Evil Dead II

Em: 00:00:57

Hi everyone, I'm Em and welcome to Verbal Diorama, Episode 319, Evil Dead 2.

This is a podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know and movies you don't that's somehow backing the Cabin in the woods from last episode, but with a new Linda and now some random old lady in the basement who definitely wasn't there before. Welcome to Verbal Diorama, where you're a brand new listener, whether you're a regular returning listener. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast. I'm so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of Evil Dead 2.

And as always, if you are a returning listener, thank you so much for continuing to listen and support this podcast. It means so much for your continued support. And this is the Verbal Diorama entry for Halloween and it's a doozy.

After last week's episode on the Evil Dead, I plan to take this week off, mostly due to the Independent Podcast Awards and being down in London. I simply took my laptop down to London and worked on this episode during the downtime that I had.

And I've worked on it whenever I had a spare moment to do so, because what else do you do? For one of the greatest sequels ever made and one of the most fun horror movies of all time. Groovy. Here's the trailer for Evil Dead 2.

Em: 00:04:05

Ash Williams takes his girlfriend Linda to a secluded cabin in the woods where he plays back Professor's tape recorded reciting of passages from the Book of the Dead. The spell conjures up an evil force from the woods which turned Linda into a monstrous Deadite and threatens to do the same to Ash.

When the Professor's daughter and her entourage show up at the cabin. The night turns into a non stop, grotesquely comic battle with Chainsaw and Shotgun on one side, demon horde and Flying Eyeball on the other.

Let's run through the cast.

We have Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams, Sarah Berry as Annie Knowby, Dan Hicks as Jake Kassie Wesley as Bobby Jo, Denise Bixler as Linda, and Richard Domeier as Ed Getley. Evil Dead 2 was written by Sam Raimi and Scott Spiegel and was directed by Sam Raimi in the last episode on the Evil Dead.

Go listen if you haven't yet.

The story was mostly about a young, scrappy team of filmmakers with a limited budget making something that in the end became a bit of a nightmare production.

I insist you listen, because a lot of the story goes straight into this one and a lot of the team reprise their roles on the crew, and it is worth knowing the background to the story.

But even during post production on the Evil Dead, Irvin Shapiro, the guy who masterminded the distribution and release, suggested the idea of a sequel to Sam Raimi, who mulled it over and decided he didn't want to do another Cabin in the woods movie.

to fight Deadites in the year: 1300

g it was in production in May: 1984

It struggled both critically and commercially, and Sam Raimi didn't want to be known as that horror guy. But work is work and their careers were lagging after Crimewave made no waves. Evil Dead 2 would be the perfect movie to cushion their careers.

Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert as Renaissance Pictures contacted Crimewave's distributors, Embassy Home Entertainment, to hash out a deal, but that stalled for five months. So they decided to interview potential cast and crew, one of whom was also working on Maximum Overdrive.

And just like Last Episode, Stephen King swoops in to save the day because Maximum Overdrive was his directorial debut and it was being Filmed at the De Laurentiis Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina for DEG, the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group headed by of course, Dino De Laurentiis. King had a multi picture deal with De Laurentiis, and King advocated for the Renaissance Pictures team on their Evil Dead sequel to De Laurentiis.

The Renaissance Pictures team knew De Laurentiis was Italian and that the Evil Dead had been huge in Italy. So they collected information on the Italian box office and took it with them to the meeting they had arranged with Dino De Laurentiis.

It took 20 minutes to secure a deal for the second Evil Dead movie with Dino De Laurentiis, a $3.6 million deal, a little less than the team wanted, but De Laurentiis stipulated he wanted a movie like the Evil Dead and not Raimi's army of Darkness idea, and the Evil Dead sequel had to be R rated. But at least this time they wouldn't be flying by the seat of their pants not knowing where their next chunk of money was coming from.

They had $3.6 million and Raimi set to work on a script with his longtime friend and within the woods co star Scott Spiegel. Sam Raimi at the time lived in Silver Lake, Los Angeles with Joel and Ethan Cohen, Frances McDormand, Kathy Bates and Holly Hunter.

