Evil Dead II

Evil Dead II
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Sam Raimi
Written by	Sam Raimi Scott Spiegel
Produced by	Robert Tapert Alex De Benedetti Irvin Shapiro
Starring	Bruce Campbell Sarah Berry Dan Hicks Kassie DePaiva Richard Domeier
Cinematography	Peter Deming
Edited by	Kaye Davis
Music by	Joseph LoDuca
Production companies	De Laurentiis Entertainment Group Renaissance Pictures Rosebud Releasing
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date	March 13, 1987 (1987-03-13)
Running time	84 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$3.6 million
Box office	$5.9 million

Evil Dead II (referred to in publicity materials as Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn) is a 1987 American comedy horror film directed by Sam Raimi and a parody sequel to the 1981 film The Evil Dead. The film was written by Raimi and Scott Spiegel (they wrote the screenplay during the production of another collaboration Crimewave), produced by Robert Tapert, and stars Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams.

Filming took place in Michigan and North Carolina in 1986 and the film was released in the United States on March 13, 1987. It was a minor box office success, achieving just under $6 million. It also received critical acclaim with critics notably praising Raimi's direction and Campbell's role as the protagonist.

Like the original, Evil Dead II has accumulated a cult following, and is widely considered one of the greatest horror films of all time. The film was eventually followed by a third installment in the Evil Dead series, Army of Darkness (1992).

Plot

The film begins with a revised recap of the events of the first film. Ash Williams and his girlfriend Linda take a romantic vacation to a seemingly abandoned cabin in the woods. While in the cabin, Ash plays a tape of an archaeology professor (the cabin's previous inhabitant), reciting passages from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (or Book of the Dead), which he has discovered during an archaeological dig. The recorded incantation unleashes an evil force which kills and later possesses Linda. Ash is forced to decapitate his girlfriend with a shovel when she attacks him.

After he buries Linda, an evil force is seen charging at Ash, mirroring the ending of the first film. Ash is thrown across the forest and is briefly possessed by the demon, but when day breaks the spirit is forced out of him, and Ash turns back to normal. Ash finds little chance of safety, however, as the bridge leading out of the woods is destroyed, and, due to being unconscious for some time, the sun is rapidly setting. As night falls, Linda returns from the dead and attacks Ash, biting his hand with her severed head. Ash brings Linda's head to the shed, where her headless body attacks him with a chainsaw. Ash gains the upper hand and slashes the body before turning then chainsaw on Linda's head, finally killing her. Ash soon discovers that the bite has caused his own hand to become murderously possessed, and he is forced to dismember it. When he finds that it still lives on after being severed, he seemingly kills it with a shotgun he finds in the cabin.

While Ash is surviving in the cabin, the professor's daughter, Annie, returns from a dig with more pages of the Necronomicon in tow. Having been unable to contact her father at his isolated cabin, Annie, with her research partner Ed Getley in tow, drives there, only to find the destroyed bridge blocking her route. The pair enlist the help of two road workers, Jake and his girlfriend Bobby Joe, to guide them along an alternate trail to the cabin. Meanwhile, Ash is apparently slowly being driven insane by his situation. This includes an experience with a room full of laughing inanimate objects; whether this experience is caused by the evil force or hallucinated is unclear.

Annie and her party arrive at the cabin. On their arrival, Ash, mistaking them for the presence, fires at them, wounding Bobby Joe. He is beaten unconscious by Jake, and, believing that Ash killed her father, Annie helps to lock him in the cabin's cellar. They soon find and listen to a recording of Annie's father, describing how his wife Henrietta was possessed and he, unable to bring himself to dismember her, buried her in the cellar. The possessed Henrietta rises from the cellar floor, and the group releases Ash before locking the cellar door once again in order to trap Henrietta. Ed is soon possessed and subsequently dismembered by an axe-wielding Ash. The group is then visited by the spirit of Annie's father, who tells her that, by using the pages of the Necronomicon that she brought with her, she can save the group. Bobby Joe is attacked by Ash's still-living hand and attempts to flee, but is attacked by the demon trees in the woods and dragged to her death. Annie translates two of the pages, learning that, by reciting incantations that they hold, she can first force the evil presence to manifest itself in the flesh, before opening a rift in time and space to send it away. Before she can begin translating and reciting the incantations, Jake turns on them and throws the pages into the cellar, holding them at gunpoint to force them to go looking for Bobby Joe. Outside the relative safety of the cabin, Ash is once again possessed and turns on his remaining companions, incapacitating Jake. Annie retreats to the cabin and, mistaking him for the demon, accidentally stabs Jake. She drags him to safety, only to accidentally leave him near the cellar door, where he is dragged into the cellar by Henrietta and killed. The possessed Ash tries to kill Annie, but stops when he sees Linda's necklace, reminding him of her. He is freed from the possession, and manages to convince Annie that he is normal again.

