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…
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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