On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: Who the Hell Are the Wise Men in “Evil Dead Burn”?
Whether you’ve already seen Sébastien Vaniček’s strangely cerebral “Evil Dead Burn” in theaters or you’re planning to catch it soon, serious genre fans should probably spend at least part of the upcoming weekend brushing up on Sam Raimi‘s deeply unserious “Army of Darkness.”
For one thing, this goofy fantasy adventure explains who the so-called “Wise Men” name-dropped in Warner Bros.’ latest sequel even are. More importantly, Raimi’s divisive spinoff reveals the creative franchise scaffolding he quietly established when he first brought his and Bruce Campbell‘s indie horror sensation to the studio system in 1993 — whether he realized it or not.
After spending several years away from the “Evil Dead” franchise, Raimi returned with a kind of imaginative fearlessness that still feels startling to describe today. Co-written with his brother Ivan Raimi, who made his “Evil Dead” debut here, “Army of Darkness” is the undeniable black sheep of Raimi’s original trilogy. It’s a medieval fantasy comedy that trades claustrophobic home-invasion terror for skeleton armies, broad slapstick antics, gleeful self-parody, and a slew of visual effects that haven’t all aged with the same grace.
But what once looked like a bizarre detour for Raimi now feels more like the moment “Evil Dead” discovered what it could actually become — not a horror franchise defined by narrative continuity, but a cinematic sandbox built around stylistic freedom. Without getting into spoilers, the ending of “Evil Dead Burn” invites fans to reconsider what Raimi was really trying to accomplish with “Army of Darkness” (which, yes, once boasted the vastly superior working title “Medieval Dead”) and offers an intriguing glimpse of where the series could theoretically go next.
Both resetting and continuing the events of 1987’s masterful “Evil Dead II,” “Army of Darkness” opens with a snappy prologue that sends the chainsaw-handed Ash Williams (Campbell) sailing past yet another doomed cabin and straight into battle with the Deadites in the Middle Ages. In hindsight, that wild tonal swing — and Raimi’s ability to survive it, both creatively and commercially — revealed a defining principle of the “Evil Dead” legacy.
Love it or hate it, “Army of Darkness” helped cinematic individuality become just as important to diehard “Evil Dead” fans as the Deadites themselves. Raimi had already hinted at that philosophy by casting Campbell opposite three different actresses as Ash’s ill-fated girlfriend Linda (here, Bridget Fonda ever so briefly) and repeatedly trapping them in variations of the same grisly fate.
As the fair maiden Sheila, Embeth Davidtz arrives armed with the audience’s familiarity with two previous “Evil Dead” films, demonstrating why repetition is often the key to innovation. You have to have a mold before you can break it, and Raimi did today’s filmmakers a tremendous service by stress-testing his own invention before moving on.
Distributed by Universal after two fiercely independent productions, “Army of Darkness” irritated some critics but performed respectably at the box office. Today, it also stands as a uniquely vibrant example of a young filmmaker pushing the blockbuster form as far as he could without sacrificing its populist appeal.
A true steward of the modern blockbuster, Raimi has continued that balancing act ever since — from the “Spider-Man” films (second sequels are tricky for him, huh?) to this year’s triumphant “Send Help.” As for the growing “Evil Dead” canon, the modern sequels from Fede Álvarez, Lee Cronin, and now Vaniček don’t imitate their executive producer so much as inherit his audacity.
If “Evil Dead Burn” is defined by Vaniček’s uncanny aptitude for rendering uncomfortable textures, then “Army of Darkness” feels like examining Raimi’s creative DNA under a microscope. Exuberant and endlessly inventive, it’s perhaps the finest showcase of Campbell’s physical talents and a game-changing chapter in horror history that’s making the future look brighter by the day. —Alison Foreman
The Bite: Bruce Campbell, Call Me!
To start this write-up on an appropriately lowbrow note: is Bruce Campbell the hottest man in horror history? The star of Raimi’s original “Evil Dead” trilogy has the chiseled jawline, broad shoulders, and pitch-black hair of a Golden Age of Hollywood star, and his pretty boy features only become significantly more appealing when he’s caked in all the blood, dirt, and cuts that poor Ash accumulates across three increasingly ridiculous films. But what really makes him such a swoon-worthy presence is his charmingly elastic face.
With a mouth that can stretch out as wide as rubber and eyes that seem perpetually on the verge of bulging out of their sockets, Campbell is the closest live-action screen actor equivalent cinema has ever had to Bugs Bunny. And it’s put to especially good use in “Army of Darkness,” a film that gives the actor space to look utterly majestic, staring into the night with wind perfectly running through his raven hair, and a pitiful buffoon, taking enough physical punishment to make Wile E. Coyote blush.
Over a gloriously packed 81 minutes, Campbell is dragged through muddy water, gets poked in the bum, has a skeleton stick their bony hand in his nose and slap him silly in the face, and so much more punishment than really has time to be catalogued in this column. Slapstick is a classic form of comedy that appeals to the most base and animalistic of human desires — it’s quite simply funny to see someone experience a little pain — but it can only work with an expressive performer who makes every punch and pratfall feel real. Campbell is such an actor, and the visceral power of his performance makes Ash, for all the moments he goes full badass, a figure it’s hard not to feel a little protective of.
What strikes me most watching Raimi’s “Evil Dead” films is how tactile they are, infused with a sense of physicality that makes the director’s outlandish world of demons and chainsaws gritty and raw. Shot on a budget twice that of its predecessor — a whopping $11 million — “Army of Darkness” constructs a Middle Ages that mostly consists of a single castle, a windmill, and a few acres of woodland. And yet it never feels like a theme park for Ash to run around, but a living time and place filled with curmudgeonly knights, bodacious maidens, and undead demons ripped straight out of a gnarly horror comic.
Raimi’s projects throughout his career have often felt like the midpoint where live-action and cartoon meet, and “Army of Darkness” is where that strain of his nerdom reaches its zenith. Making the film, Raimi utilized the Introvision front-projection process — in which pre-shot material is projected over performers to achieve an effect — to pay tribute to the stop-motion work of animator Ray Harryhausen, with skeletons ripped straight out of the iconic sword fights of “Jason and the Argonauts.”
The results aren’t traditionally pretty, yet this stylized world has real weight to it, with Campbell’s performance ably bridging the gaps where the special effects sometimes falter, making for a movie you can feel as much as you can watch. In the face of slick, airless, digitized horror films all too common today, the synesthetic experience of “Army of Darkness” hits like a startling burst of adrenaline.
As horror franchises evolve across installments, there’s a natural tendency for the creatives behind them to overthink things and get a bit too lost in the sauce of mythos and worldbuilding and topping themselves with bigger, juicier scares. What Raimi does with his original “Evil Dead” trilogy is much more interesting, setting a new aesthetic template for zombie cinema in his debut before promptly taking the piss out of the standard he set in the follow-ups, treating this demonic hellscape as a playground rather than a jigsaw puzzle to form a portrait of.
Blasting Ash back to the medieval past, the director doesn’t let the promise of exploring the origins of the Necronomicon get in the way of a blissed-out good time. “Army of Darkness” is a testament to the pleasures of watching an absolutely beautiful man get the shit kicked out of him, and to properly thank Sam Raimi for giving it to us, I have five little words: “Hail to the king, baby.” —Wilson Chapman
“Army of Darkness” is now streaming on HBO Max and VOD.
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
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