This week on Friday Night Frightfest, our multi-part Evil Dead franchise retrospective marches onward! After surviving the cabin in our last episode, we are taking a wildly divergent double-road trip: first, traveling back in time to the Middle Ages for fantasy-slapstick mayhem, and then leaping forward to 2013 for one of the most unapologetically violent, blood-soaked horror reboots ever committed to film. Grab your boomstick while we discuss Army of Darkness (1992) and Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead (2013)!
Army of Darkness (1992)
Directed by Sam Raimi, Army of Darkness abandons the cabin setting almost entirely and leans full-tilt into Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion fantasy adventure and screwball comedy. Swallowed by a time-vortex at the end of Evil Dead II, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) finds himself stranded in 1300 AD. To get back home, he must retrieve the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis—but in typical Ash fashion, he mispronounces the magic words (“Klaatu… Barada… N-necktie?”) and accidentally unleashes an army of the dead led by his own skeletal doppelgänger, Evil Ash. Packed with endless iconic one-liners (“Hail to the king, baby”), battle-ready Oldsmobiles, and skeletal slapstick, this entry turned Ash into an immortal pop-culture icon.
Evil Dead (2013)
Twenty-one years later, director Fede Álvarez took on the seemingly impossible task of rebooting the franchise—and delivered a modern horror triumph. Stripping away the humor entirely, the 2013 reboot grounds the cabin nightmare in a gritty story of addiction and survival, following David (Shiloh Fernandez) and his friends as they gather in the woods to help his sister Mia (Jane Levy) cold-turkey through heroin withdrawal. When the Naturom Demonto is unearthed and read aloud, all hell breaks loose. Driven almost entirely by jaw-dropping practical effects, intense self-mutilation, and a legendary, torrential downpour of blood during the climax, Jane Levy’s Mia delivers a fierce, chainsaw-toting Final Girl performance that earned the respect of diehard fans worldwide.
Join us as we explore two radically different directions for the Necronomicon legacy! We’ll break down how Sam Raimi transformed a low-budget horror story into a campy medieval epic, versus how Fede Álvarez proved that a franchise reboot could be terrifying, brutal, and deeply respectful of the source material.
Spoilers start around 6:13