Here’s the Hilarious Reason Why Bruce Campbell Says ‘Evil Dead’ Switched From Horror to Horror/Comedy
In the history of movie sequels, few second installments have pulled off a total tonal shift better than Evil Dead II, and none were nearly as groovy.
Even before Sam Raimi’s self-serious indie horror classic Evil Dead became one of 1981’s biggest sleeper hits, the emerging screenwriter and director already knew he wanted to turn the film into a full-on franchise. At the urging of his publicist Irvin Shapiro, Raimi started planning the plot lines for future Evil Dead films while he was still making the first installment on a shoestring budget, but it would take Raimi and his team all the way until 1985 to finally secure the funding for what would become Evil Dead II, by which time Raimi, his co-writer Scott Spiegel and his star/co-producer Bruce Campbell already had a pretty good idea for how to continue the story of Michigan State’s most traumatized student Ash Williams.
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As opposed to the dark, grisly and grim tone of the first installment, many Evil Dead fans who lined up to see the sequel in 1987 found themselves laughing and gasping in equal measure at Evil Dead II, a surprise to the hardcore horror community that rallied around the original. In a recent talk with Variety, Campbell revealed the real reason why he, Raimi and Speigel suddenly decided to shake up the Evil Dead series with classic slapstick (or splatstick, as they called it) humor, saying, “We only got into comedy — adding it to our films — because we were tired of seeing people faint at the first Evil Dead!”
“We all made stuff up on the fly,” Campbell said of the endlessly quotable banter that gave Evil Dead II its distinctly playful tone, though he admitted that “it’s a tricky dance” balancing horror and comedy as seamlessly as he and his compatriots did nearly 40 years ago.
In addition to their desire to protect their most sensitive audience members, Campbell also revealed that he and Raimi introduced humor to the Evil Dead serries because they worried that putting out another self-serious scary movie like the first Evil Dead might limit them creatively. “We thought, ‘Is that us? We’re horror guys for the rest of our lives?’” As such, Campbell and Raimi turned to their influences for inspiration. Said Campbell, “We were huge fans of The Three Stooges, so we thought, ‘Let’s put some of that in there!’”
“Stuff gets too serious. Writers get too serious, they get too serious about their own words,” Campbell opined. “‘Don’t change my perfect words!’ Some of the best lines of dialogue were never written in a screenplay!”
While Evil Dead II may not have broken any box-office records like its predecessor, it did pave the way for the kind of cheeky, silly and even improvisational style of horror/comedy that would become commonplace in the coming decades. Also, if any of the fainters who couldn’t stomach the first Evil Dead didn’t find Campbell and Raimi’s attempts to lighten the mood soothing, they can just suck it up — he ain’t holding your hand .
