This year marks the 45th anniversary of The Evil Dead, which launched the career of the legendary Sam Raimi and became one of the most discussed horror films in history. A successful franchise that encompasses film, television, comics, video games, and a half-dozen unofficial Italian sequels soon followed.
Evil Dead Burn, the sixth-ish film in the franchise, features Infested director Sébastien Vaniček unleashing undead mayhem upon an uncomfortable family reunion. In honor of the newest film, we’re revisiting and ranking every film and television entry in the series thus far.
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9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Director: Adam Marcus
Writers: Dean Lorey and Jay Huguely
“But isn’t this list…?” I’m confused, too. When 23-year-old film school graduate Adam Marcus was hired to direct the ninth entry in the Friday the 13th franchise, he couldn’t help but make sure everyone knew that what he really wanted to do was helm an Evil Dead film. That meant pairing up with screenwriter Dean Lorey to rewrite the screenplay from scratch in just four days while cramming in as many Evil Dead references as they could without producer Sean S. Cunningham noticing.
The result is the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis and the Kandarian Dagger being used to justify Jason Voorhees’ transformation into a body-swapping worm in a story that was equal parts nonsensical and boring. It did manage an outstanding performance by Steven Williams as the deadite-hunting Creighton Duke, but the film’s strengths stop there. At least it’s the easiest Evil Dead title to skip, and not nearly as bad of an Evil Dead film as it is a Friday the 13th one.
8. Within the Woods (1979)
Writer/Director: Sam Raimi
Produced on a $1,600 budget, Sam Raimi’s original concept short, performing well alongside local screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is the only reason the Evil Dead franchise even exists. But it also shows Raimi before he was such a talented filmmaker. It relies more on cliché slasher tropes that the series would shed by its first feature-length outing, most notably in killing Bruce Campbell‘s character almost immediately and having Ellen Sandweiss take on the more traditional final girl role.
Still, Within the Woods is worth watching if simply to see both the franchise and its creator in their infancy. And there are a few interesting glimpses of Raimi’s voice beginning to take shape.
Or at least there would be if Raimi had conservation in mind when producing it, which he did not. The film was shot on 8mm and then blown up to 35mm, which compromised image clarity. Surviving copies were then improperly stored, meaning this can now only be watched via barely legible scans and shoddy AI upscales.
7. Evil Dead (2013)
Director: Fede Álvarez
Writers: Fede Álvarez & Rodo Sayagues
Evil Dead marked the feature directorial debut of Fede Álvarez, who has found continued success in the horror genre with titles like Don’t Breathe, Alien: Romulus, and the television series Calls. And it’s pretty good! The Necronomicon Ex-Mortis is replaced by the similarly malevolent Naturom Demento, and the ensemble is replaced by new, equally expendable twentysomethings. However, the heart of the franchise is still there.
The performances are a mixed bag, and even the better actors struggle with the sheer volume of exposition that writers Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues try to squeeze in. But Jane Levy is excellent, and the film’s visuals are truly outstanding, with cinematographer Aaron Morton beautifully capturing the charmingly excessive practical effects. Not bad for the franchise’s first film in twenty years.
6. Ash vs. Evil Dead (2015-2018)
Developed by: Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi, and Tom Spezialy
The franchise’s first television entry shows the scars of a format transition, though more in terms of budget and shooting schedule than actual content. Most obviously, many of the series’ iconic gore effects have been replaced with middling CGI. But it’s great seeing Bruce Campbell chew and chainsaw his way through more scenery, and the writing does a good job of balancing humor and violence with new insight into both Ash and the deadites.
The presence of Ray Santiago and Dana DeLorenzo as Ash’s reluctant sidekicks, Pablo and Kelly, is a huge plus, with both actors never failing to match Campbell’s energy as things get weird. And it’s always a delight to see Lucy Lawless in any role that lets her play to her genre chops. The show ran only 30 episodes while still wrapping up nicely, making it accessible even for Evil Dead fans who aren’t into television.
