The Evil Dead & Bruce Campbell

Since it's currently taking me over 8 hours a piece to upload my old material onto you tube (leaching the net from my phone through a USB is apparently not as glamorous as I once thought), I decided that instead of going too long without an update I will continue to post more old FYP crap. After much soul searching I figured I might as well complete the documentation of it all, so that way if anyone ever cares to read all my words, they can go through it all and state "ah so that's where it all went wrong".

So with the added laziness of being ripped straight from my final year dissertation; I present my much prepared "research" (opinion) on the Evil Dead movies, it's star Bruce Campbell, and  how everything went on to influence the main character of Tom:

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• The Evil Dead Trilogy (1981), (1987), (1992) & The Musical (2003)

This franchise started off as a standard low budget horror movie about four teenagers being killed off one by one at a secluded cabin. Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead spawned a cult following due to its controversial gore and spooky atmosphere. For me personally it is a very badly acted cliché story that is more unintentionally funny than it is generally scary and I am very fond of this film for that very reason. One could assume that the creators saw it this way too, having its sequel concentrate more on the humor side of the series and finally dropping the horror element altogether for the third outing, which literally ended with our hero sleeping for thousands of years so that he can return to his job at a supermarket. Add to all of this the comedic stage musical made just over a decade later and you get a truly comedic genius of a trilogy that became something the original movie never set out at all to be.

The series centres on the S-Mart employee Ash, who has got to be the single most unlucky character in any horror movie franchise ever filmed. After forced to decapitate his friends who are possessed by ancient evil demons, Ash loses the control of his hand which begins to torment him by dragging him around the room, slapping him in the face and smash plates on his head. Once replaced with the very chainsaw he uses to cut it off with, he attempts to fight off the constantly re spawning Zombie like monsters with his newly formed saw hand and sawn off shotgun, only to be flung back in time to the middle ages where he has to defend king Arthur's court against a skeleton army led by an evil clone of himself.

The constant string of mis fortunate events that through unstoppable odds transforms the below average man into full blown action hero, is a theme I love very much and it is exactly what I aimed to mirror with my music video. The character of Tom is given two choices, die or be a man and like Ash he chooses the latter.

Bruce Campbell

As I mentioned before the character of Ash from The Evil Dead series is perhaps the most unlucky character invented, but none of this would have been apparent if it were not for the great performance of Bruce Campbell and how he develops the character throughout each movie just from his acting.

In The Evil Dead Ash is just a scared and helpless nerd. He has no idea what to do as the horrors start happening around him and opts to merely hide in corner while his friend Scott attempts to fend off the evil monsters that are coming to kill and posses them.

In Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, Ash now left alone to his own devices, descends into madness as he is forced to make best of the situation by surviving on his own. In one of the most iconic scenes in the series, Campbell has his character laugh joyfully with the hunted appliances scattered around the wooden cabin, as the evil openly mocks his efforts. The nerdy weak man that once ran away scared now embraces his end, loses all fear and decides that it is time to fight back.

Finally in Army of Darkness (A.K.A. Evil Dead 3) Ash decides he is not going to take it anymore and switches gear entirely into full blow action hero that will defend the innocent and vanquish the evil. Armed with his shot gun and chainsaw he cannot be stopped.

Bruce Campbell three act structure of the ash character is what I aim to apply to, far be it in a much more abridged fashion Tom given that Campbell had three movies, while I have two and a half minutes. First he is scared if Bob and his Zombie army then stricken with madness he runs through the battle field pushing all in his way aside. Finally when he sees Janice in trouble, he knows what he has to do.