And that is basically a who's who of Hollywood. And those are the sorts of remains that you want. Evil Dead 2 aka Evil Dead 2 Dead by dawn is part remake, part sequel.

A recall, if you will, simultaneously recaps the first movie whilst also following on from it.

Originally the plan was to reuse the footage from the Evil Dead with Ash and Linda, plus Cheryl, Scott and Shelley included, but there was a problem with the rights. Because the Evil Dead was sold by Irvin Shapiro's company, Films around the World to around 50 different distributors around the globe.

They would need to obtain clearance from each one for that territory.

Some had gone out of business in the preceding four years, so it was easier and cheaper to reshoot the recap and reduce the number of characters to just Ash and his girlfriend Linda. Betsy Baker was contacted and they met with her to reprise the role of Linda.

However, she was pregnant with her first child at the time, so instead they decided to recast the role.

Linda was also recast in army of Darkness with none other than Bridget Fonda, so the series remains inconsistent on Linda as well as inconsistent between recollections of events because the recap isn't the same as the Evil Dead. But again, this isn't a series known for its continuity.

Ash destroys the Book of the Dead at the end of the Evil Dead in a fire, but it's remarkably burn free in this movie. Not to mention the sudden appearance of Henrietta Knowby in the cellar.

While the budget was much higher than they had for the Evil Dead, it was decided to keep the recap as brief as possible and keep some of the wackier ideas restricted.

The earlier drafts of the script were written during production of Crime Wave and were more comedic, with the horror played to more laughs than scares. In a similar vein to their early 8mm comedy films.

It was agreed that Evil Dead 2 should lean more towards comedy than its predecessor, if only to achieve the desired and required R rating. Once Raimi and Spiegel were happy with their script, they auditioned a new cast including Denise Bixler replacing Betsy Baker as Linda.

The character of Bobby Jo was written for Raimi's housemate Holly Hunter in mind. But Hunter didn't end up taking the part. Apparently she wasn't pretty enough.

According to Rob Tapert, Bruce Campbell would obviously be back as Ashley and he really wanted to bulk up and get more of a hero physique. Campbell worked out for two hours a day, six days a week with a strict diet for 12 weeks during pre production, which continued into filming.

John Casino was his stunt double for the extreme stunts, but Campbell wanted to do the majority himself. Having Dino De Laurentiis involved meant potentially having access to the De Laurentiis' own studio in Wilmington next to his offices.

It had 11 sound stages, editing and screening facilities and prop shops. But after the studio interference on Crimewave, the filmmakers decided to stay away from the studios and away from the interference.

Not to mention, De Laurentiis had offered them the use of his studio for full price and it would be much cheaper elsewhere.

The decision not to use his studios offended De Laurentiis, who when they found out they had location scouted in Wadesboro three hours drive away, called Rob Taper to a meeting at his offices just to prove to them how far away they were and just to give them a hard time. But the location they'd selected was perfect and De Laurentiis reluctantly agreed.

The production's budget couldn't afford hotels for the cast and crew, so they rented local bank foreclosed homes for the duration of the shooting rather than use a pre existing cabin night on the Evil Dead. This time around, the cabin was built especially for the production.

With the cabin cellar and workshed interior sets built in the gym of the local J.R. Faison Junior High School. The cabin was built on the land belonging to a local farmhouse owned by Harry Huntley, who also became their local fixer.

The farmhouse served as their production base and it's the same farmhouse Steven Spielberg used for The Color Purple.

They paid J.R. Faison Junior High $500 a month to use its facilities and the gym was used to house a two level set, the ground floor being the fruit cellar and the first floor the ground floor of the cabin.

The exterior was a short drive from the farmhouse and they built this set from scratch, making the interior set a little larger than the exterior house, then purposely gave the house tilted windows and door frames to add to the ricketiness of it.

Unlike the last movie, which was filmed in a harsh Tennessee winter where it was the coldest in decades, this movie was filmed in the summer in Carolina and it was hot. The temperature outside was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 37 Celsius.

