Movies
These ‘Evil Dead 4’ Ideas Left Sam Raimi Questioning Their Sanity
After Universal Pictures released Army of Darkness in 1992, fans of The Evil Dead franchise had been anticipating a fourth Evil Dead for decades.
After years and years of rumors, Raimi making his 2009 Drag Me to Hell, and then eventually remaking Evil Dead with Fede Alvarez in 2013, the team behind the franchise revived it as the ongoing Starz television series “Ash vs Evil Dead”.
With Bruce Campbell reprising his role as Ash, all of us horror fans exhaled in relief. Still, there’s always that nagging thought, “What if?” What if Evil Dead 4 had been made, what would it have been like? The transformation from The Evil Dead to Army of Darkness went from straight horror to slapstick…so where would Ash end up 20+ years after time traveling to battle medieval Deadites?
Before “Ash vs Evil Dead” debuted last October, Raimi and Robert Tapert had explained that a lot of Evil Dead 4 ended up in the series, although a new interview reveals some of the defunct ideas they had been developing…ideas so strange it left them questioning their sanity.
“Ivan and I wrote a lot of different versions of ‘Evil Dead’ as a feature in the years after ‘Army of Darkness’,” Raimi told ScreenRant. “We’d get 20 pages into one draft and realize it was not good, do another five pages a different direction.
“Bruce is a documentary filmmaker I remember one of them was, capturing his own journey through life. I remember we wrote one version; we started to write one version of ‘Evil Dead 4’…” Brother Ivan chimes in: “Bruce travels cross country to sell his documentary in a car to explain the importance of his story being told.” Sam continues: “No one thought it was a very important story except him.”
One concept followed Ash after the events of Army of Darkness. “This take followed two versions of Ash: the one from their original ending set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic England (released in foreign markets) and the present day Ash, who returns to S-Mart relatively unscathed (which was ordered by Universal for Stateside audiences),” explains the site. Raimi reveals his alternative version and its meta-plot:
“So we wrote an ‘Evil Dead 4’ that followed both realities. We were going to be following two Bruces – one in the future and simultaneously crosscutting to Bruce here in the present. And we realized, we have really lost our mind now and we must stop.”
The site adds that, at one point, yet another Evil Dead 4 draft called for a major budget Terminator-esque story arc, which Campbell cheekily calls “Ash vs. the Machines.” However, Raimi scrapped his expansive vision, assuming there “wouldn’t be enough money for the big production we had planned.”
This is how we ended up with an Evil Dead remake and Starz’s ongoing “Ash vs Evil Dead” series, which returns on October 2.
What do you guys think of the ideas shared? Honestly, would you rather an Evil Dead 4 or two season of “Ash vs Evil Dead”? Pretend you have to choose…
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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