Ash, with Annie's help, modifies the chainsaw and attaches it to where his right hand had been. Arming himself with both the chainsaw and his shotgun, Ash journeys into the cellar to find the missing pages of the Necronomicon. He finds them (and Jake's skeleton), before proceeding to leave. However as he is going up the steps to safety, Henrietta surprises him and temporarily disables him, before going after Annie. Ash then recovers, declaring "Lets go" before facing her in combat. Although she throws him against the wall at the start, the still "humanly shaped" deadite receives a beating from Ash and after receiving a blow from the butt of the chainsaw, falls. However she then begins to transform into a more "demonic" form with a much longer head and, with Ash pinned down at a wall, gains the upper hand. However Annie recites a song that Henrietta used to sing to her as a child. Distracted, the deadite is dismembered by Ash, before he blasts the head apart with the shotgun.

Annie chants the first incantation. The incantation causes the evil to manifest and attack the cabin, but, before she can recite the second, Ash's possessed hand kills her with a dagger. As Ash fends off the evil by impaling it in the eye with the chainsaw, Annie uses her dying breaths to recite the second incantation, opening up a whirling temporal portal which draws in not only the evil force, but nearby trees, the Oldsmobile, and Ash himself.

Ash and his Oldsmobile fall through the portal and out of the sky. He is immediately confronted by a group of knights who initially mistake him for a being called a "deadite", but they are quickly distracted when a real one appears. Ash blasts the harpy-like deadite with his shotgun. The knights begin cheering for him, and, as he realizes he has been brought to the past, he cries "No!". He is revealed to be standing in front of an intact, populated version of the ruin in which Annie's father uncovered the Necronomicon.

Cast

• Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams, a common guy who travels to the cabin in the woods to spend the weekend with his girlfriend Linda. As the story follows, he must defeat the evil powers around him that keep growing. After enough attacks, he decides to take the evil head-on equipped with a shotgun and a chainsaw and sets out to face the enemy.
• Sarah Berry as Annie Knowby, Professor Knowby's daughter who travels to the cabin looking forward to share her discoveries of the Book of the Dead with her father. She thinks Ash murdered her parents at first, but when the evil spirits unleash against them, she realizes the truth and finds out her only way to survive is to help Ash defeat the spirits.
• Dan Hicks as Jake, a white-trash guy who freaks out before the evil spirits. When things turn bad, he thinks they have to escape before they all get killed. He is accidentally stabbed in the chest by Annie when trying to escape a possessed Ash. Badly wounded but still alive, Annie tries dragging him to safety in the living room near the trapdoor to the fruit cellar, where he is attacked and eaten alive by Henrietta.
• Kassie DePaiva as Bobby Joe, Jake's foul-mouthed, self-centered girlfriend. She tries to escape the cabin, only to be killed by the woods themselves (in a similar fashion to how Cheryl was raped in the first film).
• Ted Raimi as Possessed Henrietta, Annie's possessed mother who uses her memories to lure her in order to kill her and everybody else, but is killed when Ash stabs her through the chest with his chainsaw.
• Denise Bixler as Linda, Ash's girlfriend. She gets possessed, then tries to kill Ash. In a desperate effort, he beheads her with a shovel before burying her. Later on, her corpse raises from the grave and resumes her intentions to kill Ash with both her severed head and her body acting separately. He finally gets rid of her by chopping her up with a chainsaw.
• Richard Domeier as Professor Ed Getley, Professor Knowby's associate and Annie's boyfriend. After being attacked by the possessed Henrietta, he gets possessed by another spirit. He meets his doom when Ash dismembers him with an ax.
• John Peaks as Professor Knowby, the archaeologist who found the Book of the Dead. When he took it to his cabin to translate it, he accidentally unleashed its evil spirits. His fate remains unknown, since he only appears as a floating head from another plane of existence.
• Lou Hancock as Henrietta Knowby, Professor Knowby's wife. She gets possessed when her husband accidentally unleashes the evil spirits of the Book of the Dead. According to the Professor's recordings he was forced to kill Henrietta when she became demonically possessed and attacked him. He then buried her body in the fruit cellar where she reanimates and remains a recurring villain (portrayed by Ted Raimi) through the second half of the film.
• Ankita kumat as the GHOST

Production

The concept of a sequel to The Evil Dead was discussed during location shooting on the first film. Raimi wanted to toss his hero, Ash, through a time portal, back into the Middle Ages. That notion eventually led to the third installment, Army of Darkness.