But inside the school gym, with the added tungsten lights, it often breached 110 Fahrenheit or 43 degrees Celsius. This made it incredibly uncomfortable on set, but especially for anyone in makeup or prosthetics.

They had cast Lou Hancock to play the unpossessed Henrietta Knowby. She was 62 years old at the time and no one wants to put a 62 year old woman through that.

For the possessed version of the character wearing a heavy suit and makeup. To get around this, Sam Raimi cast his younger brother Ted Raimi as possessed Henrietta.

The suit would be filled with litres of his sweat during filming, but at least he would get into the Screen Actors Guild.

Due to the role, A complete body cast of Ted Raimi was taken on which the main portion of Henrietta's rotting body could be sculpted as one of separate head, arm and leg moulds to sculpt each part respectively.

A suit with pouches full of lentils were added underneath to give the outer skin weight and movement, although this did make the makeup much heavier and undoubtedly a lot more uncomfortable.

To get that important R rating, it was decided to have as little blood as possible and use quick cuts and character reactions rather than blood and gore. Bodily fluids were green, black and yellow. When they did use red blood, it was the same recipe as last time with the sticky Karo corn syrup.

commenced in May: 1986

He'd worked with Ramey on the crime wave reshoots and he came with his own crew and equipment.

But due to Raimi's erratic filmmaking ways, the number and frequency of setups started to grade on Schlugleit's crew, who stopped working and were eventually asked to leave the movie. Tim Philo was once again offered to be cinematographer and he again declined.

Peter Denning was then brought on board as the replacement cinematographer because Eugene Schlugleit had already completed the exterior night footage. And then Peter Denning came on board to complete the rest.

Denning was credited as the director of photography with Eugene Schlugleit as the director of photography. Knight Exterior photography.

Tim Philo was eventually persuaded to return as director of photography second unit, and he assisted for the final portion of filming, Assisting Verne Hyde, who was in charge of general physical and mechanical effects on things like the Ram-o-cam, which was a heavy 20 foot iron pole attached in the center to a western dolly so it could pivot like a seesaw with a camera fixed at the front end of the pole and six crew members pushing it from the back. This was used where the force punches through the windows of the Delta 88 automobile, which had to be done three times to get the final shot.

On the sequence featuring Ash being propelled through the forest by the demon force.

Bruce Campbell was strapped to the Sam-o-cam made up of a cast iron X with boots bolted to the end of two of the limbs and wrists strapped to the end of the other two limbs. This X was connected at center to a motor which allowed the rig and Campbell to spin 360 degrees from 1 to 20 RPM.

It was attached to a Chapman Crane arm 15ft off the ground, mounted onto the back of the truck so it could be driven along. The shot took a day to achieve and was filmed just outside of Cheraw, South Carolina.

lina had wrapped in September: 1986

And the schedule was kept fairly tight with three sets and two cameras in the space along with a special effects area. While one set was used, another was being prepped so there was no waiting around between setups.

Many of the more complicated shots and special effects animation were created here, Such as Headless Linda attacking Bruce with a chainsaw. The climactic vortex sequence created using the Sam-o-cam X rig with a blue screen, and the blood flood scene, which took three attempts.

They tried twice in North Carolina and then once again during the reshoots in Detroit. A portion of the set was constructed sideways with the camera tilted vertically.

Bruce Campbell lay horizontally flat on a diving board type rig a few feet off the floor and above him was a 55 gallon drum of fake blood with a plug in the bottom. The plug was pulled out and he was hit with the full force of the liquid.

Also asked to return following his work on the Evil Dead was Tom Sullivan for the special effects work, the task of which would include the makeup effects and the stop motion animation. For Evil Dead 2.

Sullivan felt the task was too huge, so he opted to take a reduced role, producing some of the stop motion animation and some of the props instead.

ifornia at the start of March: 1986

Shostrum had just come off makeup effects work on A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Freddy's Revenge, prior to starting Evil Dead 2, and he took the opportunity to hang a Freddy glove he owned in two of the sets through the course of the movie. Sullivan also created a brand new Book of the Dead, bigger than the original and more elaborate. He created four new books.

