The Evil Dead Movies Ranked
How the heck do you rank the "Evil Dead" movies?
No horror franchise has taken bigger swings, with entries ranging from brutal, unrelenting horror to straight-up goofball slapstick. No horror franchise has proven more consistent in its inconsistency, with each entry showcasing an anarchic streak a mile wide. If an "Evil Dead" movie isn't trying to startle you out of your skin with transgressive intensity, it's trying to make you giggle like a loon. And sometimes, it tries to make you giggle like a loon using that transgressive intensity. Director Sam Raimi made it clear with his original three movies that there are no hard and fast rules in this universe — and other filmmakers have gleefully stepped in and followed suit. The only thing that truly defines an "Evil Dead" movie is that it needs to be extreme in one way or another.
When the /Film braintrust sat down to rank the series so far (we decided to include the "Ash vs Evil Dead" TV show because it's very much canon), the voting was close. Dangerously close. The closeness between the titles indicated that this list could've looked very different if even one person had modified their ballot. And while there were outliers here and there, just about everyone who participated in this list agreed that most — if not all — of these projects are good. And some of them are masterpieces.
6. Ash vs Evil Dead
Let the record show that in casting my vote for this ranking, "Ash vs Evil Dead" was not at the bottom and I rebuke this placement in the name of the father, the son, and the holy boomstick. The reality is, however, that far fewer people have seen the three-season Starz comedy featuring a veteran Ash Williams than what is acceptable. Returning decades after his last dance with the Deadites in "Army of Darkness," the series continuation catches up with everyone's favorite chainsaw-handed hero after years of refusing to grow up and avoiding the forces of evil looking to take him down once and for all.
"Ash vs Evil Dead" is the culmination of everything that makes the series great, with huge laughs, plenty of gore, and all the Bruce Campbell comedic brilliance a fan could ever want. Campbell spends most of the "Evil Dead" franchise carrying the stories on his back, but "Ash vs Evil Dead" allows him to share the wealth. Ray Santiago is a great sidekick as Pablo, Dana DeLorenzo is the first character to rival Campbell's razor-sharp tongue as Kelly, and Xena Warrior Princess herself, Lucy Lawless, rounds out an untouchable cast. It's a must-watch for even tangential fans of the series, even if SOME PEOPLE haven't yet discovered how wonderful it is. For what it's worth, at least Rotten Tomatoes got it right. (BJ Colangelo)
5. Evil Dead (2013)
The "Evil Dead" films got pretty silly with "Army of Darkness," but director Fede Álvarez took the franchise back to a truly terrifying place with his 2013 sequel-slash-reimagining of the original 1981 film. Taking place at the same cabin decades after Ash faced down the Deadites, "Evil Dead" follows a group of young adults as they try to help their friend Mia (Jane Levy) detox from her drug addiction. The addiction angle brings in all new metaphors for the demonic-feeling nature of the illness, plus it makes Mia's friends disbelieve her when she tells them about weird happenings in the cabin. All of the "Evil Dead" basics are there: a book of the dead, demonic possession by Deadites, and lots of disgusting gore, but Álvarez's movie turns everything up to 11.
There isn't much of the franchise's trademark dark humor in "Evil Dead," but there is a chainsaw battle that takes place in a literal rain of blood, which has to count for something. The movie proved that even though Bruce Campbell is freaking awesome, he isn't necessary to make a good "Evil Dead" story, and Levy absolutely kills it as Mia. She really put herself through the wringer to give an incredible performance, complemented by disgusting special effects, some good imitation shaky-cam, and a script that riffs on the original film while doing something completely new. "Evil Dead" is seriously scary stuff, and it rules. (Danielle Ryan)
4. Evil Dead Rise
After a full decade, the world was ready for a new "Evil Dead" movie when "Evil Dead Rise" hit theaters in 2023. The biggest thing director Lee Cronin's movie did — arguably for the first time in the franchise — was to truly move away from the past. Not only did we get new characters like the 2013 remake, but we got a brand new setting as well. We moved from a cabin in the woods to a high-rise building in Los Angeles. That setting and new characters allowed for a wholly new experience, though one that felt perfectly in line with what had come before.
