Evil Dead/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Ash insane? Is he dead? Is this All Just a Dream?
  • Badass Decay: In the first two films, the Deadites require complete dismemberment to put down. In Army of Darkness, a few shotgun blasts is all it takes.
    • Fridge Brilliance: During the first two films, the Deadites are all safely housed in virtually intact, fleshy bodies (in the very first film, Linda and Cheryl don't even seem to actually die as humans before the demons take their bodies). In Army of Darkness, the Deadites are possessing dessicated skeletons -- which are a lot easier to smash apart than juicy, wet, fleshy corpses. Not to mention that a shotgun at close range is pretty good at tearing a body into chunks in and of its own right.
      • Furthermore, of the fleshy Deadites we see shot in Army of Darkness, one is merely stunned and then left to be trapped in the pit of spikes, the other two in the past (the old woman in the castle and Evil Ash) are shot to stun them and dismembered, and Fridge Logic suggests that the old woman in the ending gets hacked apart too.
  • Crazy Awesome: Ash eventually evolves into this.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: If there was a line, then it must have been obscured by Sam Raimi's many footprints.
  • Fountain of Memes: It seems that everything that comes out of Bruce Campbell's mouth in Army of Darkness has undergone Memetic Mutation.
    • Except for maybe those grape seeds.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In Army of Darkness, Ash performs a battle cry similar to a certain warrior princess. Even funnier when you consider "The Quest."
  • Holy Shit Quotient: Through the roof.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Ash shows these traits in the second and third movies. He increasingly acts more like a jerk, but he's just trying to get out of this nightmare alive.
  • Memetic Badass: Ash. Who else?
  • Memetic Mutation: So, so many.
  • Narm Charm: Lots. Really, lots. All of it intentional.
  • Nightmare Fuel: They're Horror films first and foremost, it's natural. Some specific examples:
    • The scene from the first film of the demon-possessed trees raping a victim is actually considered one of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments.
    • The scene where a decapitated deadite gets up and performs its grotesquely erotic dance.
    • The famous scene from the second movie where all of the various items in the room start laughing uproariously at Ash, who starts madly laughing along with them.
    • The ghastly "melt down" suffered by the deadites when Ash burns the Naturum Demonto at the end of the first movie.
    • The "thing in the woods" crashing through the wall at the climax of the second movie.
  • So Bad It's Good: Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness were deliberately styled to fit this. Most viewers wouldn't have it any other way.
    • Evil Dead I is a better example, since it was more straight up bad and over-the top before the sequels recognized this and had fun with it.
  • Special Effect Failure: For contemporary viewers with clear prints and by the standards of effects now. People found the gore quite convincing when the films were new.
    • By AOD, a lot of it's intentional, and that which isn't (Such as the brief bit during the recap which shows the string Ash is hanging from or the sections which you can blatantly tell are greenscreen shots) is happening at a point in the movie which is just too awesome to care about.
    • A few of the effects still hold up really well, though, in particular the severed hand sequence.
  • Uncanny Valley
  • Values Dissonance: According Bruce Campbell in the DVD commentary, a puzzling cut was made in the second movie for British showings - the part where Ash gets kicked in the head while he's unconscious. He found it odd that that was cut, as opposed to heaps of demonic blood and gore.
  • Watch It for the Meme: If you haven't seen them already, the only reason you're going to watch these movies is to get some context for all the memes it's spawned.
  • The Woobie: Everyone in the first movie has these moments at some point.