For fans of Sam Raimi’s iconic horror franchise, the 2020 Game Awards were especially exciting thanks to the announcement of the upcoming Evil Dead: The Game. Owners of multiple different consoles will be able to play it in 2021, including Microsoft and Sony’s two most recent consoles, the Nintendo Switch, and the PC. Since that fateful announcement, fans of the show and movies have been speculating how the game can tie into the Evil Dead franchise as a whole.
Many people expect Evil Dead: The Game to combine the two major elements that so many people enjoy in the movies and show: horror and comedy. For many fans of the franchise, a major selling point beyond the gore and scares in the comedy. Many fans agree that The Evil Dead (1981) wasn’t meant to be a comedy, but some people see it as such due to the difference between eighties horror movies and those from more recent years. The developers have stated that the original movie is not meant to be comedic, but it’s hard to not call The Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness horror comedies.
Chainsaws, blood-soaked faces, and legions of undead spirits known as Deadites make it clear that the series is meant to be horrific. Final boy Ash, the hero of the films and show as portrayed by Bruce Campbell, goes through hell and back just to survive. He literally gets ripped into another era of time in Army of Darkness where he struggles to make sense of the world around him. In Evil Dead, spirits possess his friends and try to murder him. In Evil Dead 2, he has to chop his own hand off with a chainsaw when it becomes possessed. There are plenty of brutal moments in the series, including the tree assault scene from Evil Dead that got only somewhat toned down in Evil Dead 2.
Evil Dead 1 and Evil Dead 2 feature a common horror set-up with young people vacationing in a remote cabin in the woods, unable to reach help from civilization. A long-dead, evil force is accidentally summoned by a recorded reading of the Lovecraftian Necronomicon, or the Book of the Dead, which then proceeds to possess multiple people and attempt to use them to kill others. Undead spreading plagues, demonic possessions, and remote locations the main character(s) can’t leave are all tried-and-true staples of the horror genre.
Slapstick, or physical comedy, is a common element of funny movies, and it goes well with the grotesque body horror moments in the Evil Dead franchise. When Ash starts to become a Deadite himself in Evil Dead 2 and has to fight his own possessed hand, it’s gory and brutal to watch him sever a part of his own body . . . but it’s also ridiculous and funny. Not everyone will find humor in watching a man play a game of cat-and-mouse like Tom and Jerry with his own chopped-off hand, but watching how seriously Campbell takes the fight with his own hand has brought many a viewer to fits of laughter.
In Evil Dead, Ash is forced to decapitate his girlfriend Linda when she becomes a Deadite, and he buries her only for her to rise up again and attack him. In Evil Dead 2, Ash thinks he’s having a dream in which the disturbing decapitated figure that Linda has become dances with her own severed head. If Evil Dead and gross-out humor is the viewer’s cup of tea, this moment has a lot of humor in it, partially in his wacky it is. A large part of the movies’ comedy comes from how far they will take certain situations.
Ash Williams is a horror movie icon who slashes and shoots his way through his enemies, and he’s the ultimate survivor. At the same time, he can majorly screw up important moments, like when he forgets the pronunciation of the final words in the incantation to remove the Book of the Dead in Army of Darkness. There would be no Ash vs the Deadites without all the gore and scares, but arguably, the franchise wouldn’t be a cult classic if Raimi hadn’t leaned as much into the comedy and slapstick elements in the later movies. If Evil Dead: The Game is to pay homage to the films, it would do well to play into horror tropes and have some serious scares, but it should also be hilarious.
Evil Dead: The Game releases on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in 2021.
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