Evil Dead Collection

Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell grew up together in Michigan and had been making Super-8 shorts since they were teenagers. To prove they could pull off something bigger, they shot a seven-minute short called Within the Woods for $1,600 — not meant as a rough draft of the eventual film, by Raimi's own account, but purely as something to show investors. It worked: a lawyer friend advised them on how to structure a production, and they raised roughly $90,000 largely from Michigan doctors and dentists willing to gamble on a couple of local kids. Bruce Campbell put up his own family's Northern Michigan property as collateral to finish the film and blow it up to 35mm for theatrical release. After a genuinely brutal shoot in a remote Tennessee cabin, the finished film premiered at a hometown theater in Detroit to, in Campbell's words, "a thousand curious relatives, investors and ex-high school pals."

What actually got the film seen beyond that room was Stephen King. A producer got it in front of him at Cannes, and King was moved enough to write a full review in Twilight Zone magazine calling it "ferociously original" — a quote Raimi has said made all the difference: "Without that, the movie may have been lost, but with King's endorsement, we were able to make our first sales." Released unrated in the U.S. to dodge an X rating, it built its reputation on the midnight-movie circuit rather than a wide release, and ended up on the UK's notorious "video nasty" list in 1983, part of a wave of horror films British authorities tried to ban outright that year.

The two sequels have a stranger relationship to each other and to the original than a normal trilogy, and it isn't by design — it's because of who owned what. When Raimi made Evil Dead II, his team didn't hold the rights to use actual footage from the first film, which a different company controlled. Their fix was to reshoot a condensed "recap" of the original's plot with different actors standing in for the earlier cast, as though it were archival footage, before picking the story back up where the real film left off. Bruce Campbell has described the result bluntly: "It's a requel! It's whatever you wanna call it!" The same rights problem hit again on the next film — the name "Evil Dead" itself couldn't legally be used for it — so Army of Darkness had to reinterpret the ending of Evil Dead II rather than continue directly from it. Each entry's connection to the one before it is a legal workaround dressed up as a creative choice.

Army of Darkness has its own odd history underneath that: it was originally announced under the title Evil Dead II: Evil Dead and the Army of Darkness, before producer Dino De Laurentiis pushed for something closer to the original's tone for what actually became Evil Dead II, bumping the medieval concept to a third film instead. Despite strong reviews, it was a genuine box-office disappointment that effectively closed out the trilogy's theatrical run — fittingly, for a film whose own ending was unsettled enough to exist in two different versions, both sitting in this collection side by side.