After the release of The Evil Dead, Raimi moved on to Crimewave, a cross between a crime film and a comedy produced by Raimi and Joel and Ethan Coen. Irvin Shapiro, a publicist who was primarily responsible for the mainstream release of The Evil Dead, suggested that they next work on an Evil Dead sequel. Raimi scoffed at the idea, expecting Crimewave to be a hit, but Shapiro put out ads announcing the sequel regardless.

After Crimewave was released to little audience or critical acclaim, Raimi and Tapert, knowing that another flop would further stall their already lagging careers, took Shapiro up on his offer. Around the same time, they met Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis, the owner of production and distribution company DEG. He had asked Raimi if he would direct a theatrical adaptation of the Stephen King (written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym) novel Thinner. Raimi turned down the offer, but De Laurentiis continued to be interested in the young filmmaker.

The Thinner adaptation was part of a deal between De Laurentiis and King to produce several adaptations of King's successful horror fiction. At the time, King was directing the first such adaptation, Maximum Overdrive, based on his short story "Trucks". He had dinner with a crew member who had been interviewed about the Evil Dead sequel, and told King that the film was having trouble attracting funding. Upon hearing this, King, who had written a glowing review of the first film that helped it become an audience favorite at Cannes, called De Laurentiis and asked him to fund the film.

Though initially skeptical, De Laurentiis agreed after being presented with the extremely high Italian grosses for the first film. Although Raimi and Tapert had desired $4 million for the production, they were allotted only $3.6 million. As such, the planned medieval storyline had to be scrapped.

Script

Though they had only recently received the funding necessary to produce the film, the script had been written for some time, having been composed largely during the production of Crimewave. Raimi contacted his old friend Scott Spiegel, who had collaborated with Campbell and others on the Super 8 mm films they had produced during their childhood in Michigan. Most of these films had been comedies, and Spiegel felt that Evil Dead II should be less straight horror than the first. Initially, the opening sequence included all five of the original film's characters, but, in an effort to save time and money, all but Ash and Linda were cut from the final draft. The film went through several other iterations, including a group of escaped convicts holding Ash captive in the cabin while searching for buried treasure.

Spiegel and Raimi wrote most of the film in their house in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California, where they were living with the aforementioned Coen brothers, as well as actors Frances McDormand, Kathy Bates, and Holly Hunter (Hunter was the primary inspiration for the Bobby Jo character). Due both to the distractions of their house guests and the films they were involved with, Crimewave and Josh Becker's Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except, the script took an inordinately long time to finish.

Among the film's many inspirations include The Three Stooges and other slapstick comedy films; Ash's fights with his disembodied hand come from a film made by Spiegel as a teenager, entitled Attack of the Helping Hand, which was itself inspired by television commercials advertising Hamburger Helper. The "laughing room" scene, where all the objects in the room seemingly come to life and begin to cackle maniacally along with Ash, came about after Spiegel jokingly used a gooseneck lamp to visually demonstrate a Popeye-esque laugh. Spiegel's humorous influence can be seen throughout the film, perhaps most prominently in certain visual jokes; for instance, when Ash traps his rogue hand under a pile of books, on top is A Farewell to Arms.

Filming

With the script completed, and a production company secured, filming could begin. The production commenced in Wadesboro, North Carolina, not far from De Laurentiis' offices in Wilmington. De Laurentiis had wanted them to film in his elaborate Wilmington studio, but the production team felt uneasy being so close to the producer, so they moved to Wadesboro, approximately three hours away. Steven Spielberg had previously filmed The Color Purple in Wadesboro, and the large white farmhouse used as an exterior location in that film became the production office for Evil Dead II. Most of the film was shot in the woods near that farmhouse, or J.R. Faison Junior High School, which is where the interior cabin set was located.

The film's production was not nearly as chaotic or strange as the original film's production, largely because of Raimi, Tapert and Campbell's additional film making experience. However, there are nevertheless numerous stories about the strange happenings on the set. For instance, the rat seen in the cellar was nicknamed "Señor Cojones" by the crew ("cojones" is Spanish slang for "testicles").

