There are certain things I love because they’re good, and then there are things I love because somewhere along the way they became mine.
Evil Dead is one of those things.
I can’t reduce my love for it to “I like horror movies.” There are plenty of horror movies. Evil Dead scratches some completely different part of my brain. It’s the cabin. The woods. The impossible amount of blood. The practical effects that are disgusting and ridiculous and incredible all at once. The Deadites laughing when they absolutely should not be laughing. And, of course, Ash Williams somehow surviving a universe that seems personally offended by his continued existence.
That might be one of the things I love most about Ash.
He isn’t some untouchable hero who walks into the room already knowing he’s the coolest person there. He gets terrified. He screws up. He gets beaten half to death. He loses people. He loses his hand. He gets covered in substances that probably shouldn't be identified. And somehow, eventually, he stands back up.
Then he grabs the chainsaw.
There’s something wonderfully human underneath all the insanity of that.
The series also understands something I wish more horror movies understood: horror and comedy don't have to cancel each other out. In Evil Dead, they almost feed each other. The Deadites aren't just frightening—they're cruel, obnoxious, theatrical little bastards. They'll torment you, laugh at you, sing at you, and then try to kill you. Ash can be fighting for his life while something completely absurd is happening five feet away.
And somehow it works.
That's actually one of the biggest things I miss in the newer movies.
They're darker. They're more serious. The humor that became such an important part of Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, and eventually Ash vs Evil Dead isn't really there in the same way. Part of me will probably always wish the newer movies had a little more of that insanity—a moment where the horror gets pushed so far that you can't help laughing along with it.
But I still love them.
Because even without Ash standing there with a chainsaw and dropping some ridiculous one-liner, I can still recognize the world they're playing in.
They respect the lore.
That's important to me.
The mythology changes and expands, but you can feel the connection to what came before: the books, the recordings, the Deadites, the rules that never seem quite as simple as anybody thinks they are. There is this larger evil lurking behind everything. Different people can encounter it in different places and different ways, but it still feels like that same ancient nightmare finding another door into the world.
That's why I can forgive the newer movies for losing some of the humor.
They might not always have the same personality as the Ash era, but I can watch them and feel like somebody actually cared about the mythology they're inheriting. They're not just borrowing a recognizable title and throwing buckets of blood at the screen.
And that's where the 2013 Evil Dead has always been complicated for me.
I don't hate it.
Actually, taken completely on its own, there's a lot about it I can appreciate. It commits to being brutal. It's nasty. It's relentless. And if the goal was to prove that Evil Dead could still make an audience squirm, mission accomplished.
But I've always felt like it took the title more than it took the identity.
It felt like someone looked at the original Evil Dead and decided the essential ingredient was blood.
So they added more blood.
Then some more.
Then apparently somebody discovered there was still blood left on Earth and added that too.
But blood was never the reason I loved Evil Dead.
The original movie was bloody, sure, but it also created this strange mythology that kept growing. Then Evil Dead II took that foundation and completely lost its mind. Army of Darkness expanded the world again. Later, Ash vs Evil Dead gave us even more mythology and showed how much history could be built around the Necronomicon and the evil connected to it.
That's the stuff I latch onto.
I want the lore.
I want the feeling that we're uncovering another piece of something ancient and horrible. I want connections that make me think about everything that came before. Give me the book. Give me the recordings. Give me Kandarian demons and Deadites and weird rules and ancient evil. Give me something that makes me want to go back and rewatch the older movies because suddenly I'm thinking about some tiny detail differently.
The 2013 movie never really gave me enough of that.
It gave me an Evil Dead movie that was determined to prove how horrific Evil Dead could be, when what I wanted was something that understood how wonderfully weird Evil Dead could be.
That's the difference.
And maybe that's why the newer movies work better for me despite still being much more serious than the Ash era. I miss the humor, absolutely. I miss that perfect combination of genuine horror and complete stupidity. I miss a hero who can get the absolute shit kicked out of him for ninety minutes and somehow still find time to be a smartass.
But if you're going to take Ash out of Evil Dead, then give me the mythology.
Make the universe bigger.
Show me that this evil wasn't born in one cabin and didn't disappear when Ash walked away. Show me different books, different victims, different eras, different manifestations of the same nightmare.
Make me feel like there's always another page we haven't read yet.
Because that's ultimately what keeps bringing me back.
The blood is fun. The chainsaw is iconic. The cabin is practically sacred ground at this point. And Bruce Campbell will always be Ash.
But Evil Dead became something bigger than any one of those things for me.
It's this bizarre universe where horror, mythology, slapstick, gore, demons, ancient books, terrible decisions, and one extremely abused Oldsmobile can somehow coexist.
There is no timid version of Evil Dead.
It commits.
A geyser of blood comes out of a wall because apparently a normal amount of blood wasn't going to get the point across. A possessed head can taunt you from the floor. A man can replace his missing hand with a chainsaw and somehow the correct response isn't “that's stupid.”
It's “Groovy.”
And beneath all of that, there is something oddly comforting about returning to this universe. I know the cabin. I know that clock. I know the sound of something moving through those woods. I know that opening the creepy book is an absolutely terrible idea and somebody is inevitably going to do it anyway.
I know Ash is going to have a catastrophically bad night.
And I know he's going to keep going.
Maybe that's what separates the things we simply enjoy from the things we really love. Eventually you stop experiencing them only as movies, books, games, or shows. They accumulate memories. You remember when you discovered them, who you were when you watched them, the scenes you couldn't stop thinking about, the lines you started quoting, and all the little rituals that formed around loving them.
Eventually, returning to them feels a little like returning to a place.
Admittedly, in this case, that place is an isolated cabin containing a demonic book bound in human skin.
But still.
Home is home.
Hail to the king, baby.