One hero copy with all the pages hand painted with watercolors, and three stunt books. He also made five sets of identical lost pages, including the Hero from the sky made from a rehearsal photo of Bruce Campbell.

He also included a passive aggressive message to the guys he shared a house with in one of the pages which reads, Ray is an asshole and he can go F himself with a weasel now. It's true. It's on the pages Ali is looking through.

Just after Bobby Joe's vine attack, Sullivan also brought the Kandarian dagger he created and still owned from the previous movie and redesigned the blade from a simple pointed piece of metal to a tail like tapered set of bones.

The brand new Book of the Dead had a hollow wooden frame with articulated ball and socket joint for the face covered by flexible skin with an opening mouth. Sullivan drew up an additional contract which also stipulated he would retain the ownership and copyright of any props he manufactured.

Which means he owned an original Book of the Dead and the Kandarian Dagger as well as many of the props. And the outstanding star of this movie isn't Henrietta's flyaway eyeball, although that comes a close second. It's Ash's evil disembodied hand.

That was achieved using various mechanical and makeup effects with stop motion animation.

Some of it used an entirely fake hand with radio controlled articulated armature, but they also used a real hand with a severed stomp appliance and an animated stop motion version for the real hand. A narrow trench was made between the cabin's floorboards with one side 2 inches higher than the other.

So when filmed across a certain angle, it looks like one continuous piece of Wood. The scene where Bruce Campbell as Ash is fighting his own possessed hand is, I think, probably everyone's favorite scene in the movie.

And it's straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon with the plate smashing, beating himself up, flipping himself over and dragging himself across the floor. Again, why was Bruce Campbell not a huge star? He did the main fight between himself and his hand in one take, apparently.

But as he chops his hand off, he needs a new appendage.

And Ash's hand chainsaw was constructed by Vern Hoist Crew from a real Homelite XL chainsaw, which had its engine replaced with a smaller 12 volt electric motor so Campbell could fit his hand inside and it would be silent enough for filming. When the chain was still fake, exhaust smoke was fed into the saw via a tube.

That tube ran down his leg and then 20 or so feet to a tobacco smoker and the chain's teeth were filed down for safety. There was an unaltered, fully working reel saw on set, but also foam rubber and lightweight stunt reproductions.

Henrietta's eyeball was a ping pong ball.

It was on a rig constructed and fixed to the camera, with a sideways U shaped black metal rod attached, the camera at one end and the disembodied eyeball on the other. With the wire stretched away from the camera, the way it flew towards Bobby Joe's mouth was like most of the movie, a Three Stooges gag.

On this movie, Bruce Campbell got to wear the scleral contact lenses during the Asch possession scene, which rendered him completely blind.

since they first used them in: 1979

Evil Dead 2 had three and a half months of post production and the majority of that included all the film's animation, which was split between Tom Sullivan, Larry Larson and Brian Ray. Doug Beswick was responsible for dancing Linda in a scene choreographed by Tam G. Warner and danced by Snowy Winters.

The dance was filmed repeatedly from multiple angles to be able to get all the footage required to animate it. They sculpted a 12 inch fully posable scale figurine of Linda with a detachable head.

A scale miniature set to match the exterior location was built on an eight foot square tabletop with trees and a smaller force perspective cabin. Beswick then painstakingly took a month to animate Linda's corpse, following the reference footage as a guide rather than matching frame by frame.

For the mist, which couldn't be animated frame by frame, they used a motion control camera system which could be programmed to match the live action camera moves with the previous stop motion camera moves. The mist was filmed live, moving at normal speed and then composited with the stop motion animation.

They also constructed a miniature cabin for the attacking trees which were a mixture of miniature hand and rod puppets and full sized rod and foam puppets.

The climax with the huge demon head in the cabin was nicknamed the Rotten Apple Head and that was constructed as a full size mechanical effect with genital eyes, foam rubber heads taken from the casts of the actors to mimic the souls it had collected during the movie.

