Part of The Best Halloween Movie Lineup from CelebnMovies247 — our day-by-day guide to surviving Halloween week with your nerves technically intact.
Welcome to Gore Day, the one this whole lineup has been threatening you with. The brief is blood — gallons of it, decades of it — so we are running the entire Evil Dead franchise in release order: five films, three eras, one cabin, one book, and the most durable chin in horror history. Combined running time is 437 minutes — seven hours and seventeen minutes. That sounds almost manageable until you remember what this series does per minute. Hydrate. Lay down towels. Never, under any circumstances, read the book aloud.
The Evil Dead (1981) — 85 Minutes
Sam Raimi took a crew of friends into the Tennessee woods with a budget reported at around $375,000 and came back with the meanest handmade horror film ever made. Bruce Campbell’s Ash starts the night as the least interesting man at the cabin and ends it as the last one screaming, and the camera — that famous, hurtling, through-the-trees camera — invents a visual language out of pure poverty. Britain banned it as a “video nasty,” which remains the proudest line on its résumé. This is the scripture: raw, cruel and funny only by accident.
No official trailer for the 1981 original is posted on a studio channel, so there is no embed here — this film traveled by bootleg for years anyway.
Evil Dead II (1987) — 84 Minutes
Then Raimi did the most Raimi thing imaginable: he remade his own film, as a sequel, with more money and a sense of humor. Evil Dead II is part two and part do-over, and it is where splatter becomes slapstick — the Three Stooges with arterial spray. The possessed hand, the chainsaw replacement, the laugh that answers itself from inside the cabin: this is the film where Ash Williams stops being a victim and becomes Ash. If we are forced to keep one disc from this entire marathon, this is the one, and it is not close.
Army of Darkness (1992) — 81 Minutes
The trilogy closes by dropping Ash into 1300 A.D., swapping the cabin for a castle siege and the horror for a Ray Harryhausen daydream — stop-motion skeleton armies, a wisecracking Evil Ash, and “Hail to the king, baby.” Universal released it in the States, and it is easily the lightest film on today’s schedule. Program it third on purpose: after two films of cabin carnage, this is your breather, the comedy palate cleanser before the modern double-header tries to hurt you again.
No official trailer for this one is posted on a studio channel, so there is no embed here.
Evil Dead (2013) — 91 Minutes
Fede Álvarez takes the wheel — with Raimi, Campbell and Robert Tapert producing — and performs the boldest tonal swerve in remake history: he deletes every joke. Jane Levy’s Mia is dragged to the family cabin to detox, which makes the possession that follows a genuine metaphor instead of a plot coupon, and Levy gives the most committed performance in the franchise. All of the blood, none of the winking. Where Raimi’s films spray gore like a fire hose at a carnival, Álvarez opens a vein and points it at your face for ninety-one minutes.
Evil Dead Rise (2023) — 96 Minutes
Lee Cronin, hand-picked by Raimi, moves the siege out of the woods and into a condemned Los Angeles high-rise, and the franchise gets its scariest Deadite since 1981: Alyssa Sutherland’s Ellie, a possessed mother smiling down at her own children. Lily Sullivan’s Beth is the auntie who has to become Ash by morning. At ninety-six minutes it is the longest film in the series — every previous entry is shorter — and possibly the meanest, a film that treats the family unit the way the original treated a cabin full of college kids. The bloodline is intact. The blood, generally, is everywhere.
The 247 Take —
Five films, three tones, one rule: the book is never your friend. Evil Dead II is the peak, Rise is the shock, the 1981 original is the scripture, and the whole marathon runs under seven and a half hours — shorter than yesterday’s clown, and somehow louder. This is the bloodiest day of the Halloween lineup and we would not trade a single gallon. Groovy.
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Sources: Runtimes, franchise history and production details from Collider, MovieWeb and CinemaBlend.
