabin. »
Campbell added that it was wise to update the story anyway, because six years had passed and he no longer seemed like a student. He explained that, to update the story, they explained that Ash was now a graduate student in mechanical engineering. It doesn’t matter once the chaos starts, but it’s nice to hear that Campbell and Raimi thought about it.
But if anyone brings up the subject in casual conversation – and we all know a few nitpickers – repeat Raimi’s words: Ash was resurrected thanks to strong box office receipts.
