The horror series Evil Dead, first brought to the screen in 1981 by director Sam Raimi, is in its healthiest state for decades. The 2023 film Evil Dead Rise was a financial success, and 2026 will prove to be a huge year for the franchise, with the release of new film Evil Dead Burn. The next film, Evil Dead Wrath, is already in post-production and due for release in 2028.
Yet like any successful franchise, Evil Dead has always been bigger than just films. It has appeared in a variety of media forms including video games, comic books, television series and board games.
This is not uncommon for a franchise, and is often part of what researcher Henry Jenkins termed a transmedia storytelling strategy. The fundamental idea of this strategy is that one singular story is told over multiple different media forms. These integrated narratives can be seen in contemporary franchises such as the Matrix or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
However, while Evil Dead has certainly appeared across different media forms, it has lacked a sense of singular narrative. As a result, there are several narrative inconsistencies seen throughout the series, with scenes from previous movies reshot, recontextualised or erased from the narrative entirely in later entries.
This lack of a unified story ultimately comes down to the creative and financial realities of the Evil Dead’s series origins. The first film, The Evil Dead (1981), was a low-budget horror, made by a group of friends with no aspirations of building a huge media franchise. It took six years for a sequel to be made. That sequel was produced by a different company entirely, meaning even if the filmmakers had wanted to reference the first film, they legally could not.
For decades, the crucial unifying component of the Evil Dead series has been Bruce Campbell’s portrayal of Ash Williams, the protagonist across the original film trilogy. The cult fandom of around Campbell in this role has powered the series for most of its existence – Campbell became synonymous with the Evil Dead franchise.
Campbell has reprised his role across multiple different media forms. Though these contain the character of Ash, they are entirely incoherent as a singular narrative, often contradicting or erasing different entries to tell their specific story. While Ash seems to act as a signifier for an “authentic” Evil Dead entry, his appearances do not seem to delineate which entries in the series can be seen as part of a coherent transmedia fictional universe.
This decision to foreground an actor and character as the foundation of a franchise could now be problematic, as Campbell announced his retirement from playing Ash in live action after the cancellation of the television series Ash vs The Evil Dead in 2018 This left the franchise in flux. How do you move forward with Evil Dead when the main character is removed?
Unifying a fractured franchise
The promotional material around the release of Evil Dead Rise (2023) suggested a new franchise strategy that looked to the original trilogy for inspiration.
In the third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness (1993), Ash is sent on a quest to retrieve the Necronomicon, a cursed book that has unleashed evil across the previous films. As Ash approaches the book, he sees that there are three on the podium. The two other books ultimately act as decoys, resulting in a slapstick sequence where Ash is repeatedly attacked by the decoy books.
Although this scene is short and played for laughs, for the promotion of Evil Dead Rise, Campbell (a producer as well as the series’ former star) highlights it as centrally important to the franchise’s future. In an interview with Collider in 2023, Campbell suggested a new key focus – the Necronomicon. Campbell noted that “the only thing that connects everything now is the book. There are three of these books out there … So, this story is really ‘where is the book now?’”
This discourse surrounding the importance of the three books was also echoed by the director of Evil Dead Rise, Lee Cronin, who made it a central part of his pitch to producers, as a way of opening up “multiple avenues for where Evil Dead can go”.
His pitch, that Sam Raimi’s original trilogy featured one book, the 2013 remake featured another and his film would feature the third book, retroactively unified the Evil Dead narrative onscreen, putting it more in line with contemporary franchises that engage with transmedia storytelling.
Specifically, the 2013 Evil Dead – developed and produced as a remake at the time of its release – was folded into continuity and as a result became part of the fictional world of the original films. By merging these supposedly disparate parts of the series into one continuity, Evil Dead Rise (or specifically the promotional discourse around it) brought the franchise closer to Jenkins’ idea of a transmedia storytelling strategy.
While Campbell will continue to be an active part of Evil Dead as a producer (and even has a voice cameo in Evil Dead Rise), this new emphasis on the fictional world of the series presents new avenues of continuity and expansion. It will be fascinating to see how Evil Dead Burn, a new chapter in the 45-year-old franchise, responds to this new strategy.
Kieran Foster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.