Even so, there were hardships, mostly involving Ted Raimi's costume. Ted, director Sam's younger brother, had been briefly involved in the first film, acting as a fake Shemp, but in Evil Dead II he gets the larger role of the historian's demonically-possessed wife, Henrietta. Raimi was forced to wear a full-body, latex costume, crouch in a small hole in the floor acting as a "cellar", or on one day, both. Raimi became extremely overheated, to the point that his costume was literally filled with liters of sweat; special effects artist Gregory Nicotero describes pouring the fluid into several Dixie cups so as to get it out of the costume. The sweat is also visible on-screen, dripping out of the costume's ear, in the scene where Henrietta spins around over Annie's head.

The crew also snuck various in-jokes into the film itself, such as the clawed glove of Freddy Krueger, the primary antagonist of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series of slasher films, which hangs in the cabin's basement and tool shed. This was, at least partially, a reference to a scene in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street where the character Nancy Thompson (portrayed by Heather Langenkamp), watches the original Evil Dead on a television set in her room. In turn, that scene was a reference to the torn The Hills Have Eyes poster seen in the original Evil Dead film, which was itself a reference to a torn Jaws poster in The Hills Have Eyes.

At the film's wrap party, the crew held a talent contest, where Raimi and Campbell sang The Byrds' "Eight Miles High", with Nicotero on guitar.

Reception

Box office

Evil Dead II opened on March 13, 1987 to a weekend gross of $807,260. At this time, it was only in 310 theatres, resulting in its smaller gross. However, after spending a little over a month in theatres, the film ultimately grossed $5,923,044 domestically.

Critical response

Like its predecessor, Evil Dead II has received universal acclaim, and holds the 98% approval rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 46 reviews with an average rating of 8/10, with the critical consensus "Evil Dead 2's increased special effects and slapstick-gore makes it as good -- if not better -- than the original." On a similar website Metacritic, it holds a score of 69/100 (generally favorable). Empire magazine praised the film saying "the gaudily gory, virtuoso, hyper-kinetic horror sequel uses every trick in the cinematic book" and confirms that "Bruce Campbell and Raimi are gods" and Caryn James of The New York Times called it "genuine, if bizarre, proof of Sam Raimi's talent and developing skill." Leonard Maltin originally rated the film with two stars, but later increased the rating to three stars.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a three star rating (out of four) describing it as "a fairly sophisticated satire, that makes you want to get up and shuffle." He praised the film's sense of surrealism, comedic timing, and "grubby, low-budget intensity." Ebert states that "if you know it's all special effects, and if you've seen a lot of other movies and have a sense of humor, you might have a great time at Evil Dead 2." Richard Harrington of the Washington Post wrapped up his review stating that "the acting is straight out of '50s B movies. The exposition is clumsy, the sound track corny, the denouement silly. Then again, who said bad taste was easy?" Conversely, Pat Graham of Chicago Reader disliked the mix of horror and comedy, writing in his review that "The pop-up humor and smirkiness suggest Raimi's aspiring to the fashionable company of the brothers Coen, though on the basis of this strained effort I'd say he's overshot the mark."

Entertainment Weekly ranked the film #19 on their list of "The Top 50 Cult Films".

Sight and Sound ranked it #34 on their 50 Funniest Films of All Time list. In 2008, Empire magazine included Evil Dead II on their list of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time, ranked #49.

J.C. Maçek III of PopMatters wrote, "Equal parts remake and sequel, the second film brought back Bruce Campbell as Ash and was every bit as gory and horrific as the first film with more tree rape and dismemberment and blood splatters than ever. On the other hand, Evil Dead II is also an absolutely hilarious and uproarious intentional comedy."

Accolades

Award	Subject	Nominee	Result
Saturn Awards	Best Horror Film	Sam Raimi	Nominated
	Best Special Effects	Vern Hyde, Doug Beswick and Tom Sullivan	Nominated
	Best Make-up	Mark Shostrom	Nominated
Catalonian International Film Festival	Best Film	Sam Raimi	Nominated
Fantasporto Awards			Nominated

References

Bibliography

• Warren, Bill. The Evil Dead Companion. ISBN 0-312-27501-3.
• Raimi, Sam. Spiegel, Scott. Nicotero, Greg. Campbell, Bruce. Evil Dead II DVD, audio commentary.
• Campbell, Bruce. If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. ISBN 0-312-29145-0

External links

• Evil Dead II at IMDb
• Evil Dead II at AllMovie
• Evil Dead II at Box Office Mojo
• Evil Dead II at Metacritic
• Evil Dead II at Rotten Tomatoes
• Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn at Deadites Online.
• Evil Dead II at Book Of The Dead