Bruce Campbell Reveals the Brutally Honest Reason Evil Dead Keeps Hiring New Directors

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

Handing someone an Evil Dead movie means trusting them to put their own stamp on a franchise whose fans have strong opinions about everything from the amount of humor to the color of the blood. Bruce Campbell has a few of those opinions himself. After starring in Sam Raimi‘s original trilogy and helping produce the later movies, he has watched other directors take something he helped build into places he would not necessarily have gone.

That has been part of the appeal of the newer movies. Fede Álvarez‘s Evil Dead is a vicious ordeal for Mia and her friends, while Lee Cronin‘s Evil Dead Rise finds its horror in children discovering that their mother is the most dangerous person in the building. Sébastien Vaniček‘s Evil Dead Burn turns a grieving widow’s visit with her in-laws into a Deadite nightmare. All three belong to the same franchise that gave Ash a chainsaw hand, but none of these filmmakers needed to turn their lead into another Ash to make it work.

According to Campbell, newer directors are more inclined to listen to the producers. In a new interview with Den of Geek, he explains: “They tend to pay attention to producers a little more fresh out of the gate.” Once a filmmaker has several movies behind them, he jokes, they might tell him and Robert Tapert “to suck it.”

Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath
your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what
it would leave behind.

Your nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you
to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever
won that particular argument.

• Freddy is horror’s cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot
  guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever.
• You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your
  own head is where this does its damage.
• These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose
  because they are weak. They lose because they are tired.
• You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep.

Your nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the
person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it.

• Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you
  describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you.
• You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You
  know that feeling from real life too.
• The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you
  have met those adults.
• By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own.

Your nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost
certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them.

• Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be
  somebody who was at the party.
• You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the
  same way you watch films.
• The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are
  the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention.
• Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home.

Your nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people
asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving.

• The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary
  room that quietly stops feeling ordinary.
• Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than
  personal, which is rarer than it sounds.
• This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are
  the ones who are not alone and refuse to be.
• Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one
  standing in the hallway.

Bruce Campbell Has a Theory About Why the New ‘Evil Dead’ Movies Feel Different

• Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

• Image via Warner Bros. Pictures.

• Image via Warner Bros.

• Image via Warner Bros.

Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures.

Image via Warner Bros.

Image via Warner Bros.

Campbell is also very aware that the filmmakers taking over Evil Dead have different ideas about what makes a good time at the movies. Discussing Lee Cronin and Sébastien Vaniček, he points to their Irish and French backgrounds, respectively, describing their approaches as “European sensibilities.” He then apologizes in advance for the generalization he is about to make. “But most European filmmakers don’t blow shit up. They don’t do knife fights,” Campbell says. He adds that big action sequences hold less appeal for them. Coming from someone whose most famous character replaced his severed hand with a chainsaw, then spent another movie fighting skeletons in medieval England, it’s clear that there’s a respect for taking the franchise new places.

Campbell’s comments make the differences between these directors more interesting than a simple question of whether Evil Dead should be funny or serious. His own movies could be terrifying, ridiculous, and disgusting within the same scene. Each of the modern directors has found their own balance, even if Campbell might occasionally wonder why everyone else is laughing. Bringing in someone with a different sense of humor can keep the Deadites unpredictable, which is good news for audiences and terrible news for whoever opens the book next.

Evil Dead Burn is streaming on HBO Max now. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.