The Untold Truth Of Evil Dead II

Long before he turned a Marvel hero into a zombie in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," director Sam Raimi proved he was the master of the undead subgenre in his "Evil Dead" trilogy. Even more impressive, he proved he could handle any sub-subgenre within it: starting with brutally straight-ahead horror in "Evil Dead," he injected a heavy dose of comedy in "Evil Dead II" and went all in on the genre-busting slapstick swashbuckler "Army of Darkness." Fans have never been able to agree which is the best, but we've always had a soft spot for the middle chapter, funnier than the original but less goofy than "Army of Darkness."

Best of all, it's a true horror comedy, always keeping you guessing whether the next moment will make you laugh or scream. And sometimes, even more disturbingly, it'll switch back and forth in a single scene, like the classic "laughing house" sequence, where all kinds of inanimate objects come to life like a "Silly Symphony" cartoon and start laughing at Final Boy and sort-of hero Ash (Bruce Campbell). He starts laughing along until his laughter turns into a scream of abject terror. Even the lamp's goofy Popeye laugh turns into a bloodcurdling wheeze.

So how did this masterpiece of splatstick enter, much like the Evil Dead themselves, into our universe? Well, there was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (mostly sweat) involved, but everyone seemed to have a ball anyway. Here are their stories.

It's rare that you can describe a movie as both a shoestring production and a special effects spectacular, but that's exactly what "Evil Dead II" is. Raimi accomplished this by combining every trick in the book — prosthetic makeup, simple hand puppets, high-tech animatronics, stop-motion animation, miniature sets, matte paintings, overcranking, and undercranking.

Most cost-effective of all, he simply ran the film backwards. Some scenes are obvious, like the smoke receding into the ground as the sun rises after Ash's first night in the cabin. But others are so seamless that it would probably never occur to you there were any special effects involved.

For instance, the documentary "Swallowed Souls" reveals that the scene of Bobbie Joe swallowing Henrietta's popped-out eyeball was filmed by yanking the eyeball out of her mouth. To get attacked by the trees, she sat on a grass-covered treadmill, and the roots growing into her face were actually attached before being pulled out. Raimi leaned so much on his backwards trick that Bruce Campbell recalls on the Blu-ray audio commentary, "I remember watching the dailies and Sam turned to me, going, 'That is the worst reverse-motion acting I've ever seen.' You'd only hear that from Sam."

If there's one thing Sam Raimi loves more than making movies, it's tormenting his friends — and if he can combine those two pleasures, all the better. Just look at Raimi's "Oz the Great Powerful" and "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," where he gives Campbell a cameo just long enough for him to get beaten up and leave, or "The Quick and the Dead," where he made up an excuse for actor Pat Hingle to wallop on Campbell when the cameras weren't even rolling.

In theory, Campbell had a stunt double to take some of the punishment for him. In practice, as he explains on the Blu-ray commentary, he got to use him exactly twice. Raimi responds, "The more there was a chance of Bruce hurting himself, the more appealing it was to let him do his own work!" It does nothing to shake Raimi's prankster image a few minutes later, when the crew is shown watching Ash get whacked by a branch and Campbell remembers that Raimi was holding it from offscreen.

But Campbell got off easy compared to Sam's little brother Ted Raimi, who, as little brothers tend to, got the worst of it. He wore the 20-pound hag suit in the blazing Southern heat, sometimes spun around on a harness, and was always sweating — in the scene where Henrietta flies round yanking archaeologist Annie by the hair, you can actually see sweat pouring out of her ear!

Some stunts were so risky that Sam Raimi had to take extra insurance on them. Specifically, there's the scene where the invisible evil force grabs Ash and sends him flying through the air, spinning upside-down and back again, ramming straight into every obstacle in his path.

Even though this happens in the first 10 minutes of the movie, the commentary reveals it was the last scene Raimi filmed. Why? Well, that really is Bruce Campbell there, and he really is slamming through every tree in the forest. As he explains on the commentary, they waited until the rest of the movie was done, "that way in case anything happened to me, we'd be fine." Given how much other abuse Campbell takes throughout the movie, that's really saying something. But it turns out the crew had every right to be worried: just before Ash goes flying, the cameraman simulates the Evil's point of view by driving a motorcycle with a camera attached through the cabin, before stopping right in front of Campbell's face and breaking his jaw.

One of the most disturbing scenes in "Evil Dead II" — and one we nominated for most disturbing scene of all time — begins when the Evil's first victim, Ash's girlfriend Linda, turns out to be less dead than he hoped. Her headless body rises from the grave and starts dancing, eventually rejoining with her eerily doll-like head. Doug Beswick animated the scene in stop-motion, and as anyone who's grown up getting the creeps from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" or "The Corpse Bride" can tell you, the process creates an uncanny valley effect that Beswick plays to the hilt. The result is creepy, beautiful, and kind of silly all at once.

A clay figure might have done all the dancing, but Beswick was still drawing from life — and from an unexpected source. Sam Raimi reveals on his commentary that he got in touch with his old high school drama teacher, Helen LaBatte, to choreograph Linda's undeath dance. Effects supervisor Greg Nicotero adds that she even acted it out herself (presumably except for the parts where Linda's head falls off). It's hard for most of us to imagine our teachers approving of an adult career making trashy horror movies. It's even harder to imagine them being so supportive that they'd actually help make your trashy horror movie.

When it's time to list the great icons of horror — Dracula, Frankenstein, Norman Bates, Leatherface, Jaws — hopefully there's room for Ash's chattering, possessed hand (we call him Squeaky). He might have never come to life if screenwriter Scott Spiegel hadn't messed around with the Hamburger Helper mascot. In "Attack of the Helping Hand," Spiegel enlisted Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell for camera duties and gave Raimi a bit part as the milkman. The story: Instead of helping a housewife make hamburgers, the living glove attacks her. Just about everything from that short made it into "Evil Dead II," but fortunately without the overtone of sexual violence. Just a few examples: the hand flips the protagonist the bird in both movies. Both protagonists try to get rid of the disembodied hand by drowning it and trapping it under a bucket (they even use the same line, "Welcome to your new home") that we see sliding around in the background just when it seems like the threat is over.

Getting to revisit the evil severed hand was what sold Spiegel on the movie. As he explains in "Swallowed Souls," "Sam goes, I'm going to take that short, and it's gonna be 'Attack of the Helping Hand' meets 'Evil Dead.' And I go, 'I totally get the movie you're making. Okay, cool.'" That turned out be an understatement: The hysterical scene of Ash fighting his own hand goes past cool and into awesome territory.

If there's a simple explanation for the enduring success of "Evil Dead II," it's that, as effects artist Shannon Shea says in "Swallowed Souls," it captures better than any other movie the thrills of a carnival House of Horrors. Sometimes you'll get a good laugh out of the cheesiness of it all, and sometimes some horrible creature will jump out of nowhere and scare you senseless. Stroll across the boardwalk to the roller coaster, imagine taking both rides at once, and you'll have a good sense of what makes "Evil Dead II" so special.

Someone seems to have taken the funhouse connection a little too literally, because that's where one of the props ended up. To defeat the Evil, Annie has to recover, translate, and recite a spell to "make it a thing of the flesh" so Ash can kill it and/or send it back in time. The Evil's corporeal form appears as a gigantic animatronic that the crew nicknamed "Rotten Apple Head." On the commentary, Raimi explains that the crew lost track of it. It was too heavy for them to haul off the set, but some local businessman apparently thought it was worth the weight. Raimi knows this because that October, the Rotten Apple Head resurfaced at a local haunted house.