Details

Release year: 1987

Storyline

Ash Williams, the lone survivor of an earlier onslaught of flesh-possessing spirits, holes up in a cabin with a group of strangers while the demons continue their attack.

Top credits

Directors

Sam Raimi

Writers

Cast

Bruce Campbell — Ash
Sarah Berry — Annie
Dan Hicks — Jake
Kassie Wesley DePaiva — Bobby Joe

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Did you know

• Stephen King was such a huge fan of The Evil Dead (1981) that he called up producer Dino De Laurentiis (who was producing King's Maximum Overdrive (1986) at the time) to have his production company DEG (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group) finance Evil Dead II. Although DeLaurentiis was initially skeptical, he agreed when he learned that The Evil Dead had been hugely successful in Italy. Although the makers had hoped for a $4 million budget, they got $3.6 million, which was still over 10 times the budget of the first film.

• Although the cabin is supposed to be the same as the one from The Evil Dead (1981), that movie was shot in Morristown, Tennessee; the sequel was filmed nearly 270 miles to the east, in Wadesboro, North Carolina. Most of the film was shot on a set built inside the gymnasium of Wadesboro's J.R. Faison Junior High School. Financer Dino De Laurentiis had originally offered his studio in Wilmington, but director Sam Raimi had just made Crimewave (1985) which was plagued by studio interference, so he chose a location 3 hours from De Laurentiis' office to prevent history from repeating.

• During the scene where the severed head of Linda bites Ash's hand, Bruce Campbell says the single line "work shed." This line was later re-dubbed in post-production due to the quality of the audio, giving it a strange, slightly "disproportionate" sound to the audio. Nine years later, while filming his cameo in Escape from L.A. (1996), the first thing Kurt Russell said to Bruce Campbell on the set was, jokingly, "Say 'work shed.'"