5. Army of Darkness (1992)
Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi
Army of Darkness was the first serious attempt to push the boundaries of the Evil Dead franchise, but struggled under the weight of budget troubles and a studio that stripped Raimi of final cut in a fruitless attempt to get a PG-13 rating. Raimi’s script attempts to lean harder into Evil Dead 2‘s comedy, which is sometimes delightful and sometimes barely visible beneath the studio’s editing. Likewise, for the special effects, which largely discard The Evil Dead‘s iconic aesthetic for Ray Harryhausen-esque stop-motion and more standard studio fare, to varying success.
The fact that the film still works at all is impressive. The fact that it manages some of the franchise’s most iconic moments is almost awe-inspiring. We’ll never know what it could have been like if it hadn’t faced such serious production troubles, but it’s still a silly, scary time even if it isn’t as silly and scary as the two films that preceded it.
4. Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Writer/Director: Lee Cronin
Lee Cronin’s take on Evil Dead would be the first time the franchise found its way out of the woods. But the new setting — a dilapidated apartment complex isolated from the surrounding city by gentrification and landlord mismanagement — is so effectively remote it may as well be in the middle of the wilderness. It’s a fascinating new turn for the series, mixing the futility and dread of facing the undead with the futility and dread of our increasing economic uncertainty.
Cronin‘s script also takes an interesting turn by making all members of the core cast family, which shifts the stakes and opens the door for a truly terrifying performance by Alyssa Sutherland. Its success means we now get to have an Evil Dead film every three years instead of every decade. If they’re all this good, that won’t be a bad thing.
3. Evil Dead Burn (2026)
Director: Sébastien Vaniček
Writers: Sébastien Vaniček & Florent Bernard
The latest Evil Dead title is the first one to seriously attempt to weave together the franchise’s 45 years of loose threads. And it works! Mostly because it keeps the focus on Souheila Yacoub‘s protagonist instead of attempting actual Avengering. The complex family dynamics add some welcome texture to the story and a scene-stealing Hunter Doohan continues to demonstrate how much range he’s capable of as a performer.
Director Sébastien Vaniček delivers visceral horror violence, including a few scenes that should surprise even fans that are used to how brutal the franchise can be. When combined with Philip Lozano‘s cinematographer and Maxime Caro‘s outstanding editing, Evil Dead Burn becomes one of the franchise’s best entries.
2. The Evil Dead (1981)
Writer/Director: Sam Raimi
Sam Raimi was a 20-year-old with a meager $375,000 budget when he directed The Evil Dead. The cabin that served as the film’s primary location had no plumbing, which complicated the fact that it was where the cast and crew slept during production.
The completed film would land an X rating in the United States and be a major contributor to the video nasty panic in the United Kingdom. All of which led to the passage of the Video Recordings Act and normalized film censorship in the country.
It’s hard to say whether The Evil Dead deserves its specific legacy. But it’s very obviously deserving of a place in history. To watch The Evil Dead is to watch a genre come into its own. New horror motifs are invented in real time. Old ones reach their natural maturity. It is, quite simply, one of the most confident and influential horror films of all time.
1. Evil Dead II (1987)
Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Sam Raimi & Scott Spiegel
How do you top such a historic film? If you’re Sam Raimi, you do the same thing you did before, but make it very, very funny. The Evil Dead‘s notoriety and cult following meant Evil Dead 2 got enough of a budget bump to elevate the special effects, but not enough to lose the scrappiness that drove the original production. The fact that there wasn’t much need for new exposition meant more time for Bruce Campbell to shine. Some humor snuck in, and the rest is history.
Campbell is a unique performer in that he possesses a natural hamminess but never so much as to overpower the less comedic things happening around him. Evil Dead 2 is this tightrope walk at its very best. The film is so funny, not in spite of its horror elements but because of them. Sometimes in the face of horror, laughter is the only thing we have left. Well, laughter and chainsaw hands.
The Evil Dead franchise may not be as storied as series like Halloween (13 films), Friday the 13th (12 films), or A Nightmare on Elm Street (9 films). But it also possesses a level of consistency that the other franchises lack, and demonstrates a level of innovation and tenacity that testifies to why horror is such a reliable breeding ground for new talent. And with the franchise now putting out consistently reliable new material, there’s never been a better time to revisit or dive in for the first time.