They struggled to make the heads work as they wanted to, so Raimi used an anamorphic lens to distort the image and cut around the heads where possible. A full size 16 foot tree hand was created to come through the cabin window to grab ash.

The arm was an aluminium frame which was articulated and attached to cables for movement. The frame was then covered in fake bark, made mattress foam which was shaped and glued in place once filming was complete.

Rather than pay to have it all brought back to Detroit, most of these effects were just left in Wadesboro and Rotten Applehead went missing for a while before turning up at the end of a hallway in a local haunted house attraction.

ly left unknown for years. In: 2011

te and the wood rotted and by: 2014

ission from the landowners in: 2016

Virtually all the wood had termite damage and rot, and while they managed to save the workshed exterior, the frame was tilting and eventually collapsed. The workshed was rebuilt with as many of the original wooden planks as possible with a metal canopy frame.

It went on tour for a few years before being bought at auction by the Living Dead Museum in Edin City, Pennsylvania. This museum grew out of a store and museum called Monroeville Zombies, which was originally located in the Monroeville Mall.

Why is that place familiar? It's where George Romero filmed the original dawn of the Dead. He also filmed Night of the Living Dead in Evans City, Pennsylvania.

Everything is linked.

And despite this movie starting as an idea for Ash to be pulled into the Dark Ages, at the end of the movie, the vortex would pull him into a time portal and once again the continuity would skew between Evil Dead 2 and army of Darkness. But I guess that's for a future episode. And this is the perfect time to segue into the obligatory Keanu reference of this episode.

And if you don't know what that is, it's where I try and link every movie that I feature with Keanu Reeves. And as I mentioned, Ash Williams is introduced to time travel at the end of this movie by being pulled into the Dark Ages.

And another character who is introduced to time travel is Ted Theodore Logan. And who plays Ted Theodore Logan? Oh, it's Keanu Reeves. And that is the easiest way to link Keanu Reeves to Evil Dead 2.

The score for Evil Dead 2 was composed by Joseph LoDuca, who also composed the other two scores in the Evil Dead trilogy, which I don't think I mentioned last episode. So correction, the music for the Evil Dead was composed by Joseph LoDuca and so was the music for Evil Dead 2.

For a long time this movie was seen as a remake, and it sort of is. In a way, it is both a remake and a continuation of the story.

But to avoid confusion, the end credits State Evil Dead 2, the sequel to the ultimate experience in gruelling terror, was filmed in Wadesboro, North Carolina and Detroit, USA. But despite their best efforts to the Contrary, Evil Dead 2 looked like it was going to get an X rating from the MPAA.

It would have been very difficult for the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group to Release Evil Dead 2 unrated because they were a signatory of an MPAA contract prohibiting them from releasing any unrated movies.

So DG decided to not submit the picture for a rating, and to get around the legal issue, they set up Rosebud Releasing Corporation to handle distribution and they sold the movie to Rosebud.

De G had already booked the cinemas across the US and the advertising and marketing material had already been created and paid for before the movie was sold to Rosebud. So the only real difference in the situation was the name of the distributor.

channel. The MPA, which since: 2019

March: 1987

It debuted at 14 and peaked at 12 in its sixth week. Evil Dead 2 would go on to gross $5.9 million worldwide.

Unlike the Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2 had no such banning as a video nasty here in the UK and made a killing, no pun intended, on home video. It's been re released several times including on VHS, DVD and Blu Ray.

dn't until it was unbanned in: 1990

November: 2023

The Collector's Edition and a Blood Splatter Edition There were only 500 copies of the collector's edition and 250 copies of the Blood Splatter Edition, so if you have one of those you might get your hand chopped off for it. It's widely seen as superior to the Evil Dead in many ways, every bit as gory and horrific, but also hilarious and silly.

