Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II opens with a cabin, a tape recorder and a bad idea. Ash Williams, played by Bruce Campbell, takes his girlfriend Linda to a remote cabin in the woods. He finds a recording of archaeologist Raymond Knowby reciting passages from the “Book of the Dead,” the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, uncovered during a dig. Ash plays it. Something answers.
The Tape and the Kandarian Demon
The recording unleashes the Kandarian Demon, an unseen force that kills and possesses Linda and turns her into a “deadite.” Ash decapitates her with a shovel and buries her in a shallow grave. Dawn comes. The force throws him through the woods, possesses him briefly, then the sunlight expels it.
He tries to leave. The bridge to the cabin is destroyed. The entity chases him back, Linda’s revived head bites his hand, and he destroys her with a chainsaw in the toolshed. His bitten right hand turns on him. He severs it, tries to shoot it with a shotgun, and the hand mocks him and escapes.
That is the machinery of Evil Dead II, and it runs on one idea: Ash loses a piece of himself and keeps going. The film is 84 minutes, tagged “Kiss your nerves goodbye!” It is billed as horror, comedy and fantasy, and it earns all three.
Annie and Ed Return From the Dig
Knowby’s daughter Annie and her research partner Ed Getley come back from the dig with the missing pages of the Necronomicon. The destroyed bridge forces them to enlist handyman Jake and his girlfriend Bobby Joe to lead them to the cabin on foot.
They find Ash, who accidentally grazes Bobby Joe while shooting at his possessed hand. The newcomers assume he murdered Annie’s parents and lock him in the cellar. Then they listen to the rest of the tape. Knowby explains that he killed his wife Henrietta after she was possessed, then buried her.
The cast fills these roles with a straight face: Sarah Berry as Annie, Dan Hicks as Jake, Kassie Wesley as Bobby Joe, Denise Bixler as Linda, Richard Domeier as Ed, John Peakes as Professor Knowby, Lou Hancock as Henrietta, and Ted Raimi as Possessed Henrietta. William Preston Robertson is the voice of the Evil Dead. Snowy Winters plays the dancing demon Linda.
A Sequel Built on Insistence
Evil Dead II exists because the first film would not die. After the critical and commercial failure of Crimewave in 1985, Raimi, producer Robert Tapert and Campbell started a sequel at the insistence of their publicist, Irvin Shapiro. Stephen King, who had endorsed The Evil Dead, brought the project to producer Dino De Laurentiis, then making his directorial debut on Maximum Overdrive. De Laurentiis agreed to back it and handed the filmmakers a considerably larger budget than the original had.
Raimi had devised a premise set in the Middle Ages with time travel. De Laurentiis asked for something similar to its predecessor instead. The film was shot in Wadesboro, North Carolina and Detroit, Michigan in 1986, with extensive stop-motion animation and prosthetic makeup from a team including Mark Shostrom and Greg Nicotero.
The sequel’s best decisions, in order:
- Casting Campbell as the whole engine, not just the hero.
- Making Ash’s severed hand a character with a sense of humor.
- Keeping the cabin and the tape as the source of every problem.
What the larger budget buys is not scale. It buys the toolshed chainsaw, the hand, the stop-motion, and the confidence to play a possession scene for laughs without dropping the threat.
- The tape recorder that starts everything.
- The bridge that traps everyone.
- The cellar where the newcomers lock Ash.
- The missing pages Annie carries back from the dig.
What Evil Dead II Gets Right
The film’s real subject is Ash’s hand. Once it is severed, Evil Dead II stops pretending to be a haunted-cabin movie and becomes a comedy about a man fighting his own body. Campbell sells it without a wink. That is harder than it looks, and it is why the film still works.
The weakness is the middle. Locking Ash in the cellar while four new arrivals listen to a tape stalls the momentum the hand sequence built. The newcomers arrive late and spend their first act mistaking Ash for a murderer, which the film resolves by simply letting them hear the recording. Annie’s missing pages matter, but the film takes its time getting them into play.
None of that sinks it. Evil Dead II is a sequel that survived a flop, a producer’s note and a premise rewrite, and came out sharper than the film that preceded it. The stop-motion and prosthetic work from Shostrom and Nicotero gives the demons a physical weight that effects-driven horror since has rarely matched. Raimi and co-writer Scott Spiegel wrote a script that treats panic as punchline, and Campbell plays it straight to the end.
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