The Evil Dead 2 is our number two film on the NerdiPop 80’s Horror Countdown!
Are you ready to return to the Cabin and confront the Book of Dead and the Deadite’s again in the sequel or remake of the 1981 horror film classic, The Evil Dead?
Synopsis:
Ash, a young man, takes his fiancée Linda to a lonely cabin in the woods and plays back a professor’s tape recorded reading of sections from the Book of the Dead. The magic summons a terrible power from the woods, transforming Linda into a hideous Deadite and threatening Ash with the same fate. When the professor’s daughter and her entourage arrive at the cottage, the night becomes a non-stop, grotesquely hilarious war between chainsaw and shotgun on one side and demon horde and flying eyeball on the other.
9 Fun facts about The Evil Dead (1987)
(1) This film is frequently mistaken for a remake of The Evil Dead (1981); however, this is not the case. Because the rights to broadcast footage from the original could not be obtained in order to recap what happened, the opening was rewritten to explain how Ash got to the cabin, and so on.
(2) Bruce Campbell says the single line “work shed” during the scene where Linda’s severed head bites Ash’s hand. Due to the poor quality of the audio, this line was later re-dubbed in post-production, giving it a peculiar, slightly “disproportionate” tone. Nine years later, when filming his cameo in Escape from L.A. (1996), Kurt Russell joked with Bruce Campbell on the set, “Say ‘work shed.'”
(3) Stephen King was such a fan of The Evil Dead (1981) that he persuaded producer Dino De Laurentiis (who was also developing King’s Maximum Overdrive (1986) at the time) to finance Evil Dead II through his production company DEG (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group) (1987).
(4) The majority of the film was shot on a set created inside the JR Faison Junior High School gymnasium in Wadesboro, North Carolina.
(5) The Evil Dead (1981) recap contains a scene in which the “evil force” runs through the cabin and rams into Ash. People were encouraged to believe that Bruce Campbell had a broken jaw when Sam Raimi (who was manning the camera at the time) crashed into him with a bicycle. Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell fabricated this story as a joke to test how many people believed it actually happened.
(6) Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” is one of the books on the can that catches Ash’s possessed hand.
(7) The smoke produced by the chainsaw is actually tobacco smoke. To produce the illusion, Sam Raimi attached tubing to the back of the Chainsaw, hid off-camera, and blew cigarette smoke down the tube.
(8) When Ash carves his girlfriend’s head with a chainsaw and searches for the pages in the later cellar scenes, a glove belonging to the Freddy Krueger character from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) can be seen hanging above the tool shed door. This was in response to A Nightmare on Elm Street’s use of The Evil Dead (1981) on a television screen (1984).
