That doesn\u2019t mean Cosmic Horror in cinema is brand new, however. While direct adaptations of Lovecraft\u2019s work to the screen ostensibly began with 1963\u2019s The Haunted Palace<\/em>, strains of Lovecraftian horror broke out in a number of experimental, hallucinatory horror features as in, for example, 1962\u2019s Carnival of Souls<\/em>, 1973\u2019s Messiah of Evil<\/em>, and the three films by John Carpenter dubbed his \u201cApocalypse Trilogy\u201d<\/a>: 1982\u2019s The Thing<\/em>, 1987\u2019s Prince of Darkness<\/em>, and 1994\u2019s In the Mouth of Madness<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most horror movie franchises tend to shy away from Cosmic Horror, simply because the rinse\/repeat cycle of a sequel typically requires a formula, and with a formula comes rules: witness the slasher film, and the Scream<\/em> franchise\u2019s clever, meta take<\/a> on the \u201crules\u201d of that subgenre. One of the rare horror franchises that maintains its roots within Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror is the Evil Dead<\/em> franchise, consisting of 1981\u2019s The Evil Dead<\/em>, 1987\u2019s Evil Dead II<\/em>, 1993\u2019s Army of Darkness<\/em>, 2013\u2019s Evil Dead<\/em>, the premium cable series Ash vs Evil Dead<\/em> (2015\u20132018), and this month\u2019s Evil Dead Rise<\/em>. For a variety of reasons, the Evil Dead<\/em> series has steadfastly committed to remaining untethered from a consistent tone, a grounded reality and strict continuity. Its contradictions and lack of predictability is a feature, not a bug, one which keeps the series unsettling no matter how cartoonish or slapstick-y it becomes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Cosmic Horror in The Evil Dead<\/em> is established right away: the movie\u2019s opening shot is a disembodied camera flying over a dank, foreboding swamp before continuing through the woods and finally landing on our protagonists\u2019 car driving on a narrow road. Throughout the course of the movie and the subsequent sequels and spin-offs, this shot came to represent what was termed the Evil Force, yet writer and director Sam Raimi never provides a concrete explanation of what exactly it is during the first film, leaving the audience to wonder right from the get-go about whose perspective we\u2019re seeing, what (if anything) this Force might look like, and how it operates \u2014 especially given that the characters have yet to read from the evil Book of the Dead they eventually find in the basement of the cabin in the woods they\u2019re staying at. So technically the Evil shouldn\u2019t be unleashed yet, but is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As this opening shot establishes, nothing in The Evil Dead<\/em> conforms to a strict set of rules. While it\u2019s possible the characters might have survived had they not discovered the Naturom Demonto and a tape recording of a professor reading incantations from it, there\u2019s the sense that perhaps they were always doomed. Once the Evil is officially unleashed and the companions of Ash (Bruce Campbell) begin to be possessed by it, their possession seems more haphazard than anything else \u2014 this is not the zombie archetype as established by the films of George A. Romero, where a bite or scratch from a creature will \u201cinfect\u201d the victim. Nor is it the same kind of demonic possession as seen in The Exorcist<\/em> and its many knockoffs; where those victims suffered demons entering their bodies looking to permanently set up shop, the people possessed by the Kandarian Demons (alternately termed Deadites) are \u201ctaken\u201d at will, and may or may not get a chance to regain their humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Army of Darkness<\/em> continues the tradition of retaining a lot of the series\u2019 stylistic elements while completely switching things up, keeping Ash stuck in the Middle Ages as he struggles to battle a demon army and get back to his own time. The opening recap is again it\u2019s own thing: yet another actress plays the hero\u2019s doomed girlfriend, Ash is revealed to have been an employee of a blandly corporate chain of department stores called S-Mart before being sucked through time, and so on. Army of Darkness<\/em> isn\u2019t the only film to feature multiple cuts with wildly divergent endings, but their existence feels apropos, making the movie into a sort of choose-your-own-adventure experience when viewed on home media. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s no surprise that the continuation of the series with Evil Dead<\/em> (20 years after Army of Darkness<\/em>\u2019 release) made a meal out of the franchise\u2019s mercurial continuity. Evil Dead<\/em> can be seen alternatively as a remake, a reboot or a reboot-quel, as various references both visual and aural go beyond mere fan service to indicate a larger, pseudo-multiverse concept buried within the film and the series: Ash\u2019s Delta 88 can be seen rotting outside the cabin as Mia (Jane Levy) sits on top of it, echoes of voices from the original film can be heard peppered throughout the movie as well as during the end credits, and Ash (or is it Bruce Campbell playing himself?) appears in a brief post-credits shot. When Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), explaining what he\u2019s found within the Naturom Demonto, states that the passages in the book are \u201cconfusing\u201d and \u201csometimes contradictory,\u201d it\u2019s both a clear statement of the film\u2019s brand of Cosmic Horror as well as a wink and a nod to the series\u2019 ever-changing playbook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The series Ash vs Evil Dead<\/em>, thanks in part to the dramatic requirements of serialized television, attempted to define the mythology of the franchise more concretely than any prior film in the series. The \u201cDark Ones\u201d that were briefly mentioned in the opening narration of Evil Dead II<\/em> become personified in the character of Ruby (Lucy Lawless), and the nature of Ash as a prophesied savior of humanity is given far more weight than it was in the films. Yet during the show\u2019s brief three-season run, it ran into numerous narrative obstacles, straining against the more restrictive, Supernatural<\/em>\/Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em>-style \u201cbig bads\u201d and their various backstories. Although the series was confused, it never lost the appeal of the films: throwing all caution (and good taste) to the wind and letting loose with inspired setpieces, mean-spirited humor and bold visual moments.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Evil Dead Rise<\/em> seems to be rebooting (or reboot-queling) yet again, as no recurring characters from the prior movies look to be making a reappearance. Yet the potential for any of them to do so is still very much in play, because if nothing else, the Evil Dead<\/em> franchise has always retained its sense of \u201canything goes.\u201d Whether that means old characters showing up or simply the shocking dismemberment of various limbs and appendages in increasingly creative ways, it\u2019s a quality that lends the franchise a remarkable sense of fear and excitement toward the unknown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With “Evil Dead Rise” hitting theaters this weekend, we take a look at the guiding principle of this wildly divergent series. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":20046,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-20044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20044"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21742,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20044\/revisions\/21742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/evil-dead-2-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
With Evil Dead II<\/em>, almost everything stays the same \u2014 Ash travels to a cabin in the woods, plays a tape, unleashes Evil, has to chop up his girlfriend with a chainsaw, gets chased by the Evil Force \u2014 and yet everything is changed: Ash arrives at the cabin with only his girlfriend in tow (played by a different actress) instead of his sister and several others as in the first film, the Book of the Dead has a different name (Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, a more explicit reference to Lovecraft), Ash himself is possessed not once but twice (and manages to dispel it for good), and the film\u2019s tone expands from being relentlessly grim to resembling a gorier Three Stooges<\/em> short. The changes to the events of the first film in the recap sequence were done more out of legal necessity than intentional obfuscation<\/a>, but they dovetail nicely with the franchise\u2019s interest in keeping the characters and the audience continually off balance. It\u2019s highly unlikely that anyone seeing the sequel for the first time expected it to end with Ash being pulled through a time vortex to the Middle Ages, a twist that in any other movie would be too off-the-wall, but for Evil Dead<\/em> it feels highly appropriate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n