![]() This article was amended on 16 December 2015. Christ, compared to some of these guys, I still got 30 more years of this crap!”Īsh vs Evil Dead is available on demand to Virgin Media customers. They’re not slowing down because they’ll die. He does more fan conventions a year than I do. Success begets success”), Campbell has not only made peace with being known for his trademark role, he sees it keeping him active well into his twilight years. ![]() With a second season of Ash vs Evil Dead green-lit before the first one even airs, and persisting rumours of a fourth film (“If this show goes three, four years, I’ll guarantee you there’s going to be another movie. Some guy called me the Gregory Peck of B-movies. I’m grateful there’s something people can grab on to and remember. If all you watch is horror then I’m your horror guy. But a guy that watches Evil Dead isn’t necessarily going to watch any of that. I’ve done comedies, dramas, children’s films. I used to get really pissed off when people didn’t recognise all the other stuff I did. Does that make for a confusing career? “I’m actually more pigeonholed by fans than by my own industry. A matter of weeks ago, he showed up on Fargo playing Ronald Reagan. To non-horror fans, Campbell is a working actor probably best known for his seven seasons on the US spy show Burn Notice. So I said to Sam: ‘Can you get your head around this as a TV show?’” If you don’t get the Taco Bell tie-in deal and it makes $40m on opening weekend you’re branded a loser and the franchise is dead. Do we really need a $200m Evil Dead? I don’t think so. But Sam Raimi makes big-budget movies now. “We only did it because people wouldn’t shut up about a sequel. In 2013, Campbell and Sam Raimi produced an Evil Dead remake that dispensed with the cartoon humour and reverted to the original template of five shrieking students trapped in a cabin with a book made of human flesh. We made one in the 70s, one in the 80s and one in the 90s, so it wasn’t like we were trying to shove the franchise down your throat.” Evil Dead hit a chord with people because we didn’t crank ’em out. We were never even Friday The 13th, but I’ve got 300 pictures of people’s Evil Dead tattoos that they’ve put all over their bodies and I don’t think you find that with other movies. “The Evil Dead fans are not gigantic,” says Campbell. ![]() But each rapidly assumed cult status and that cult has never dwindled. Neither movie was a big, or even medium-sized, hit. Everyone wanted to see what this video nasty was once we’d won the court case.” The publicity sent it to number one,” recalls Bruce Campbell, who plays The Evil Dead’s signature role, Ashley “Ash” J Williams. The hysteria continued all the way until a test trial in July 1984 when a Crown Court judge screened the film and failed to find it obscene. ![]() Soon after, police confiscated mainstays of the VHS horror shelf such as The Driller Killer, I Spit On Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust from the nation’s shops, with The Evil Dead considered the most notorious corrupter of young minds. In 1983, Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, demanded members of the House of Commons squirm their way through scenes of decapitation, dismemberment and tree-rape culled from Sam Raimi’s micro-budget splatter classic, The Evil Dead, in an attempt to force the government to clamp down on the then-burgeoning video-rental industry. Mary Whitehouse would be scratching her way out of the grave if she knew she’d helped the movie she branded “the number one video nasty” have a long and healthy lifespan.
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