Brutal, fun, and most of all bloody, Cronin gave us an unrelentingly horrifying experience that feels much closer to "The Evil Dead" than anything that has come since Sam Raimi made his cheap little-movie-that-could in the middle of nowhere all those years ago. Most important of all, this movie proved that the series can have a future without Ash Willims, without familiar settings, and without being anchored to nostalgia. The mythology of this universe is rich enough that it can expand well beyond what we already know. Depending on what happens in the future, we may look at this as a real turning point. Cronin did right by the Deadites. (Ryan Scott)
3. Army of Darkness
The stereotypical arc of a movie trilogy is that the first one is fresh, the second is a formula perfected, and then the third is when the enterprise runs out of steam. If any movie can disprove this hypothesis, it's "Army of Darkness." No sequel I've ever seen has made as sharp a left turn as this one does. After two movies of Ash at a cabin in the woods being tormented by the Deadites, this one sends him back in time to medieval times. For some directors, such a ridiculous premise would be rejected in half a second, but Sam Raimi commits to the idea without ever taking it too seriously.
"Army of Darkness" makes the best use of Bruce Campbell's boneheaded charisma, as Ash is a fish out of water and must go on a literal hero's quest to get home. Raimi lets his love for slapstick run wild as Ash meets obstacle after obstacle with his trademark foolishness. Watching "Evil Dead II," you may have been laughing and screaming, but in "Army of Darkness," you're just plain laughing.
These unique qualities arguably hold "Army of Darkness" back from being the very best "Evil Dead" movie; its setting has little in common with what's come before or after, and so it can't stand as the best representative of its franchise. Even so, it remains refreshing even 30-plus years later to see a sequel take such a wild swing. "Hail to the King, baby." (Devin Meenan)
2. The Evil Dead
The horror genre thrives on two things: simplicity and ambiguity. With that in mind, "The Evil Dead" is quintessential horror cinema, as it is the simple story of a group of college students who decide to vacation at a remote cabin in the woods, find a mysterious Book of the Dead and an audio recording in the cabin's basement, play the tape, and unwittingly unleash demonic entities who, one by one, take over the group of five friends, torturing them through possession and bodily dismemberment the whole way.
That's it! That's the entire plot of "The Evil Dead," and it was literally the design of filmmakers Sam Raimi (director), Rob Tapert (producer) and Bruce Campbell (star) to emulate the boom of transgressive horror films occurring in the late '70s. Taking their cue largely from "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "The Hills Have Eyes" (the latter being referenced in the movie itself) while tapping into Lovecraftian body horror and "Exorcist"-style dread, the Michiganders concocted a film they cheekily referred to on-screen as "The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror," and that label turns out not to be facetious.
To be fair, there is humor in the original "Evil Dead," some of it intentional thanks to the fellas being big "Three Stooges" fans. Yet the many behind-the-scenes hardships and held-together-with-tape nature of the movie only makes it that much more charming while keeping it grounded enough to still be chillingly upsetting. Raimi's film-drunk exuberance makes the film consistently thrilling with his inventive camera trickery, and Campbell's hapless sap Ash is the perfect Final Boy. 40-odd years on, "The Evil Dead" is still so unrelenting and transgressive that the Dead's mantra proves irresistible to this day: "Join us." (Bill Bria)
1. Evil Dead II
"Evil Dead II" isn't just a movie. It's one of the movies. It's got everything, complementing and contradicting itself. Simultaneously funny and terrifying, new and ancient, arty and crowdpleasing, vibrant and grim, ambitious and low rent, sequel and remake. Rather than recap the first film with flashbacks, Raimi swiftly re-envisions the "The Evil Dead" with fewer characters, then leaves poor Ash alone in the cabin, with nothing but demons and his own fractured psyche to keep him company and tear him apart.
With scares inspired by "The Three Stooges" and Robert Wise's "The Haunting" (it doesn't get much more disparate than that), "Evil Dead II" keeps the audience just as off-kilter as Ash. He's not just of a victim of impish murder demons, but also of an impish director, who will stop at nothing to make Bruce Campbell suffer for our amusement. Meanwhile, Raimi's trademark daredevil camera movements sell every moment with an energy rarely seen in cinemas before or, sadly, since.
Since it's paced like a freight train on a sugar high, it's easy to write off "Evil Dead II" as an energetic goof. But it's one of the great films about a lovable loser, on par with the silent comedy classics of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. The world is out to get Ash. The underworld is too. That he keeps fighting, even when it means he has to chainsaw his own hand off, is pathetic, noble, tragic, silly, and always — always — exciting. (William Bibbiani)