Editorials
How the ‘Evil Dead’ Remake Gender Swapped Ash Without Pissing You Off
Gender-swapped reboots have become something of a *thing* in the entertainment industry, with recent/upcoming takes on films like Ghostbusters, Ocean’s Eleven and even TV’s “Greatest American Hero” flipping the script and turning existing male characters into something we could always use more of: strong female characters.
Of course, there’s been a whole lot of backlash against this progressive and welcome trend, with Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters particularly upsetting the franchise’s core fanbase. Rather than bringing back Peter, Ray, Egon and Winston, Feig instead gave us Abby, Erin, Jillian and Patty; needless to say, many GB fans had already decided they hated the movie long before it was released or a trailer was even shown. Sad, but so very true.
Another gender-swapped reboot, though one that almost never comes up in this conversation, was Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead, 2013’s new take on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead that replaced iconic badass Ashley J. Williams with Jane Levy’s Mia, a character who, by the end of the film, is familiarly handless and wielding a red chainsaw.
I’d argue, as I tweeted (and Alvarez himself re-tweeted) over the weekend, that maybe the single most admirable accomplishment of the Evil Dead remake is that it gender-swapped Ash without announcing or making a big deal out of it, thereby preventing hardcore fans from going into it with hatred already in their hearts.
In fact, Alvarez pulled off this sleight of hand so effectively that few even noticed.
Many were disappointed by the fact that Ash Williams was not in the remake, but that’s actually one of the most brilliant choices the film makes. It would be impossible to watch anyone else in the role and not compare that person to Bruce Campbell, so it’s often best for remakes to throw iconic characters like Ash right out the window and start fresh.
Which brings me to one of my favorite aspects of the remake. Though there is no character named Ash, nor one that fully embodies all the qualities of that character, the character’s traits are very much present throughout, as the clever script has a whole lot of fun playing around with the idea of which character is that “Ash” character.
Going into the 2013 remake, it seemed obvious that Shiloh Fernandez’s David was our new Ash. With his short black hair, heroic good looks and familiar-looking blue work shirt, David very much plays the Ash character throughout the majority of the film, as he’s the brother figure who seems most equipped to deal with the Deadite invasion.
A couple of David’s scenes even pay direct homage to Ash scenes from the original Evil Dead, such as him finding a chainsaw in the work-shed and performing a live burial. Further leading us all astray, a scene of David slicing somebody up with a chainsaw was featured in the trailer, though it did not end up in the theatrical release.
But David does not ultimately become the Ash character, a mantle instead taken up Levy’s Mia. While Mia is initially presented as the film’s villain, the tables take a surprising turn in the final act with Mia assuming the role of Ash. With all the others dead, Mia becomes the badass heroine, slaying the demonic creature known as “The Abomination.”
She loses a hand. She equips herself with a chainsaw. She spouts a one-liner.
If Mia had been named Ash, of course, there would’ve been an extreme backlash towards the film. Just as there would’ve been if the marketing tipped its hat to the fact that yes, our beloved male hero has been replaced by a brand new female hero for this particular reboot. Smartly, however, the twist was kept secret… and the name Ash done away with.
But make no mistake, Mia is the Ash of the Evil Dead remake, an ass-kicking, Deadite-slaying heroine who ultimately becomes every bit Ash’s gender-bent equal.
Evil Dead proved that a smart approach is all it takes to make gender-swapping iconic, beloved characters not just inoffensive, but an effective way of breathing new life into old properties. It gave us a female Ash we’d love to see take the lead of an entirely new film franchise, so here’s hoping we haven’t seen the last of our new three-lettered hero.
Hail to the queen, baby.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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