It's easy to forget that demon-blasting Evil Dead hero Ash wasn't always a badass, given how amps-up-to-11 cool and gun-slingingly groovy he is most of the time, but the evidence is right there in Sam Raimi's debut feature: Ash was a bit of a dunce in the first Evil Dead. Quiet, slightly geeky and hesitant to act most of the time, Ash emerges as the unlikely hero in 1981's Evil Dead, leaving the more self-assured, macho stuff to his friend Scotty (who dies despite himself). Even by the end, as the sole survivor of the grisly ordeal, Bruce Campbell isn't yet playing the Ash we think of today. This was because Raimi and Campbell were still yet to see the Evil Dead franchise's potential as a horror-comedy (the first film isn't as intentionally funny as its reputation suggests) and if a character is defined by his or her first appearance, then Ash's behaviour in subsequent films is uncharacteristic. Evil Dead II is uniquely both a sequel and a remake scenes from the first film are recreated and extremely different so an argument can be made that the first film is no longer strictly part of the canon, but where's the fun in that? Hardened beyond compare by the events of the first film and after a brief stint as a deadite Ash quickly reinvents himself as '80s Action Hero to the Nth degree, replacing his hand with a chainsaw, participating in the most cliched 'tooling up' sequence this side of Rambo and arming himself with an unrivaled arsenal of one-liners. The Evil Dead series is one of the greatest things committed to cult cinema, and if that gift to horror nerds was reliant on completely re-imagining the central character, then hail to the king!
26 year old novelist and film nerd from London. Currently working on his third novel and dreaming up more list-based film articles to flood WhatCulture with.
