Ready Or Not Star Samara Weaving Made Her Horror Debut In This Acclaimed TV Series

Anointing talented newcomers as scream queens is one of the greatest joys of being a horror fan, and in recent years, Samara Weaving has proven herself worthy of the coveted title. The Australian actress has done everything from comedies to action movies, but is perhaps most recognized for her genre work in "The Babysitter," "Ready or Not," and "Azrael." Although Weaving has been a professional actor since the late 2000s, her (literally) splashy horror debut came in the form of a recurring role in the first season of "Ash Vs. Evil Dead."

Now streaming for free on Pluto TV, the acclaimed horror television series picks up where Sam Raimi's beloved "Evil Dead" film trilogy left off. Bruce Campbell's Ashley J. Williams is still a bumbling, yet lovable fool who lives by himself in a mobile home and works at the local Value Stop. In the throes of smoking weed and trying to impress a girl (one of the funniest moments in the "Evil Dead" franchise), he reads from the Necronomicon, hilariously unleashing a whole new wave of evil upon the world. 

Ash travels to the evil cabin in the woods where this all started in the hope that he can put the whole thing behind him. Meanhile, his trusty Value Stop comrades/Deadite hunters Pablo (Ray Santiago) and Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo) get lost in the woods nearby and encounter a group of Australian hikers. Standing behind the two obvious redshirts is Weaving as Heather, and it becomes immediately clear why she's since become a popular horror figure.

Samara Weaving is a woman of many talents who utilizes her expressiveness in a manner that was made for horror movies. Her enchantingly large blue eyes project an innocence that transforms into an oculus of terror when really bad stuff goes down. In "Ash Vs. Evil Dead," it truly feels like Heather's scared beyond belief when Deadite Amanda Fisher (Jill Marie Jones) retrofits the corpses of her two best friends as bleeding hand puppets. But perhaps the most important discovery comes in the three-part Season 1 finale, in which Weaving introduces the world to her infamous bird scream.

With "Ash Vs. Evil Dead" being her first foray into horror, Weaving couldn't have possibly known that she was holding in a ferociously memorable wail that sounds as if a terrified seagull found themselves trapped in a human body. You can practically feel the reverberations through the screen every time she unleashes it. She discovered it by accident while shooting, and in that instance, everyone in the room knew it was something special.

In the episode "The Dark One," Heather gets her moment in the spotlight with an onslaught of Deadite nastiness such as a broken leg, cockroaches all over her body and nails in her face. She even explodes into a geyser of blood, not unlike the Le Domas family in the ending of 2019's "Ready or Not." Weaving effortlessly elevates what could have been run-of-the-mill Deadite fodder into one of the series' most memorable side characters. We wouldn't have her future horror outings without "Ash Vs. Evil Dead."

"Ash Vs. Evil Dead" was billed as a legacy sequel series, and the Season 1 finale plays like the "Evil Dead 4" horror folks had been waiting for prior to 2023's "Evil Dead Rise." Keeping with the subgenre's tropes, the younger generation in Pablo and Kelly are upheld as Ash's successors, of which Ray Santiago and Dana DeLorenzo are more than worthy of the honor, and a better world would see them carrying the "Evil Dead" torch in future projects. But the true heir in all of this is Samara Weaving.

If she hadn't been killed off, Heather could have fit easily with the core trio in future seasons. Much like Bruce Campbell, Weaving became an overnight scream queen by playing a character who goes from a doe-eyed traveler to a blood-soaked 20-something who watches her friends die in gruesome ways because of an evil book. The first time she gets coated in blood, on account of Ash slicing up Amanda with his chainsaw hand, is baptismal. It's since become an unofficial recurring tenet of Weaving's horror work that she must, at some point, end up drenched in blood.

As someone who began her acting career starring in Australian soap operas from the late 2000s to the early 2010s, Weaving has surely come a long way. It's telling how much of a horror mainstay she's become that it was surprising to see her taken out soon in the opening sequence of "Scream VI."