Evil Dead 2 has an 88% on rotten tomatoes with a critics consensus reading less a continuation than an outright reimagining. Sam Raimi transforms his horror tale into a comedy of terrors and arguably even improves on the original formula.

s. We got army of darkness in: 1992

vein with Drag Me to hell in: 2009

led Evil Dead was released in: 2013

It's got a bigger budget, the same people behind the scenes more or less, and Bruce Campbell just proving he can do slapstick as well as visceral horror.

The movie acts as a semi remake, throwing continuity out the window and foregoing Many of the details the first film established almost as if this is someone else's side of the story. This is the same movie in so many ways, but also so very different. It's more professional, more polished.

The effects aren't as gory, but they are ever so much more impressive.

Expertly walking that line between comedy and horror, the end of Evil Dead 2 also brought the end of the renaissance pictured partnership as we knew it.

Bruce Campbell was primarily an actor and Sam Raimi was starting to make waves for his original and interesting ideas, which probably wouldn't also include a role for Campbell.

Campbell moved to California to pursue his acting career and Sam Raimi sold a story idea to Universal, who entered a production deal with Sam Raimi and Rob Tapered. Raimi always wanted to make a movie about Pulp, the Shadow, but couldn't get the rights.

Instead, he would create the movie that would become a critical and commercial success and solidify his career. And that movie was Darkman.

Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, who worked on the special makeup effects on Evil Dead 2, went on to form their own special effects company, KMB EFX Group.

Kurtzman would go on to write the story and be the makeup effects supervisor Armed From Dusk Till dawn and do the special makeup effects on and direct Wishmaster and they're both previous episodes of this podcast. This movie undoubtedly made Sam Raimi a director to watch, but also gave cult horror one of its most endearing heroes in Ash Williams.

And Bruce Campbell fully embraced that king of horror label. Ash is more fleshed out this time around.

He's an old fashioned matinee idol, overly confident, wisecracking and synonymizes the franchise so much that it never seems to work without him. The scene where the entity chases him around the house only to lose sight of him and give up shouldn't work in a horror movie. And yet here it does.

Because Bruce Campbell is so damn good. He is Evil Dead and Evil Dead is him.

Crimewave was such a huge disappointment for Sam Raimi that Evil Dead 2 was seen as a last ditch attempt to prove himself. It was almost a go for broke attempt. Throwing everything at the screen and pretty much crab everything sticking is some sort of achievement.

This was one of the first out and out horror movies I ever saw and I loved it. I always say I'm not a horror girly and yet this is my sort of thing. The effects hold up really well.

The makeup is great, it's funny, it's scary enough to be scary enough. Sam Raimi had the talent to make the Evil Dead and then come back and reimagine his own story into something bigger.

Hone his talents and 15 years later, get the Spider man trilogy. How did that happen? When he's not constrained by studio interference, he makes great movies. Bruce Campbell will forever be known as Ash.

And that's no bad thing. He holds a unique place in cinema history. A leading man with leading man looks and charisma who could have become a list.

But he's happy where he is, and he never took his fame for granted. Sometimes movies happen because of luck, but sometimes it's because something else didn't happen.

Evil Dead 2 took the small amount of money it had and threw everything on the screen. It's imaginative, vibrant and cartoonish. The perfect movie to watch this Halloween. No, actually not perfect. Groovy. Thank you for listening.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Evil Dead 2 and thank you for your continued support of this podcast. If you want to get involved and help this podcast grow, you can leave a rating or review wherever you found this podcast.

You can find me and follow me on social media at verbaldiorama. Or you can tell your friends and family about this podcast or about this episode.

And of course, if you haven't listened to the previous episode on the Evil Dead, now's the time to go and listen to the previous episode on the Evil Dead Next episode. We are going from groovy to groovy, baby. Yeah. Does film history make you horny, baby? Does a movie's legacy make you randy?

Verbal Diorama is shagadelic and it's going into the history and legacy of Britain's ultimate gentleman spy, Austin Danger Powers. The next episode is on Austin Powers, international man of mystery and it is going to be groovy, baby.

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It just leaves for me to say Happy Halloween to you all. I hope you have a very spooky time, I hope you enjoy some very spooky movies and I hope to see you next time on the podcast. And finally. Bye.