Evil Dead II
1987 · Sam Raimi
For when you want to laugh and scream in the same breath — a party movie, a midnight movie, the perfect thing when straight horror feels too grim but you still want your pulse up.
What it's about
Ash Williams brings his girlfriend to a remote cabin in the woods, where a tape recording of an archeologist reciting chants from the Book of the Dead unleashes something that wants everyone in the cabin — starting with her. What follows is one man's very long, very bad night fighting a possessing evil with whatever's at hand, up to and including a chainsaw.
The experience
A screaming rollercoaster that's somehow hilarious and genuinely nerve-jangling at once — the horror keeps escalating into slapstick and then the slapstick turns scary again. It's relentless, gleefully gross, and over before you catch your breath.
Performances
Bruce Campbell gives one of the great physical-comedy performances in genre history — matinee-idol jaw, crash-test-dummy body, throwing himself around the cabin like a one-man Three Stooges act while selling real terror underneath.
The craft
Sam Raimi bolted cameras to planks and motorcycles and sent them hurtling through the woods as the evil's point of view, tilting frames like a funhouse and drenching everything in stop-motion, prosthetics, and unnatural fluids. The low budget is the style: every effect is handmade and the seams are part of the joke. Loud speakers and a crowd make it sing.
Why it matters
It invented a tone — splatstick — that horror-comedy has been chasing ever since, and became a foundational text for a generation of genre directors who grew up on its DIY audacity.
Reception & legacy: how Evil Dead II was received, argued over, and remembered →
Sam Raimi's return to the cabin is less sequel than possession: he restages his 1981 shocker's premise with real money, then accelerates it into delirium. Bruce Campbell's Ash — jaw like a matinee idol, dignity of a crash-test dummy — endures a one-man vaudeville of self-inflicted violence that owes as much to the Three Stooges as to any horror tradition, and the film invented a tone, splatstick, that horror-comedy has been chasing since. The craft is the joke: Raimi bolted cameras to planks and motorcycles and sent them screaming through the woods as the unseen evil's point of view, tilted his frames like a funhouse, and let stop-motion, prosthetics, and a flood of unnatural fluids do the rest. Dead by Dawn, as the subtitle has it, became a foundational text for a generation of genre directors — Peter Jackson's early gore farces and Edgar Wright's kinetic cutting both descend from it — and Campbell's chainsaw silhouette became modern horror's most durable icon.
Lines of influence
- The Evil Dead (1981) — The direct source film Evil Dead II remakes in its first act, establishing the low-mount 'shaky-cam' demon-POV rig and the improvised camera mounts (2x4 'Ram-O-Cam', shaky-cam) Raimi reprises and refines.
- The Three Stooges (Columbia shorts) (1940) — The eye-poke/slap rhythm and self-inflicted bodily punishment that Ash's one-man slapstick — the possessed hand beating him with plates — directly transposes into horror.
- Sherlock Jr. (1924) — Deadpan physical comedy treating the body as an abused prop and precise stunt choreography, the silent-slapstick grammar behind Bruce Campbell's escalating pratfalls.
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — German Expressionist canted framing and warped space — the source of Raimi's aggressive Dutch angles that tilt the cabin into a nightmare geometry.
- Jason and the Argonauts (1963) — Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion armature animation, the technique Raimi apes for the jerky, herky-motion deadite corpses and the dancing/decaying bodies in the finale.
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) — Codified the chainsaw as a horror icon and the relentless, sweaty kinetic assault that Raimi weaponizes when Ash grafts the saw onto his stump.
- Night of the Living Dead (1968) — The besieged-cabin siege structure and matter-of-fact practical gore of possession-as-contagion that Evil Dead II inherits as its dramatic engine.
- Dawn of the Dead (1978) — Tom Savini-style latex-and-Karo-syrup practical splatter, the maximalist prosthetic gore aesthetic Raimi's crew pushes into geysering absurdity.
- Halloween (1978) — The prowling subjective monster-POV Steadicam glide, ancestor to Raimi's low, rushing point-of-view of the unseen evil force tearing through the woods.
- An American Werewolf in London (1981) — Fused belly-laughs with Rick Baker's grotesque practical transformation FX, proving the horror-comedy tonal whiplash Evil Dead II lives on.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) — Surreal dream-logic set-pieces built from in-camera practical effects (rotating rooms, elastic reality) that license Raimi's laughing-mounted-head and living-room mania.
- Army of Darkness (1992) — Raimi's own direct sequel extends Ash's one-liner slapstick and Harryhausen-homage stop-motion skeletons into a full swashbuckling comic set-piece register.
- Bad Taste (1987) — Contemporaneous DIY splatstick that shares the home-built camera rigs and gleeful practical-gore excess, the parallel branch to Raimi's aesthetic.
- Braindead (Dead Alive) (1992) — Takes Evil Dead II's splatstick to its logical extreme — lawnmower massacre, gallons of prosthetic viscera played for slapstick — the facet's named heir.
- Shaun of the Dead (2004) — Wright's whip-pan snap-zoom kinetic cutting and horror-comedy timing are self-avowedly built on Raimi's rapid-fire montage grammar.
- Drag Me to Hell (2009) — Raimi returns to gross-out splatstick and demonic-possession gags — the flying eyeball, projectile fluids — refining the Evil Dead II shock-laugh cadence decades later.
- The Cabin in the Woods (2012) — Deconstructs the very cabin-in-the-woods deadite scenario Evil Dead II codified, turning its practical-monster menagerie into meta-genre commentary.
- Evil Dead (2013) — The reboot re-stages the cabin, the Book of the Dead, and the practical-effects gore purism as a direct homage to Raimi's blueprint.